Ah Scoble, when are you going to learn?  Everytime you mention Mac and anything Microsoft related in the same sentance, a whole bunch of Mac users are going to flame you something savage.  In this case of course their completely right – Windows Media Player for Mac sucks and I don’t bother watching any Channel 9 videos because it sucks so much.  I could probably use VLC which I use for anything else that Quicktime can’t play but it just seems like too much hassle just to listen to a bunch of people prattle on and on instead of just reading a quick text based blog entry.

So iTunes 4.9 is out and the podcasting support is pretty cool.  It does pretty much what you’d expect – podcasts appear in a new “Podcasts” “special playlist” just under the “Library” icon.  It does keep track of whether or not you’ve listen to a particular podcast or not so you can keep track of where you’re up to and has a bunch of configuration options for how to handle incoming feed entries and how long to keep stuff.

Ken Arnold talks about the complexities of generics and how he doesn’t feel they provide enough benefit for the complexity they add.  I have to agree, most people probably only understand the basics of generics and not the full spec which is a recipe for great confusion and the number and type of bugs that generics prevents really doesn’t give much benefit.

It’s odd that there’s such a push towards scripting languages with no compile time type checking at the same time the Java crowd are pushing for stricter compile time type checking.  I can honestly say that in all the perl, PHP and Ruby scripting I’ve done that not once have I ever had a bug caused by having the wrong type of data in a variable.  Not once.  You never should if you have clearly defined what each variable’s purpose is and if you haven’t done that you’ve got problems that extend way beyond what a compiler can help you with.

The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

Recently Apple made WebKit development much more open which is great for people who develop products using WebKit as they get more control – it’s great for the KHTML developers as it’s easier for them to integrate Safari changes and for a bunch of people to test against.

The downside however is that people who have no business playing with development builds of WebKit just can’t help being cool and running it anyway.  What’s worse is that people encourage this stupidity by making prepackaged builds available.  If you can’t follow the very simple instructions to build your own version of WebKit from CVS, you really, really, really shouldn’t be working with a development build – you almost certainly don’t have the skills required to provide a worthwhile bug report anyway.  The build instructions for WebKit are probably the most brain-dead simple instructions I’ve ever seen for any open source project (you thought ./configure; make; make install was difficult – try just build-webkit; run-safari).  There’s even a simple script to pull the latest updates from CVS without having to know anything about CVS commands.

My saturday mornings are being consumed by catching up on reading that I put off during the week and it’s starting to get out of hand.  I had the future in-laws, my mother and my little sister over for dinner last night so completely ignored the incoming feeds – this morning there were over 200 new items to flick through and another 20-30 had arrived before I got through them all.  The list of open tabs in NetNewsWire has overflown into a drop down menu all week and after 3 hours of reading this morning I’ve only just gotten it to fit again.  Plus I have a stack of downloads to play with and evaluate.

Hand warmer for geeks – a USB powered device that blows warm air across your keyboard.

The rest of me is quite warm, but I can’t wear gloves and type at the same time.  If you know of one that exists, my birthday is in a couple of weeks so you could just send one now….

So I’ve been getting into Ruby on Rails and things started out well, had the basis of an application up pretty quickly and now I’m starting to get into the logic of the app rather than just pulling values out of the database and displaying them.  Productivity is droping, very rapidly.

The problems all seem to come down to the lack of a good IDE.  Specifically:

• I have no idea where the definition of methods etc are.  Are they inherited?  Are they dynamically generated by something?
• I have no idea where the documentation for stuff is.  Is it at api.rubyonrails.com, is it on ruby-doc.org, is it buried somewhere in my gems installation?
• Navigating files is just too slow.

It wouldn’t take much of an IDE to fix those problems just display a nice list of files in the project down the side with tabbed editors, then have the ability to select a method, variable, etc and jump to it’s definition or it’s documentation.

It’s really worth subscribing to “kazem’s” cartoon feed for some quality geek laughs.  Occasionally he turns into a bit of a Sun shill (he does work for Sun) but mostly it’s just general laughs from a (software) bug’s life.  Fortunately there’s now a happy little orange icon linking to the RSS feed – it took me ages to find it originally as it was in no way linked (it’s here for the record).

Ugo Cei commented on the new technorati interface and while I think it’s an improvement over their previous attempt, it still needs work.  Searches work consistently now, but it’s still way too hard to find the RSS feed for the search and there appears to be a few bugs which prevent you from getting access to one at all for some searches.

Oh well, looks like I’ll be using the Feedster integration with NetNewsWire for a while longer.  I did send them some feedback which hopefully made sense, I’m not really sure how to accurately describe the problems I was having with finding feeds.

While this site is graciously hosted by Iain I’m in the process of developing another site (non-blog) and the more I think it through the more likely it is that it’s going to drive a not insignificant amount of traffic and I definitely want it to be snappy all the time (as opposed to slowing down when Iain decides to download too much at once).  At the same time I keep playing with different technologies from J2EE to Ruby on Rails to custom perl apps and whatever else, so being able to set up whatever I want is a pretty big bonus.  Sounds like a virtual server might just be the best bet but I really don’t want to spend much money.

Hey I stopped short of saying this is why I hate marketers…

How many more Microsoft sites will open without RSS? Sigh.

Sigh, Microsoft opens another cool but lame site. Cool cause it’s for digital photographers. Lame cause it doesn’t have an RSS feed. After Gnomedex these kinds of lame sites will look even lamer! When will Microsoft’s marketing departments get the memo? EVERY site MUST have RSS from now on. Got it? No? Pay attention to Dean Hachamovitch’s keynote at Gnomedex, OK? He runs the IE team.