The Bell Tolls For Thee, Zune- May 23, 2008 GameStop has decided to stop selling the Microsoft Zune due to piss-poor sales: Microsoft has sold about 2 million Zunes since the device&8217;s release in Nov. 2006 while Apple sold 10.6 million iPods in the last quarter alone. Is this a surprise for anyone besides Steve Ballmer linkhttp://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/newsanalysis/hardware/10418052.html Title Case for Ruby- May 21, 2008 There&8217;s been a great response to my request to convert Title Case, Gruber&8217;s nifty perl-based title-casing tool into Ruby so the rest of the world (just kidding, Perl people!) can make use of it. Here are the initial...http://hivelogic.com/articles/2008/05/title-case-for-ruby LOST Finale at RailsConf 2008- May 21, 2008 Update &8211; 22 May 2008 Now that I&8217;ve got everybody psyched about this, I realize that I probably can&8217;t attend. I&8217;ll be heading for the airport at about 6:00am EST Thursday morning (which means up at about 5:00am EST&8212;early even for me). I&8217;ll be travelling for about 13 hours. LOST starts at 9:00pm and ends at 11:00pm PST, which will feel like 2:00am for me coming from EST. Staying awake for 24 hours right before a talk would probably be pushing my limits,...http://hivelogic.com/articles/2008/05/lost-finale-at-railsconf-2008 Title Case- May 20, 2008 Gruber has whipped up a tool he calls Title Case: It&8217;s pretty easy to write a non-clever title-casing function. The simplest way is to just capitalize the first letter of every word. That&8217;s not right, though, because it&8217;ll leave you with capitalized small words like if, in, of, on, etc. What you want is something that not only knows not to capitalize such words, but will un-capitalize them if they&8217;re erroneously capitalized in the input. Now if somebody has the...http://daringfireball.net/2008/05/title_case Alltop- May 20, 2008 Alltop, one of the latest sites from Guy Kawasaki, has just launched a Ruby-specific version of their site. So, what is Alltop From their site: We import the stories of the top news websites and blogs for any given topic and display the headlines of the five most recent stories (except Moms.alltop which has fewer headlines because there are so many feeds). When you place the cursor over a headline, we display part of the story so that you can decide if youd like to read it. To read the.http://ruby.alltop.com/ An Event Apart San Francisco (2008)- May 20, 2008 Our friend from New York has just announced the schedule for An Event Apart San Francisco. AEA is the design conference for people who make websites, and it&8217;s happening August 1819, 2008. Just check this roster: Heather Champ, Kelly Goto, Jeremy Keith, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Cederholm, Tantek elik, Jeffrey Veen, Derek Featherstone, Liz Danzico, Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman. Sounds like the place to be. linkhttp://aneventapart.com/events/2008/sanfrancisco/ Probing the Hive Mind- May 15, 2008 An interview with yours truly by Chris Bowler of The Weekly Review. Chris and I discuss web development and design, interdisciplinary skills, usability, Cork&8217;d, working with Dan Cederholm and John Gruber, meditation, Buddhism, and more. linkhttp://theweeklyreview.ca/2008/05/15/probing-the-hive-mind-an-interview-with-dan-benjamin/ Speaking at RailsConf 2008- May 13, 2008 I&8217;m speaking at RailsConf again this year. My talk is entitled Entrepreneurs on Rails, and I&8217;ll be discussing the challenges faced by independent freelance developers and small development agencies, from incorporating (or not) to working from home, the feast-or-famine-phenomenon, and more. So if you&8217;re going to be at RailsConf, or in the general vicinity of Portland at the end of Maybeginning of June, let me know. linkhttp://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/schedule/speaker/4997 The New Machine- May 13, 2008 We&8217;ve just redesigned and relaunched the Rails Machine family of websites with an all new look and brand, just in time for RailsConf 2008. Take a look around. Kick the tires. Take it for a spin. You can read more about the launch on the blog. linkhttp://railsmachine.com How to Securely Erase Storage Media in Mac OS X- May 13, 2008 Inevitably, there will come a time when you have to donate, sell, or return your Mac. Maybe it&8217;s just a bit too old and slow, and it&8217;s time for a replacement. Maybe you&8217;ve changed jobs, and you need to return your computer back to the mothership. Maybe you&8217;re ready to donate the too-slow-for-me-but-great-for-a-student Mac to the local school. When preparing for such a situation, it&8217;s important that you do more than just delete your personal files and clear the...http://hivelogic.com/articles/2008/05/secure-erase-osx |