Published June 9th, 2009
in Product Review.
As a registered iPhone Developer you are allowed to try out new builds of the iPhone Operating system to allow you to develop against an actual iPhone instead of just the provided iPhone emulator.I’ve been fortunate enough to be using the 3.0 builds for quite some time and now that Apple has announced the full feature set of the new O.S. here are some first impressions on some of the features:
- Cut and Paste - It works great, but the funny thing is I use a lot more than I thought I would. Maybe Steve was right after all, LOL.*Waves Hand*”You don’t need cut-and-paste. This is not the text you were looking for”
- Media Downloads - I had been waiting for this for some time. You can now download movies, TV shows, and audio books from iTunes on your iPhone. I’m actually downloading “Predicatably Irrational” on my iPhone while writing this Blog entry, nice! You need Wifi for this functionality, and it will take a while to download your book. Don’t try this on a low battery!
- Landscape Keyboard - Finally! You can now use landscape mode with your email, notes, and Safari.
- MMS - ready as far as the iPhone is concerned, but AT&T still hasn’t got their act together. AT&T says they are working on MMS and it will be ready sometime at the end of the summer…Grrrrrr.
- Internet Tethering - Don’t get excited, AT&T hasn’t got this feature working either. They are getting really annoying. And you better believe that if/when they allow tethering at all, they will charge a lot for the privilege.
- Spotlight Search - You will love this feature, I use it constantly. Here’s a tip, use it to launch your Applications. No more remembering what screen that app is on, just start typing the first few letters of your Applications name and away you go!
- Voice Dialing - Sorry Charlie, this feature is only on the new iPhone 3GS and isn’t a part of the 3.0 update. My personal reaction? Whaaaaaaah! *Stomps Foot* I want it, I want it.
- Voice Memos - Kinda lame, really. Works O.K. but has absolutely no features at all. Think of it as just a big, red, record button. Wait a minute, that’s exactly what it is.
- Turn By Turn and Video Recording - Fooled you. You don’t get these either. Buy the new iPhone 3GS.
Published February 10th, 2009
in Product Review.
I thought the first generation of the Kindle was an interesting idea but overpriced and feature poor. With the new Kindle 2, Amazon has released a product that I believe is still overpriced but will get much wider adoption. The key feature is that the Kindle is always connected to the Internet allowing the download of fresh content 24/7. Since Amazon doesn’t charge users a monthly connection fee, they are out only the initial cost of purchase. The new Kindle is much thinner and now holds over 1,500 books. And Kindle 2 even reads to you, with a “Read to Me”, Text to Speech engine. But the sweetest detail that Amazon isn’t really marketing (still a rumor) is that the Kindle 2 will sync with mobile devices. This Whispersync feature will allow your iPhone or other mobile device to read Kindle content. The one showstopper for me however is that the Kindle 2 doesn’t allow users to upload their own content to the device.
New Features & Enhancements
- Slim & Lightweight: Just over 1/3 inch and 10.2 ounces
Books in under 60 seconds: Get books delivered in less than 60 seconds; no PC required
- Improved Display: Reads like real paper; now boasts 16 shades of gray for crisp images and text; even reads well in bright sunlight
- Longer Battery Life: 25% longer battery life; read for days without recharging
- More Storage: Take your library with you; holds over 1,500 books
- Faster Page Turns: 20% faster page turns
- Read-to-Me: Text-to-Speech feature means Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud.
- No Wireless Bills: No monthly wireless bills, data plans, or commitments. Amazon pays for Kindle’s wireless connectivity so you won’t see a monthly wireless bill.
- Large Selection: Over 230,000 books, plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines and blogs available
- Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise
Published March 5th, 2008
in Rails.
We completed our subversion setup in part three, now let's add Capistrano deployment to the mix. Let's go ahead and ssh into our server:
CODE:
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ssh -p 8888 deploy@your_linux_box.com
Add the following new directories to our server. This is where our staging and production factory websites will be deployed to:
CODE:
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sudo mkdir /var/www
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sudo mkdir /var/www/apps
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sudo chown -R deploy:deploy /var/www/apps
Continue reading 'Full Rails Stack Part Four: Capistrano, MySQL'
Published March 4th, 2008
in Rails.
