The recent purchase of my Macbook Pro was the first time I was able to buy a computer from an Apple retail store, and I wanted to post a few of my thoughts about the experience. I think the thing that stood out the most for me, was how smoothly the whole process went. Usually when I go into a computer store such as BestBuy or Futureshop, I’m immediately “attacked” by a sales person who makes it so very clear that he is more than willing to give me any information I may need about a product. I find this rather funny, because most of the time the salespeople actually have very little personal knowledge of the products, and only know what was in the training manual (which is very little). Read the rest of this entry »
Twitter: Installed Vista in boot camp. It's actually kinda cool. Although not nearly as cool as OSX, and it makes my laptop run hot.
I know it’s been quite a while since my last post, but there’s been a lot of changes around here recently. First and foremost, I bought myself a new laptop. I had previously been using the coveted 12″ G4 Powerbook. It lasted me just under 3 years, and was a great machine, in the perfect mobile form factor. However, I decided that it was time to make my entrance in the world of Intel Macs. So I went out and got myself a brand new 2.4 GHz Macbook Pro. The complete specs are as follows: Read the rest of this entry »
Having recently switched back to Wordpress from a Rails based blogging application called Simplelog. I thought I would list some of the reasons why I made that decision. I find it rather ironic that I made the move back to a PHP based application after my rant about how Dreamhost Hates Rails, but the reasons for it have nothing to do with Rails vs. PHP, but have more to do with Simplelog vs. Wordpress. Read the rest of this entry »
I recently decided to make the move back to Wordpress from a smaller Rails application called Simplelog. I’ll save my reasons for another post, but needless to say, I had to decide what type of application stack I would use to host Wordpress. After a bit of research, I decided to go with NginX in the front end to serve static files, and put Apache behind it to serve the dynamic PHP content through the use of mod_php. I had originally thought I might use NginX only, but Wordpress is fairly dependent on mod_rewrite for a lot of things, and NginX doesn’t really have an equivalent yet, so I wanted to have Wordpress itself running on Apache. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll admit it, that title is wayyy too sensationalistic. But I think it fits right in with all the back and forth blog posts that have revolved around a recent post at the Dreamhost blog talking about the problems with running Rails apps on shared hosts. Seeing as how I’ve tried, with mixed results, to run Rails apps on a couple different shared hosts, as well as on a VPS with root access, I thought I would throw out a few of my own opinions on the article. Read the rest of this entry »
I was reading Wired.com this morning and came across a rather scary article on Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. Apparently, no one at Boeing realized that it wouldn’t be a good idea to put the flight control and communication system on the same network as the passengers internet access. So basically, it wouldn’t be impossible that a passenger could hack into the control systems from the passenger cabin. From Wired: Read the rest of this entry »
For Christmas this year, I got a black 3rd generation iPod Nano, so I thought I’d write up a quick review after playing with it for a couple weeks. Coming from a 2nd generation iPod Mini, this is quite a big step up for me. I’m only going to concentrate on the features I consider to be major improvements, because I don’t think anyone wants to read about all the little things. So let’s get started! Read the rest of this entry »
Apple announced today that they will finally be offering Canadians the ability to buy TV shows through the iTunes store. Now many of you might be excited to hear this. With video support available on all new iPods, except the Shuffle, the ability to download TV shows from iTunes should be a great thing. Well as per usual, we got shafted. Here’s a partial list of available shows from the press release: Read the rest of this entry »
The first mission in the highly anticipated MacHeist 2 is now underway. I’m a newcomer to MacHeist, as I came across MacHeist 1 just after it had ended. The premise is fairly clever and engaging. There are multiple “missions” that one has to complete which give the “agent” (you) free use of a commercial Mac application. At the end of the event, an application bundle is revealed and then sold at a heavily discounted price. For example, the bundle in MacHeist 1 was valued at a few hundred dollars, but sold for only $49. Read the rest of this entry »
I came across a really interesting article over at AppleMatters.com, where Chris Howard attempts to answer the question “Why Do I Use Apple’s Apps?” He specifically mentions Spaces, and I thought I would concentrate on that. Chris writes: Read the rest of this entry »
