I walked past our office plotter the other day and noticed this message on the console:

This picture is blurry but says, “Cartridges will expire in days: 8.” Are you kidding me? When did ink start expiring like 2% milk? I’ve heard of invisible ink, but expiring ink? How dumb do they think we are?

One of the IT guys happened by while I spluttered about the stain of injustice. He opined that, since plotters weren’t pressed into frequent enough use to turn over enough ink cartridges   (more...)

People are always careful when typing emails.
People are now always careful when typing emails.
People are not always careful when typing emails.

Emailers often both read and write the above statements synonymously, simultaneously asserting and negating their intents as they saunter through communication wreckage. I’m not sure why correctly typing “not” or correctly reading “not” poses such a challenge, but I bump into this problem at least weekly, if not daily.

To   (more...)

Last week macZOT offered a discount on an application called Peek-a-Boo Process Throb. I’d never heard of the application, and am not yet sure how often I’ll use it, but I found the concept interesting, the execution well done, and the price negligible, so I paid the registration fee. Some time later, I received my registration key in an email, so I copied the key to the clipboard and command-tabbed to Peek-a-Boo   (more...)

I just released version 0.5 of Safe, the open-source command-line password management program written in Ruby. This version adds diffing and merging Safe password files. I keep my Safe file on a USB thumb drive, but I also copy it to the various computers I use in case I don’t have my USB thumb drive with me. Sometimes the files get out of sync. Now I can diff and merge the files.

I also ran into some problems with passwords not authenticating. It seems that the XML parser   (more...)

YazSoft has just announced version 5 of Speed Download, its download management product for Mac. They charge $25 for this product. The price may or may not seem reasonable to you, depending on your need for a download manager and your willingness to pay for software, but it’s certainly not outrageous. They offer a reduced price to upgrade from previous versions ($15 - $20, depending on which previous version you use), as well as a cross-grade “switcher” price for $15.   (more...)

By the time people who knew nothing about soldering guns started buying home computers, memory was measured in kilobytes. My first computer, an Atari 400, had 16 kilobytes of RAM, and my second, and Atari 800, tripled that. Even the lowly Timex Sinclair had a full kilobyte, which could light up the screen and not much more. People running IBM machines and clones soon had 640 kilobytes of RAM, and and about this time Bill Gates never said 640 kilobytes would be   (more...)

Last Thursday I attended the inaugural meeting of RubyJax, the new Ruby users group in Jacksonville, Florida. I drove straight from work and strode into the meeting wearing a golf shirt, crisp khakis, and tan Cole Haans, and instantly felt overdressed. A few people sported clean jeans and polos, but I’d have blended much better in a techno T-shirt, battered dungarees, and sandals. Hoops and baubles festooned nostrils and earlobes,   (more...)

The rain Florida has received over the past few weeks has revealed some roofing shortcomings. We apparently have a roof leak in the building where I work–I walked into work the other day and saw this:

Yep, that’s a hose taped to the ceiling, running down to a trash can in the hallway. And there it’s sat for a week.

Or maybe the leak wasn’t caused by the rain–maybe one of our programmers slipped in a Leaky   (more...)

After using the MacBook Pro for a little over a week, I must confess: I miss Outlook. Admittedly, Outlook 2007 has three years on Entourage 2004, but I’m using Outlook 2003 so Entourage has a one-year advantage. My struggles:

Meeting Requests do not display whether they conflict with existing calendar items; I have to view the calendar to check for conflicts. Meeting Requests do not automatically delete when I accept them. The Move Message dialog does not remember the last-selected folder, but always has the   (more...)

Apple fixed my MacBook Pro for free. They replaced the surface of the laptop–the part that surrounds the keyboard. No more random reboots. The IT guy from work temporarily misplaced the power cord, which delayed a fruitful reunion, but I’m now happily typing away on the backlit keyboard. I may never touch a Windows machine again!

