technology

Earlier today, TechCrunch’s poorly researched claim that Twitter is abandoning Ruby on Rails in favor of PHP or Java generated a lot of buzz in the Twitter and Ruby communities (the claim was later refuted by Twitter developer Evan Williams). Of course, the article’s comments attracted the usual, ignorant TechCrunch trolls. Most took the opportunity to pitch their framework of choice (such as PHP, Java, .NET, or Django), which they claimed would of course magically solve all of Twitter’s scalability issues....

For the past half year or so, I have mainly been using my MacBook Pro - particularly for the past few weeks since I hooked it up to my new 22" widescreen LCD monitor. However, I have still had to keep my Linux PC running as a print- and fileserver (serving, among other things, my mp3 music collection), which has been bothering me. So yesterday I picked up an Airport Extreme, and so far I am extremely impressed with it....

Until recently, I have mostly used my MacBook Pro without an external mouse, but I recently hooked it up to a KVM switch that allows me to share my external keyboard, mouse, and monitor with my Linux box. I always felt that the mouse support in OSX was lacking, even though I wasn’t quite able to pin it down. But now that I’m comparing the same mouse on two systems, the difference is quite pronounced....

I came across two interesting pieces of news this morning: HP is cutting back on telecommuting. By August, most of HP’s IT employees will be required to work from one of HP’s office instead of from home, even though HP pioneered the telecommuting trend starting in the late sixties. Apparently they have found that significant efficiencies are gained by allowing the IT employees to collaborate in person and learn from each other....

Earlier this week, Apple unexpectedly released their Bootcamp software, which allows owners of Intel based Macs to dual-boot into Windows XP. Bootcamp itself appears to mainly consist of the required Windows XP drivers, whereas a firmware update is actually responsible for enabling the dual boot feature. For the most part, this sounds like a pretty good deal to me. I don’t own a Mac, but I am pretty certain that my next computer (Notebook or Desktop) will be a Mac, and this feature adds extra confidence to first time Mac users that they will be able to continue to run their Windows applications....