Big Nerd Ranch, which became well known on the strengths of Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa training and writing, has a new offering in their “bootcamp” series: Ruby on Rails Bootcamp. It’s taught by Marcel Molina Jr., a longtime Rails contributor. Most of the stuff Big Nerd Ranch teaches has been around in one form or another for ten years or more; it says something that they are tackling something so relatively new. Another jump in mindshare for Rails.
Sometime in recent weeks, store.apple.com picked up some Ajax. If you didn’t know this either, go play with the online configurator. Notice that as you make changes via the pop-up menus, updates to the “Summary” box in the upper right are made without a page load. The items that are added or altered by your selection are briefly highlighted in blue, which then fades out.
Examining the source reveals certain telltale signs as well.
Another in a weekly series of unearthings.
Two years ago my titanium PowerBook died and I took an unplanned six-week leave from OS X. Afterward I wrote up my experiences in an essay called “FreeBSD, KDE and Me” (you might miss the title reference if you’re not of a certain generation). Within 24 hours the essay had gotten about 10,000 page views – easily the most popular thing I had ever posted.
Matisse Enzer’s Unix for Mac OS X Tiger is on its way to bookshelves near you. This is a complete overhaul of the previous edition, which covered 10.3. For the GUI-centric Mac user curious about the command line, this is a great book to own. Matisse is another Well denizen, and I’ve followed his progress on the book with interest. Also see his blog entry on the book’s release.
A lot of eBay phishing scams take you to websites that not only mimic the look of the site they’re impersonating, but actually contain live links to that site and even use images hosted there.
I just got one today: an email with the ironic subject line of “eBay Fraud Mediation Request.” I always take a look at these to see if the scammers have any new tricks. I even click on the links (being a Mac user emboldens me there). This one took me to a site called www.signin-e-bay.com (I’m omitting the full link that takes you to the scam pages). The page was full of links to real eBay pages and used images hosted on eBay servers.
ScreenCastsOnline and MacTV have posted a great screencast that demonstrates some of the wonders of LaunchBar. I’m a longtime fan and user of LaunchBar, but it can be hard to evangelize because it’s so unlike anything most users know. (Spotlight has changed that a bit, but that’s a post unto itself.)
I thought the use of the Keyboard Viewer was particularly clever. When the utility you’re demonstrating has “Keep your hands on the keyboard” as its motto, just following the mouse won’t do.
“Splog” as a label for spam blogs seems to be taking off. I’m not crazy about it, because I think the challenges and possible solutions of fake-blog spam sites have huge overlap with fake-portal and fake-search-engine link farms. The difference is mostly significant to people who run blog indexing services.
Not to discount their needs or their efforts. J. Scott Johnson, CTO of Feedster, weighs in today with a piece in Online Media Daily. One of his best points: “Can the war on splogs be won? No.” In other words, expect to deter and minimize blog spam,not to eliminate it.