Aldoblog

Last weekend I was in Chicago for the first ever RailsConf, a gathering of about 600 people focused on developing web applications using the Ruby on Rails application framework. Other people are posting lots of details and thoughts (try clicking the RailsConf tag below), so I’ll just add a few deltas:

I’m sure a million people will be linking today to the Apple announcement of Boot Camp, a new utility which now makes it both possible and easy to install Microsoft Windows XP onto an Intel-based Mac. I’m also sure most of them will put their amateur analyst hats on, and tell people what they think […]

I continue to use and love Eudora as my email client. This despite it being a little long in the tooth, and with a visual style straight from 1999. I’ve been waiting for a new version with some new features for a while, and I finally got tired enough of a specific missing feature to do something about it. Here’s an AppleScript to tide me (and possibly others) over.

I’ve been a BBEdit user for more than a decade, and consider it one of the finest pieces of software I’ve ever used. But a new text editing application, TextMate, has me re-evaluating my loyalty. I hope to make 2006 the year I achieve “text editing zen,” and I think TextMate is the application to help me do it.

There’s not much about audiobooks (except how to buy them in the iTMS), but Apple’s new iPod 101 is likely to be an extremely useful resource to all the many visitors who are coming here after getting an iPod for Xmas.

Just a quick note in case anyone is interested, I am selling off my old Mac (a PowerMac G4 with 1 gig of RAM and a large, fast SCSI disk; more details in the listing) on craigslist.org:

http://www.craigslist.org/sfc/sys/98433667.html

All things considered, I’d rather sell to someone I know, so if you’re interested, let me know. (Quickly, it’ll surely sell this week.)

Rochelle and I ate lunch today at a new restaurant called Medicine. The food is Japanese Zen monk vegan, called “new-shojin”. The flavors are delicate, subtle, and quite good once your brain and palate adjust. And I thought I was at the Apple Store.

Our preferred method for obtaining audiobooks is from Audible.com. Second is from the public library. Third is buying them on MP3 CDs.

I upgraded to PGP Desktop 9 because the new version would finally work with Eudora on Mac OS X. All I had to do was install the new version, reboot, and the new automatic mode began immediately discovering and auto-enabling my email accounts as I used them.

Unfortunately, the automatic mode doesn’t work so well if you are also using some kind of network tunnel, such as a VPN or ssh port forwarding, which is increasingly common for me as I take the laptop to clients or on the road. I thought I would document the configuration of manual proxy mode for Mac OS X users, since I found the documentation light in this area.

Phillip Torrone’s Audible does Podcasts – the complete guide is a nice write-up of a new feature at Audible.com that supports the automatic download of periodic audible content. Although his article uses the very nice iPodder application to demonstrate the features, there’s no reason why you can’t use the built-in podcasting features of iTunes 4.9. Here are instructions and a couple of screenshots.