Incidentally, I’m typing this blog entry on a trial version of MarsEdit, which I downloaded because of (more...)

I bought my first Mac in 2004: an iBook G4. Before then, I called Macs “Etch-a-Sketches that you don’t have to shake.” My iBook quickly supplanted my HP P4 laptop as my personal-use computer, and remained in heavy use until I put together a high-powered Ubuntu desktop about a year ago. I still fire up the iBook occasionally, but it’s no match for the newer, beefier machine.

The Senior Director of Infrastructure where I work, the guy in charge of “anything that plugs in,” buys Dell: laptops for management, desktops   (more...)

Day three started with Bruce Tate, Ruby, and Rails. Tate isn’t entertaining nor dynamic (a la Scott Davis), but his presentation skills suffice and his material is excellent. Leading Java developers bemoan his defection to Ruby for a reason.

I’ve been playing with Rails and Ruby (see my password management program at http://safe.rubyforge.org), but I have much to learn about the Ruby way.   (more...)

I spent the morning of Day Two with David Geary, JSF, Seam, Facelets and Ajax4jsf. The session came in two parts, and I could have stayed for a part three and a part four if they’d been offered. The Seam/Facelets/Ajax4jsf development model represents significant advancements beyond the Servlet/JSP model we’re preparing to upgrade, and Geary does a terrific job presenting those technologies. He seems to get into a lot of different technologies; he also presented Rico, (more...)

I’m at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel in Orlando, Florida, at No Fluff Just Stuff. Both an offsite management work meeting all morning and an accident on I-4 delayed my arrival past the registration, opening remarks, and the first session, but I arrived in time for the second session: David Geary’s   (more...)

From the what-will-they-think-of-next department, here’s an external hard drive designed to house your deleted files. It’s shaped like a trash can and sports the recycling logo, so it attempts to cover both the Mac and the Windows scenarios. Truthfully, it looks more like a coffee cup to me. It uses Bluetooth to connect to your computer, so you can just set it on your desk and never think about until you need to recover something, or until you take your laptop on the road . . . .

See it here:
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I just released version 0.2 of Safe, the command-line password management program I’ve been using. This is the first public release, and it’s still alpha, but I’d love feedback. I’m using it on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It requires Ruby, Rubygems, and the crypt and highline gems.

Last year I built a computer with parts ordered from newegg.com. Over time, and because of its faster processor, larger hard drives, and buckets more memory, my home-built computer has replaced my aging iBook G4 as my principal away-from-work computer. It runs Ubuntu 7.04 (64-bit), and Compiz Fusion amazes everyone that happens by. I realize that building my own PC separates me from Grandma Myrtle, Joe Sixpack, or whatever other metaphorical   (more...)

My parents spent the past three years Down Under doing missionary work. They lived in Melbourne, halfway around the world from us in Florida, USA. Email shortened the distance and resolved the time zone issues, so communication ran freely. Rather than ferry a computer around the globe and foot a shipping bill that exceeded the value of the goods shipped, they bought a computer in Australia and left it behind on their departure. They did all their email in Outlook Express, and my father took care to ask me how to preserve   (more...)

Last Sunday–Mother’s Day in the United States–my wife’s purse disappeared. Actually, someone put a crowbar through the passenger window of her van as it sat in our church parking lot and helped him or herself to the purse. The crook felt no sympathy toward a mother of five losing her new Vera Bradley purse with matching wallet and coin purse on Mother’s Day, but I guess crooks don’t   (more...)

The last day of JavaOne featured Java-powered toys, introduced sequentially by James Gosling. None of them commanded more than a raised eyebrow or polite applause, except perhaps the programmable dancing robots–and that probably because of their contrast with the merely dull. The parade began with some either from the DTrace project or Project Delight–I couldn’t discern which. He demonstrated tracing a Garage Band-like application, though he should have instead showed an eBay-like application, for he spoke   (more...)