Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
By now you’ve seen the new Microsoft commercial. Let’s get it out of the way right now: WTF?
Ok, the Apple Mac v. PC commercials are starting to get a little old. Yes, they are a little smug. Alright, a lot smug. But, come on, this is the best that Microsoft can do with $10 million? And Seinfeld? I find myself being more than a little embarrassed for Bill, and Jerry.
Better luck next time.
Accelerating From a Stop
Ok, step one: Install Netbeans 6.0 Ruby version. No problem here, it works like any other package install. Now to configure it to my taste. The main change is to change the default Ruby engine from the included JRuby to the OS X installed 1.8.6 version of Ruby. I have nothing against JRuby, but at this stage I don’t want to debug JRuby related issues, so I want to stick with the de facto version. On Windows the location of your local Ruby installation is easy enough to find, c:rubybinruby.exe. On OS X I looked all over for it. It ran fine from the console, so it was installed and worked. But, where is the binary? I looked in the usual places, that I could think of, no joy. So, I turned to my local OS X/Ruby/NetBeans guru: Google. After much searching, I found a page with the path I needed. It seems that Ruby has been “framework-ized” into OS X. But, the binaries have been symlinked to: /usr/bin/ruby. Problem solved.
Step two: MySql. Downloaded. Installed from package. Done. Well, I need to install an OS X admin util. But, I can administrate it from the command-line in the meantime.
I opened the Depot Rails app from the Agile Rails book, ran the DB migrations and fired it up. Success.
Ok, I have a usable environment. Time to code.
Right turn ahead…
Ok, now back to software development topics. In particular, my current interest in Ruby, and it’s current killer app (framework): Rails. As for the post title, look here. It’s my hope that following the Rails won’t end up similiarly, but if you read stuff like this, you have to wonder. Although Zed seems to be generally pissed at life, he takes it out on the Ruby on Rails “community”.
I just got a new Apple MacBook Pro laptop a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been getting it all set up with my preferred apps. And, getting it set up to do some RoR development. OS X 10.5, Leopard comes with Ruby and Rails installed, which makes it easier to get started. I installed TextMate, the preferred Mac text editor. I also installed the Ruby version of Netbeans. I’ve been an Eclipse (and IBM Rational Application Developer, Eclipse with an IBM clown suit*) user for several years. Prior to that I used JBuilder and Forte, Netbeans predecessor. Eclipse has become a conglomeration of every plugin that can be imagined. It used to be the fast and slim alternative to Netbeans. Netbeans 6.0 is a cleaner, slimmer, and more focused IDE than Eclipse. I wish I could use it for Java development at work. I’ve played with the Ruby version of Netbeans 6.0 on Windows XP, with Instant Rails. Very nice, except for the Windows part.
So, I am going to try to document my journey down the (Ruby on) Rails.
* Credit for this description goes to my friend Kelly.
Artist’s Tools
I recently read a blog entry of a friend of mine. He was professing his love for Ardour, an open source digital audio workstation package. We frequently talk about our non-professional pursuits, in his case music, photography in mine. We have both come to rely on a primary piece of software to facilitate our art. Ardour is his tool of choice.
Over the last year, I have been beta testing Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which is a photo editing, digital asset management (DAM), raw workflow program. I had been using Capture One LE from Phase One, as my primary tool. It was fast enough at raw conversion, but the workflow seemed clunky to me, and it has no real DAM capability. I found over the year, that at some point I had switched all my photo work to Lightroom, and hadn’t fired up C1 in several months. Each beta added better performance and new and improved features. One of the chief advantages of C1 has been it’s ability to run at a decent speed on my G4 1.5ghz Mac Mini. Lightroom performance was not as good through beta 3. But, beta 4 introduced a much faster and feature complete product. I decided at that point that I would stick with LR and buy the 1.o version, if the price didn’t exceed the cost of the computer it is running on.
Recently Adobe announced that Lightroom had achieved 1.0 status and was available for purchase. The price, $199 now, $299 later puts it squarely in the market of Apple Aperture. So, I’ve got about 7 days before my beta, trial version of LR expires and leaves me without my primary software tool. The 1.0 version is faster than the beta 4 version. And, includes a variety of features not seen in the beta. Several of which make the decision to purchase even easier. I really like the virtual copy function, additional photo grading options (flags!) and several of the new tools in the Develop module. I’ve owned various computers over the last 25 years and there have been very few software packages that I really strongly felt help me get the job done. CA Clipper, MultiEdit, Borland Delphi, Mozilla Firefox, are all on my short list of those tools. I would definitely add Lightroom to that list. I can spend more time taking photos, and less time post processing the good photos.
It’s unfortunate that there is nothing even close to LR in the open source world. Open source image editing has pretty much centered on The Gimp. It can be argued (unsuccessfully) that The Gimp is a viable alternative to Photoshop. But there is no open source app that incorporates the functionality of LR, or Aperture. Projects like DigiKam show promise, but are still a long way from addressing the needs or professional or serious amateur photographers. It was this lack of good quality image tools that drove me from my Linux desktop to the Mac.
The more I have used the shipping version of LR, the more I am impressed. It has let me concentrate on the final image and not the tool. In general, it gets out of my way in the right places. I am still struggling to come up with a coherent image storage strategy. But, now that I’ve committed to LR, I can make some decisions that will help pin down that strategy.
Google Reader
One of my primary uses of my Palm Tungsten C was as an RSS reader. It worked pretty well when I was in WiFi coverage, but it was limited in ability overall. I recently tried Google Reader (as mentioned on Scobleizer). I transferred my OPML file from my Palm and started to explore. I usually start my workday by pulling up a set bookmarked websites in tabs in Firefox. I move from tab to tab looking for the latest news. Throughout the day I fire up a different bookmark set to get updated news, or hit the RSS feeds. Since abandoning my Palm PDA, I have been relying more on Google Reader. I like the layout of Reader page. A list of feeds on the left, with the number of unread articles. There several filtering options and you can collapse/expand user defined categories to limit the size of the list. Clicking on a feed brings up the list of articles, which expand as selected. Clicking on the article title will open the article in a new tab (in Firefox). Which is handy for summary only feeds.
Since using Reader I find myself starting the day with it rather than my growing “morning news” bookmark set, and coming back to it for my periodic updates.
What’s not to like? The feed management needs work, particularly when managing categories. It’s clumsy and slow.
Otherwise, it’s priced right and it doesn’t get in my way. I think i’ll keep it.
