An ad by the Newspaper Association of America states that “No amount of effort from local bloggers, non-profit news entities or TV news sources could match the depth and breadth of newspaper-produced content.” Wow! That’s insulting. What’s worse, it completely misunderstands what’s happening to the newspaper industry and why the printed page is destined to fail. (Continued…)

A wonderful story about why we need to Save The Presses! I think the best one is “You can shed a tear right now for the iconic ransom note, with letters clipped from newspaper headlines. What’s a kidnapper to do? Print out letters at home using different fonts and point sizes?” (Continued…)

Managing email is a royal pain. Especially if you read email on more than one device. After buying iPhones last year, Mike and I worked up an excellent system of managing our email on the iPhone, computer and web. (Continued…)

Last year we did a project with substantial business logic requirements. The Rails testing framework saved us. We could create tests for all the different uses of the system and ensure that these rules were always followed. As wonderful as it was, there was a bitter aspect to Rails testing — fixtures. (Continued…)

There are several ways to set up a system for Ruby on Rails development. Leopard comes pre-installed with Ruby and Rails and is perfectly fine for most users. For me, however, I kept running into troubles. Trying to do a free standing install of graphic libraries (FreeImage or ImageMagick) proved too painful. I switched back to using MacPorts. (Continued…)

I was sightseeing around San Francisco one very rainy day. It was 1990 and I wanted a CD player. I was also broke. CD players were still rather expensive. So I’d been shopping around for a while. I knew the prices, but they were just barely out of my reach. So I was biding my time, checking every electronics store I saw.

That day, as I wandered around downtown, I found a small shop at the base of a skyscraper. It had a window front on the street with electronics from top to bottom. Inside, it was packed. I’ve never seen so many electronics in such a small space. It felt like a sardine can of circuits, chrome and black plastic.

I made my way over to the CD players and found the exact portable CD player I wanted to buy. (Continued…)

Having a current copy of your credit record is vital to protect yourself from credit errors and identity theft. And, thanks to Congress, getting a copy is extremely easy. By law, everyone is allowed to download an annual copy of their report. But be warned. The website advertised on TV, freecreditreport.com, is not the right place to go. It is a scam run by Experian to get people to sign up for an unnecessary yearly service. The correct website is annualcreditreport.com. (Continued…)

SWFUpload is a fantastic application which makes short work of a hard problem — how to upload multiple files to a website. Most solutions using Ruby on Rails revolve around multiple fields and complex ajax calls to monitor the upload progress. These are all hard to implement because they lack compatibility across browsers, require difficult server set up, and usually fail to update quick enough to give real upload progress feedback to the user. (Continued…)

In 1994 I took a Sharpie and wrote out the alphabet on my computer keyboard. Then I took little pieces of clear tape and carefully covered each key to keep from rubbing off the newly written letters. Why would I do this? Because my hands were starting to hurt and I needed a better way to type. Dvorak was the key. Not the columnist but the researcher who created the world’s greatest keyboard layout — August Dvorak. (Continued…)

Security is a pain. Too much security gets in the way of productivity. Too little and the world owns your bank account. Finding the right balance is difficult. For me, securing my laptop has proven to be a challenge. Sure, I can lock it down so it requires a drop of blood every time I wake it up, but that’s too painful (and I need the blood). So I found a decent balance that you may want to try. (Continued…)

Our garage door wouldn’t close. We’d hit the button, it would start closing, then stop, then roll the door back the little bit it had moved down, and the light on the opener would flash 10 times. I think it was trying to say something. After careful research over the next few weeks, a lot of thought, and a clean wet rag — we fixed it. (Continued…)

The new iPhone has the best mail client I’ve ever used on a smartphone. When I first got my iPhone, I immediately connected it to my Gmail account. Unfortunately, Gmail uses POP to download messages. It started sending every single message from my archive — thousands of messages.

What’s worse is the lack of synchronization between my iPhone and the Mail program on my MacBook because of POP. If I delete a message on the iPhone, the message remains on Mail. I needed a better solution and it was Mike who came up with the answer. He suggested using .Mac and Gmail as a Mashup. Here is how it works for me. (Continued…)

Conflict. It is the heart and soul of reality television — of all television, really. Without conflict there is no story, no ratings, and no show. Take Survivor (please?). In real life, if 12 random strangers were stranded on a deserted island, would they plot against each other? I doubt it. They would need to learn to get along, to work together, or else they would die.

To make a television show, you would need to find personalities that thrive on conflict, have extremely differing opinions, and then create an artificial situation where backstabbing is required to win. Now you have a prime-time show. That’s what counts as good television in the 21st century. (Continued…)

I never use the GMail web interface unless I’m on the road. Instead I POP my email into my Apple Mail program. The downloaded email is not erased from GMail (like traditional POP servers). Instead it is stored in the “All Mail” archive along with all my sent messages, too. After a year and a half, I’ve used 2600 MB of my 2800 MB email box (thank you Google). (Continued…)