For the past 8-9 years, Java has been my bread-and-butter programming language, and to this date it is the language I am most familiar with. However, for the past few years I have developed a growing interest in dynamic scripting languages, and Ruby in particular. To a large extent this was fueled by the elegant Ruby on Rails web application framework, although I have written a few standalone Ruby applications as well....
Up till now I’ve never really gotten that much into social networking applications. I joined Tribe.net about 3 years ago but haven’t really checked in for 2 years. I steered clear of MySpace so far… But yesterday I went on a bit of a social networking spree and decided to sign up for a few services: Facebook, Bebo (2 former coworkers of mine are at Bebo now), and the recently launched Pownce (I don’t have any more Pownce invites, but you might find this post useful - it worked for me)....
Last week I’ve had a real unfortunate experience with AT&T: Our phone line (which includes DSL) was down for a whole 4 days, from Monday morning to Friday morning. This is by far the most severe outage I have ever experienced, and suffice to say I am extremely annoyed with AT&T’s ineptitude, and their obvious lack of concern for their customers. I first reported the problem Monday morning at 10AM, but it took them until the next day before they even sent someone out there....
Call me a late adopter, but I have finally gotten rid of all CRTs in my house (partially as a space saving measure in preparation for our upcoming move to a smaller house, although this may just be a subconscious way of justifying the expense ;) ). I replaced my 32" CRT TV with a 37" LCD TV and my 19" CRT computer monitor with a 22" widescreen LCD monitor. The difference is amazing, although my remaining video equipment isn’t quite up to par (particularly my DVD player, which is not upconverting and seems to have a broken component output)....
Earlier this month, version 1.5 of the OSX Camino browser was released. Camino is based on the same Mozilla rendering engine as Firefox, but unlike Firefox, Camino behaves much more like a native OSX application, without a lot of the overhead (such as the XUL user interface) that Firefox brings with it. Ever since I started using the Mac, I’ve never been a big fan of Safari. I have used Firefox up till now, but I’ve been getting less and less excited about it....