I had a conversation with Loren Segal a couple weeks ago about email. He made a comment about Google Buzz mentioning that he has never used Gmail, and our conversation ensued. My first email address was with Hotmail, as I’m sure a lot of people’s was. Then I moved to Gmail proper and was hooked. I wondered why anybody would use any other email system. I had a few university emails (ualberta, cs.ualberta, ece.ualberta), but I also started up an o…

I recently added a Javascript file to my bundle with sinatra-bundles that uses Javascript's eval functionality. The call to eval executed code that referenced a method parameter. sinatra-bundles compresses Javascript files, and as part of that, shrinks variable names. Normally this isn't a problem, but in this case of eval, it became a problem, since it was trying to reference a local variable that no longer existed (because it got shrunk to som…

AJAX requests are a grand thing. They let you request things from your server without refreshing the page. Now, if you are trying to proxy a page, you can rewrite all the links in the page to point back through your proxy, but AJAX requests are another thing. Oh wait no they're not! You can't rewrite them when you proxy the page (by proxy, I mean you request my page with a URL param to another page, and I pull in that page, do some stuff, and se…

Lots of interesting things are afoot, and I try to keep track of them. Here's what I'm watching. Rails 3 Lots of new changes are coming with Rails 3, and it's pretty exciting. I wrote about some of the cool ones here. Rails is shaping up to be faster, more modular, and generally better and easier to work with. With all the smart people working on it, you don't have to look very hard to realize this is going to be a big release, and is only going…

I am in the unfortunate position where I have to use Mac OS X Server on a regular basis. Hey, at least it’s not Lotus Notes. Since it fills me with so much rage, let’s just get right into it. Everything is shiny except mail When you first hit the login page, it looks good. The blogs and wikis look good. The calendar looks good. The mail interface is, comparatively, bloody terrible. They wrote their own stuff for everything except mail, where the…

The Rails 3 Beta got dropped a few days ago, and the release notes for Rails were put out a bit before that. The list of changes is long; this is a big release. There's a lot to sift through, a lot to change to upgrade your existing application, and a lot to learn whether you are upgrading or starting a new app. The big question is: WTF does all this mean to me? Don't worry, I'm going to tell you. If you want to read the full release notes, go f…

I didn’t want to write about the iPad on day one, because I was fairly negative overall. I’m still not completely sold on it; it’s missing some things for me. Granted, I’m not the target audience for this device, and all these things I’m going to talk about are my pressure points. It you think the device will work for you, fine, but for what I want to do with it, it’s not quite there. No card slots The thing is big enough to put a card reader in…