One thing I like about using a Mac is the number of small shareware applications available. Of course, there are a number of these available for Windows as well, but they don't seem to have the same usefulness or flair (or at least they didn't used to).

For about the past month, I have been using TextMate as my primary editor. I found this entry in the TextMate blog very interesting. In it, Allan looks back at the year and reflects on becoming an independent developer. He references Gus Mueller's blog entry about his journey (the creator of several applications including VooDooPad). Both interesting readings from two successful shareware application developers.

I didn't know a Singleton in Ruby would be so easy. I am more impressed with Ruby the more I learn about it.

Recently in the web development arena, there has been more talk about using "dynamic" languages for development. One of the most popular is PHP. Don't take this wrong, I have done PHP development, but it can get complex and difficult to be DRY (maybe one of the frameworks will help solve this).

I recently watched the December 3, 2005 presentation at Snakes and Rubies. The one common theme between the two presenters is that PHP didn't meet their needs (to say the least). The two projects discussed were Ruby on Rails and Django Framework. I have used Ruby on Rails, but this was the first time I really looked at Django. It looks interesting and there are many similarities between the two frameworks.

Not much to this post. Just a few videos that made me laugh or I thought were cool.

1. Two Students - made me laugh
2. Emperor Cruise - reference to Star Wars
3. Water Cannon - I would like to build one of these
4. Windows 98 - well...it's Windows

A few days ago, there was a posting on the Ruby on Rails blog about a new memcache-client and cached_model. The instructions seemed straight forward so I thought I would give it a try. I added the CachedModel to a Rails application and had it working in no time. The application wasn't spread across multiple servers so there wasn't much point to it other than to test it. I decided I wanted to write a standalone ruby script to interact with my memcached server. While trying this, I ran into the following error:

memcache.rb:305:in `socket': uninitialized constant MemCache::Server::Timeout

Today, I was emailed the link to FireBug. It is a very useful Firefox extension if you are a developer working with HTML, CSS or Javascript. I would highly recommend it.

See the creator's website for more information including how to log to the console.