software

Last weekend, I migrated my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. Wordpress is a solid blog platform and has served me well for the past 7 years, but at this point I simply don’t need anything that sophisticated. The frequent security exploits have also become a bit of a liability, and in fact my blog was already hacked in the past. To be fair, the Wordpress development team tends to react quickly with security updates, but I simply don’t have the diligence to keep my Wordpress installation up to date all the time....

A couple weeks ago, Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails) was released. I recently tested this at work, on an EC2 instance, and my initial experience was so smooth that I am already planning to use it to deploy our various Rails applications. The benchmarks I’ve seen put its performance on approximately the same level as a Mongrel cluster, but its ease of use is an order of magnitude better. All you need to do is install an Apache mod and set up a virtual host config that points to your Rails app’s public directory....

After having signed up for an Evernote beta invite a while ago, I finally received one this week. Evernote is a next generation note taking service. What sets it apart from similar applications are the numerous ways of entering as well as retrieving notes. First of all there is the Evernote Website. It is simple and straightforward, and seems to be very responsive. You can create as many notebooks as you want....

Yesterday I set up Markdown support for my blog, as I was getting tired of typing <li>, <a href="...">, etc. I’ve had my blog for almost four years now, and I can’t believe that I have not done this before. It finally allows me to focus on the actual content while I’m writing a blog post, without having to contort my fingers to type the necessary HTML tags. I’m using the PHP Markdown script, which can be used standalone but also functions as a WordPress plugin....

So I went out and bought Leopard last Friday when it was released. I even got a free T-Shirt for being one of the first 500 customers at my Apple store. This was the first time I can think of that I ever went out and bought an OS on its release day (or any piece of software for that matter, perhaps aside from a computer game or two). I was worried there might be a long line, but my Apple store was pretty deserted (this was at 8PM)....