The Mom Test

I come from a music/audio background. When I was in college, we were taught the Car Test, being budding recordists. The Car Test, for those who are not familiar, is when you take the mix you did on a pair of speakers that are designed for critical listening and play it on the shittiest set of speakers you can find. (This might be the iPod Headphones Test or the Laptop Speakers Test, but I learned it as the Car Test.)

Ruby Rags

There’s a place that makes shirts for Ruby/Rails geeks called RubyRags. The above picture is a rough sketch of my idea for a Ruby t-shirt. Maybe I am adding this to the list of jokes I need a whiteboard and a laser pointer to explain?

Open Source Ghetto In Need of Police

I’ve been writing Java code for a while now. I’m good with it, can manipulate it to do my bidding, create something from nothing rather than depend completely on its massive collection of libraries, etc..

Recently I started using Rails, and I like it, for the most part.

But I’ve written a program with a bunch of Javascript, and I need to somehow get data associated with the Java variables into a Rails database. Like an asshole, I thought “oh, I bet the Rails Wiki has some good info on this”.

“Cool Trick” or “Old News”

This might be totally old news for most of you, but I think this is a good hack.

We all know we can download YouTube movies with the activity monitor in Safari, right? Well, we can, but the resultant file is an FLV and yet it can’t be viewed using any conventional playback program, including Flash Player.

Here’s where I always find myself having to download some video compressor that has all its menus in Cyrillic and an icon that actually is a Trojan Horse.

But I think I inadvertently found a very elegant and trustworthy solution to this last night. Again, I’m sorry if this is like listening to your grandfather talk about how useful HAM radio used to be, but I think this is useful, so I’m just putting it out there to help.