Rob on Ruby (and Java)

“Hide Your Desktop” app and video

rnewey — Fri, 07 May 2010 20:45:23 +0000

Of course the biggest thing for us on the devdaily.com website lately has been the release of our “Hide Your Desktop (Hyde)” app for Mac OS X systems. It’s a great app, and at 99 cents, it’s a heck of a great price.

Along with the Hyde app, we created a fun “Hide Your Desktop” video on YouTube. It’s a fun way of demonstrating how Hyde works. Many thanks to Adam for the idea to set this all to some fun music.

Flash, LSOs, and security

rnewey — Fri, 07 May 2010 20:40:32 +0000

One thing we’ve been digging into lately is the issue of browser security, and specifically the concern about “Flash cookies”, and Flash LSO objects, which appear to be a form of cross-browser cookies. Here’s a link to a Firefox tool named BetterPrivacy, which discusses the Flash LSO problem.

Microsoft business strategy, innovation, and turf wars

rnewey — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:26:57 +0000

Confessions of a Microsoft employee: Microsoft was dysfunctional, and hurt by poor strategies and turf battles. As someone looking on at Microsoft from a distance, here’s my favorite quote from this story:

“The company as a whole seemed more and more focused on chasing competitors into any business where they might someday present a threat — which to me always felt like ego on the part of SteveB [CEO Steve Ballmer]“

That statement sums up my feelings about their approach to business.

Todd Palin, Alaska governor?

rnewey — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:19:06 +0000

No surprise here — Sarah Palin’s husband (Todd) had a very active role in governing the state of Alaska. My question: Is this legal?

Zen habits site

rnewey — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:17:27 +0000

I’ve quickly become a fan of the Zen habits website. I like some of the productivity and simplicity comments I’ve read there, and even approaching the topic of “motivation” from a Zen Buddhist perspective is interesting.

New Java and Mac tutorials

rnewey — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:14:12 +0000

Recently I contributed to some more articles on the devdaily.com website, including these Java and Mac tutorials:

Already a month into the new year, but we’re pretty cranked up about the Java and Mac tutorials we’ve already written this year.

List of UIManager color keys

rnewey — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:15:11 +0000

We’ve been writing some Java Swing code lately, and somewhere along the way we got caught up in the list of color keys in the Java UIManager class. These keys are cool, because if you use them properly, it can help keep the colors in your Java/Swing application consistent within the application itself, as well as consistent across platforms.

While working on our Swing app, Al just wrote this “list of UIManager color keys” tutorial. Hopefully the source code and list of color keys in that article will be helpful to other Java developers in their Swing/GUI development work.

And now, it’s back to our regularly-scheduled Swing app development work…

A printf reference page

rnewey — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:53:47 +0000

Nothing major, but we just made some updates to our printf reference page. This page started off when we were doing a Java project that required some formatted printing, but if you’re familiar with Java, Perl, and Ruby, you know that the printf format syntax is similar across all those languages.

In other news, we’re just keeping an eye on the CES 2010 news. It’s fun to see all the cool, new stuff, but I don’t have any major purchase plans based on anything I’ve seen.

Alexander Consulting, in Louisville, KY

rnewey — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:14:16 +0000

Just getting into this whole ‘work’ thing again today, and as we were working on blog posts about Mac HTML editors, we realized the alexanderky.com website was created with iWeb. So, while we’re in that neighborhood, if you’re interested in Java, Ruby, PHP, Unix, and Linux consulting in Louisville, Kentucky, check out that website.

(Yes, that was a shameless plug.)

Is Google competing with their own vendors?

rnewey — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:38:06 +0000

Wow, Mark Sigal raises a very valid point that with the release of Nexus One, Google is now directly competing with the mobile phone hardware vendors and service providers they said they would not — and should not — compete with.

I’ll go further and say that Google selling the Nexus One is like Microsoft picking out just one hardware vendor, and then partnering with that vendor to sell hardware systems directly from microsoft.com. If you were the other hardware vendors, wouldn’t that piss you off?