Blog of the designer/developer Zach Inglis.
Thanks goes to Rein on this one.
I hate trolling through .methods finding custom methods, but Rein recently told me of a way that I didn’t have to. For example lets suggest you were looking at the request.methods,
request.methods - Class.methodsSo simple I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.
Also note that you can make it even more usable as so:
(request.methods - Class.methods).to_yamlI was waiting until I switch my blog until Rails only and then going to install Warehouse and list all my plugins there, however having to been forced at gunpoint (or at least metaphorical gunpoint) to try Git, I am starting to really appreciate the nuances that it brings over SVN. I won’t go into that now.
I’ve had many plugins lying around the place ready for consumption by Rails developers but now I shall start storing them online for everyone to use.
Currently a bit of a hack-job, was built before I even jumped on the REST boat and knew about @object.to_xml but essentially makes the fields in error_messages_for clickable.
With this plugin it takes 2 minutes (no, seriously) to add Basecamp-like urls to your project. Thanks goes to both David Heinemeier Hansson and Derek Haynes for their plugins.
Simply wrap your inputs and labels in a fieldset block, passing a string aswell if you want a legend and it wraps it in fieldsets in the html for you.
Of course there are more to come as I can track down some of my plugins in the wild.
The guys over at Rogue Amoeba have just released a new version of AirFoil.
Yesterday I emailed them as I was trying to set up AirFoil to goto my Windows PC (so when watching things or listening to music it would come out in the crystal quality that is my speakers rather than the tinny sound of the Macbook Pro.
Yesterday, I emailed them asking them if I could do so. Unfortunately there was no solution. Today is a different day and they emailed telling me they support it. It also looks like they support AppleTV now! Go them.
The HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray war is almost at an end. I say almost as it is not official yet, but now Best Buy and Netflix are jumping to Blu-Ray, it is close. The only thing left is for Paramount and Universal Studios to jump ship and Microsoft to support Blu-ray.
It did not even come down to the technical aspects, like it should have been. HD-DVD had shown that it was the better format, with larger capacity disks in the market than that of Blu-ray (Though of course Blu-ray was technically larger, this had not been shown.) Even so, the HD-DVD team had been reported to be working on a 45gb disk.
With this in mind, I think there are a lot more reasons why HD-DVD should have won. For example, the naming convention is also a plus for non-technical users. People know the acronym HD. I feel that people trusted Sony too much without considering their past experience. Sony are persistently trying to create new format technologies and locking people into them. Sony is known for their failed formats: Betamax and UMD, and this should have been a bigger factor than it was.
I have also hard reports from equitable close friends that have said they found their HD-DVD to provide a better experience. I personally have not seen a Blu-ray video so cannot confirm this.
Where HD-DVD really failed? They had a hugely rich company supporting them, Microsoft. Microsoft were lazy in their support and in my mind the sole reason that Blu-ray won. Microsoft specifically said that there will be no HD-DVD games, I suspect for when the Xbox 3 emerges, and that you have to pay a premium (no pun intended) to get the add-on or a unit with the player hardware built-in.
If Microsoft aggressively pursued (let’s face it, they’re well known for their aggressive tactics) they could have very successful with HD-DVD, even taking a reasonable loss on the players would have ultimately helped them. What is worse for Microsoft though, is if they did succed, they would cause the Playstation 3 to take a huge hit. On the flip-side, we will now see a huge rise in the Playstation market share due to the Blu-ray win. People wanting to purchase a new console will pick the Playstation because Blu-ray is the winning format and that Xbox does not have support for it yet, will go for a Playstation 3. This is especially the case as a Blu-ray reader is around the same price as a PS3, so why not pick one up while you are at it, and a game or two.
Contrary to my bashing, I have been watching Blu-ray’s development for what is probably about 4 years now. I was very excited and very upset to see its gone the way it has. I own a HD-DVD player and will continue to use it still.
Remember that post from a few days ago where I was upset about shipping times? Scrap that. It came this morning. Over the last 2 days I have watched it go from Shanghai, China to Alaska and then this morning I watched it go from Alaska to Indianapolis and then back upto Cedar Rapids and then to Moline and finally here. All apparently in the space of 8 hours.
It’s a beautiful piece of equipment. The USB compartment is magnetic by the way, which means it clicks shut. The USB port is a bit fiddly to fit things into though. The screen is awesomely glossy. The apple logo on the back is bigger. It feels like you’re holding an expensive piece of equipment but not like a heavy piece. The best bit about it? The keyboard, it is an awesome keyboard although, I don’t think the EJECT keyboard button was needed. The power does work in my Macbook Pro but the Pro randomly doesn’t get connectivity.
Totally awesome!
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