Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology: amazon unbox Goes Live
I’ll be interested in the first reviews of his (sic) product.
Ok, here’s a review:
First, and worst, doesn’t work with a Mac. Surprising for Amazon, and right there a deal-breaker. You can only watch on an XP PC. Can’t burn to DVD (except as a backup that won’t play in a DVD player, and librarians love DRM, right?) So I guess I’d say it sucks.
Technorati Tags: geek, amazon, library, stupid, mac
Gluttonous : Guide: Things You Shouldn’t Be Doing In Rails
Koz recently checked code into core that kicks and screams all the way home if you’re using deprecated methods or instance variables. In honor of this I’ve decided to give you a list of things I still see over and over in Rails code that you really shouldn’t be doing anymore. Really. Trust me on this.
Library Journal – The Gender Gap
We won’t be changing to help women. We will be doing it for our libraries, for our profession, and for ourselves. We need women in digital library positions. We need their unique perspective and their civilizing influence on the boys’ clubs that many library systems units, professional events, and online forums have become. But more than that, we simply need their talent.
Excellent article by Roy Tennant. Read the whole thing. I especially agree about the civilizing influence. It would go a long way towards eliminating the tedious culture of one-upmanship often endemic to technical communities. As long as we continue to have a geek culture mainly driven by the wants and desires of 20-something white males, we’re going to miss out on the true potential of Web 2.0 as an agent for far-reaching change. And in a profession like librarianship where women are by any measure the majority, the lack of women in systems librarianship just doesn’t make any sense at all.
Technorati Tags: library, library+2.0, systems+librarianship, feminism, geek, politics
We need time to think; we need (metaphorical) quiet to get into the flow. A tool that shouts “spelling error” with every typo is providing more distraction that help. Yet it feels good to make those red squiggles disappear — “We’re making progress!” — it feels good to play with fonts and shift the format. A computer is a far different beast that Heidegger’s hammer: it can be at hand in many ways simultaneously.
Having had to do some writing for MPOW lately, I’ve found that I’ve been getting good results by forcing myself to ignore the red squiggles and just plow on. It was a revelation of sorts – at first it’s really difficult to not correct immediately, but if you can get over that initial resistance, it gets easier to ignore the squiggles. Then when I come to a natural break in my thoughts, I can go back and right-click the errors into correctness. It’s very easy for me to fall into the trap of letting font-tweaking and margin-narrowing – the virtual equivalent of pencil sharpening and squaring the pad with the desk – keep me from getting to work.
Technophilia: Ten ways to search with Technorati – Lifehacker
Before I get really going with all the search nerdiness helpful Technorati search tweaks, I want to point out that there are other excellent blog search engines out there: Sphere, PubSub, Feedster and Ice Rocket, to name a few. I picked Technorati to play with because it’s the one that I and a lot of other folks use the most – however, your mileage may vary.
Some good ways to search Technorati when it’s working. I ‘m starting to use it more; in the past, I perceived it as little more than an egoboo amplifier for the usual suspects. Now, though, it appears to be gaining enough critical mass to be useful. The “Top x” lists are still annoying, though.
Technorati Tags: technorati, geek, search
Nice rundown of the various validators available in Rails.
Technorati Tags: ruby, rails, geek, programming
Pluralization Tester for the Ruby on Rails Inflector | Ruby on Rails for Newbies
Uh, this shows you how Rails “pluralizes” a word. I had no idea this was a problem.
dzone.com – fresh links for developers
Any number of Digg clones are appearing, and dzone aims to be digg for developers. Nice drilldowns for specific areas with their own rss feeds. – you can get ruby (actually rails, but is anyone doing non-rails ruby? If they broke them out, the ruby category’d be empty), java, usability. Looks well-done and a good resource. No Library 2.0, though.
My continuing NetNewsWire woes (no link, only working software gets links): this morning manual feed refresh just stopped working. I choose refresh all and after a few seconds the action completes and nothing has happened. Not only that, NNW is practicing a particularly nasty form of lock-in: it won’t export my feeds correctly to OPML. I read about 500 feeds or so, and when I export, whether I export to all in flat format, all in groups format, selected in flat or selected in groups, it manages to export only 181 of those files. Pretty good way to make sure I don’t switch to another newsreader, eh? Not only this, but according to this bug report, this has been an open bug for better than a year. I have always liked the feel of NNW and it has been a good piece of software in the past, but this kind of sloppiness for a paid product is unacceptable. The NewsGator “sync” has been awful from day one. About the only thing I’ve liked about it is that my additions or deletions from my feed list have also been synced, although like every other aspect of this software, it’s done it inconsistently. As soon as I can figure out a way to cleanly (and completely) export my OPML from the program, I’ll take my feedreading elsewhere. BlogBridge is looking damn good at the moment.
UPDATE: Ironically enough, I can export all the feeds from NewsGator online. But this is crazy: what if I didn’t have a NewsGator account? I’ve reimported everything back into Bloglines, and I’m trying out other RSS readers. I’ll post more about this when I’ve had some time to play with them all a bit. Until then, I’m just using Bloglines for now. It at least works.
Via VersionTracker, I found a new type 2 tracking program for the Mac called Type2Tracker. It looks really great, but there’s one big problem: I can’t import my meter data into it. I’d have to enter it manually and that’s a deal-breaker for me. I know of only one other program that will import data from a number of popular meters, the Body Journal, from a Canadian company. It also looks pretty good, but it’s not aimed specifically at diabetics. My guess is that the meter manufacturers, all of whom sell software packages themselves (for Windows only), aren’t too forthcoming with the specs necessary to write a package for the Mac. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to know. I ended up getting a OneTouch UltraSmart. Highly recommended.
And while I’m on the subject of meters, why isn’t there a LOT more technical innovation in glucometers? There’s an awful lot of us diabetics out there – why aren’t we getting meters with Bluetooth interfaces and web capabilities? How come I can’t press a button on my meter and have it sync up with the diabetes software on my Powerbook? Why can’t it send my results wirelessly to my doctor? Is it ageism – would the companies be doing this if diabetics were mostly people in their 20’s (although since new cases are being diagnosed increasingly younger, that may yet be the case)? Why isn’t Apple designing a meter? The iBleed? It could also play music!
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