If you've finished part two let's continue. In this part of the series I'm going to assume you have a working installation of MySQL on your local client machine that we will only need for testing purposes. If you've got a Mac you might look at installing MacPorts and using it to install MySQL for you. First we'll create a test rails project. I'm going to use the latest rails 2 sugar in setting up this simple test site. Open up terminal or iTerm and find a directory you want to use to create the test project. Here we go:
CODE:
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rails --d=mysql factory
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cd factory
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rake db:create
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script/generate scaffold widget name:string description:text
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rake db:migrate
Now let's test our site to make sure everything is working correctly:
Open up your browser and try the site out using http://localhost:3000/widgets.
Continue reading 'Full Rails Stack Part Three: Project and Subversion'
Published February 5th, 2008
in Rails.
We completed setting up ssh and ssh keys in part one, let's continue now with part two of installing a full Rails stack.
SSH into your server:
CODE:
-
ssh -p 8888 deploy@your_linux_box.com
By default, Debian and Ubuntu have five package repositories called main, restricted, universe, multiverse, and commercial. You will need the universe package repository. By default, it may or may not be enabled. To check, edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file (note that if you didn't install the aliases in part one you'll use "sudo nano" instead of sn below):
Continue reading 'Full Rails Stack Part 2: Rails, Mongrel and Nginx'
Published February 4th, 2008
in Rails.
I enjoy coding websites. I like coming up with elegant and flexible solutions to problems. If you saw David Heinemeier Hanssons' early screen casts on web development with Ruby on Rails, you may have been as impressed as I was. Unfortunately, deployment of a website to a *nix server can be a daunting task if you haven't done it before. It doesn't matter if it is a PHP, Python, or Ruby on Rails website, you need to have some basic sysadmin skills to set everything up on a newly installed server. You've got to know something about web servers (Apache, NginX, etc.), something about databases (MySQL, Postgres), about firewalls (iptables or Shorewall), source control (Subversion), email (SendMail, Postfix), monitoring your server (Monit, Nagios), statistics (Awstats, etc.), log rotation, cron jobs, offsite backups (Amazon s3). I have yet to meet an expert in all of these areas. For those sysadmins out there that fit the description I bow deeply. I've decided to do a series on setting up a full Rails stack on Ubuntu. So far I have deployed production Rails web applications to Red Hat, Open Solaris, CentOS, and Ubuntu servers. I've learned enough to know how truly ignorant I am. I don't claim to be an expert. But I am willing to share what I've learned so far in hopes it will help others out there. Here is what you'll get (in no particular order) when finished with the series. Continue reading 'Full Rails Stack With Nginx, Mongrel, Monit, And More'
Published September 26th, 2007
in Music and Product Review.
The Amazon MP3 Music Service has just been released. It is in beta and works quite well. To use it you must agree to the terms of service. You then are allowed to download the client software which is used to retrieve purchased music from Amazon's servers. Client software is available for both Mac and PC and has been promised for Linux sometime in the future. Linux users can download single items in the interim.
Continue reading 'Amazon MP3 Music Service (Review)'
Published September 15th, 2007
in Music and Product Review.
This weekend I finally got a chance to take the music notation software LilyPond for a spin. I had heard of the open source project and was anxious to try it out. As a former Finale and Sibelius user I must admit to being a bit skeptical about its capabilities. I was pleasantly surprised to find the documentation and examples on the website helpful in getting started. For my first attempt with the software I kept it simple. Since my eight-year-old son is now taking piano lessons, I decided to compose a simple Minuet in the Baroque style. Continue reading 'LilyPond & Textmate Make Beautiful Music'
Published July 29th, 2007
in Product Review and Productivity.
Bare Bones Software, authors of BBEdit and TextWrangler, has a wonderful application that helps you to organize your information called Yojimbo. It can archive complete web pages, create bookmarks, add notes, create PDFs from almost anything, create secure areas, is taggable, searchable, and is now accessible via the web. The web version, Webjimbo, allows you to access your computers Yojimbo database from anywhere you happen to be.
Continue reading 'Accessing Yojimbo From Your iPhone'
Published July 17th, 2007
in Linux.
So lets setup the final piece of the puzzle so we can install some packages and start coding already. If you've been following along (Part Two), we are now ready to setup the shorewall firewall. This will lock down all ports we aren't using, both tcp and udp. Go ahead and ssh into your slice from terminal and type in the code below to install the shorewall package.
CODE:
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sudo -i
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apt-get install shorewall
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cd /etc/shorewall
Continue reading 'Shorewall Firewall on Ubuntu Feisty VPS Part 3'
