I’ve stopped posting to this blog; I use this one instead, now.

Since starting to write Rails apps, I hear people rave about TextMate but really I don’t see the point. What’s so great about it? I used it for the duration of the trial but during that time I felt completely under-powered. RubyMine, on the hand, had pretty much zero learning curve, easy to debug with [...]

My MacBook is getting a bit weather-beaten and I’m thinking of a getting a replacement. Maybe a PC laptop this time (cheaper) which means I would run Ubuntu. The only problem is that Flex Builder 3 for Linux is only at alpha stage, and there is no official date for a full release as far [...]

Taking a look at the FlexORM system for AIR development and it’s brilliant. About a year ago I was wishing there was something like this and now here it is! Great job from the Codec people.

Ever since I’ve installed Snow Leopard on my Macbook it’s incredibly slow to boot up. It shows the Apple logo and the spinning wheel for around the normal length of time, then there’s a long wait (between 2 and 10 minutes) with a pale blue screen. Eventually the login window appears. I’ve seen a lot [...]

In April last year I was thinking out loud about how a JAXB-for-AS3 would be a good thing. I didn’t pursue it much, had a couple of ideas that turned out to be dead ends. So I forgot all about it. Lo and behold, though, someone (independently) had very similar thoughts and acted on them. [...]

I just set up Postfix and Dovecot on my Ubuntu VPS … thanks to this tutorial it was … not painless exactly, but not half as bad as I was afraid it would be. Great tutorial, highly recommended – it’s for Debian but I think there was only one small change required to use it [...]

At last, an orthodox file manager for OS X … that is, not just something that runs on OS X (like the Java app muCommander or KDE’s Krusader, which runs via X Windows), but a proper native app. I’ve just installed XFolders, and it’s brilliant – sehr gut!

Isn’t it a great feeling when a project that you’ve been working on for a long time finally goes live? Introducing Makebook: a web app that lets you create books and manage a library of stories, recipes, poems, whatever … I’ve been developing the Flex front end for about 7-8 months now, and it’s been [...]

I just tried logging in to my Sydney Uni email and found they’ve switched to Outlook Web Access. What a staggering piece of stupidity. Locking an academic email facility in to a commercial third party is a wrong move in the first place. Given that they made this bad decision, why use Outlook Web Access [...]