AJ Morris

So I thought I’d write a little post letting everyone know that I haven’t forgotten about them. I’ve been a little busy with working on a Rails blog that I was going to be creating, and have had a few web design projects I’ve been trying to get finished up. Hopefully I won’t be much longer! I have a few cool things for you to check out while I’m away. The first one is called Synergy. It’s a cool open source utility that I’ve been using at work to connect all my computers (6 in total) together with the ability to use 1 set of keyboard and mouse. The second is called iShowU. It’s a cool little screen recording utility that I just purchased to help with creating some screencasts on a Mac. It’s about 20 bucks and gives me a clean looking file that through the use of a few programs I can convert the MOV file to an AVI file so I can edit and produce in Camtasia Studio. Hopefully sometime in the near future Camtasia Studio will be for a Mac. But until then, iShowU will do the trick for me.

I hope to have a new screencast up soon that will show you Synergy (at least on each side, Mac and PC), and maybe one that shows you a few things about iShowU. I have a list of some ROR screencasts that I’d like to do, but I’m finding that I need to really just record and then splice together all sorts of pieces to get a screencast. Maybe I’ll have the option soon to create shorter ones with the use of Jing, iShowU, and Camtasia Studio.

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So I just wanted to remind people that I’m still planning on going to the DC Startup Weekend. There’s some great ideas so I’m really looking forward to what other ideas get added. Check out the list of already growing cities that have committed to hosting a Startup Weekend.

Check out what can be done with Jing on a Mac! I was talking around the office today and decided I wanted to know if Jing could capture the dashboard and some widgets. Guess I was right! The hint is that you need to use your hotkey, by default on a Mac it’s Command + Shift + 1.

Tuesday Apple Inc. announced a new generation of the iMac. Something the rumor mill has called, as well as what most of us have been expecting. But why not make a business mac? Isn’t that what we are all lacking? Let’s take a look at Apple’s computer lineup. First off we start out with the Mac mini. A cheap starter PC that’s really rather useless except for the people that are only going to sit on the internet. It doesn’t pack a big enough punch for businesses to use it. It also doesn’t offer dual-link AVI. Something us designers and developers require, since most have dual monitors around the office today. What’s also strange about this computer is the lack of customizable options. Let’s take a look at their next computer, the iMac. So the iMac has a little more in the feature category, you can customize things like RAM, Hard Drive, but that’s about it. Still no options when it comes to video cards. Jobs said that he expects the business users to like the iMac, however, I tend to disagree. Monitors are something that lasts 2, 3, maybe 4 generations of computers. Business users aren’t going to get rid of a perfectly good monitor because the computer goes bad; they usually need to save money!! The next class of computers are the Mac Pros. Now these are powerful! A little too powerful for the daily business user, and expensive at that. Why pay $2,000-$3,000 dollars fora PC that’s too powerful for you. Yes you can say that it’ll last long, however, do we really need server class processors for daily work? Why not take the server class processors out, bring in some other features to compare with Dell, HP, Gateway, etc. and knock off a couple hundred dollars or so. Personally, working in the software development environment, it would work. You seem people carry around MacBooks and MBPs but when you ask them what their work computer is you usually hear them say Dell. If Apple were to compete with Dell (and others), I think we’d start to see a higher market share with Macs in the business environment.

So I’ve been looking through various tutorials and such trying to find something that protects comment spam. So far the only thing I’ve been able to come up with is Akismet. Us WordPress users know what Akismet is, but there’s some various tutorials out there that show us how to use Akismet in our ROR apps. There is a Akismet plugin that’s out there, but what I’ve found out there, things are either too hard to figure out myself, or they are confusing. So I’m wondering what other ROR developers are using to protect against comment spam. I have heard of people using different plugins for captchas, but I’m looking more for IUE (Initial User Experience) in my app then a user having to put in characters for a captchas. Is there anyone out there using something different? An easy way to implement things? Your knowledge would be muct appreciated.

So this week was pretty good so far. First off, I’ve gotten the A/C all week since my parents asked me to house sit. Anyone that’s been to my apartment knows how hot it gets when it’s hot out, so a change of pace is helpful! Secondly, we got our profit sharing checks at work. Which means, what can I buy….Well this time it allowed me to purchase a much anticipated item, my MacBook!! I’ve been pushing it off for some time, but after I had some issues with Windows XP (for the last time) I decided that it was just time to go completely Mac. So I know have an Intel Mac Mini, which will probably become my desktop since it was my “Apple TV” and the MacBook will pretty much become my daily computer.� If you know of some good open-source applications I can add to my MacBook.� So far I’ve got Adium for an IM client, CyberDuck for FTP, TextMate (though I bought it) for editing, iTerm for Terminal, FireFox (obviously for web-browsing), also added Flock (since I’m addicted to it), Jing for screen capturing and sharing, and CocoaMySQL-SBG for editing MySQL GUI.. If you can think of others I would appreciate it!

My last post was how to add WYMEditor into your Rails app, however I noticed that I recorded it a little too big, so I will try to re-record it this weekend. I’ll also be working on a video show you how to install compile Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X. I followed a written tutorial, however, it can sometimes be rather confusing when you try to follow written instructions.