Rails Day

I have decided to enter in the Rails Day competition. It's June 4th, and is basically just a competition to see who can build the best application in Ruby on Rails within 24 hours. I'm not revealing my idea to everybody, but I do hope I win, or at least come close. There are so many cool prizes, my favorites being a lifetime subscription to Basecamp Basic and an Apple Mac Mini. Good luck to any who are entering.

Help me get a Mac mini!

Anybody who hasn't signed up on freeminimacs.com, a new site from the people who brought you freeipods.com, help me get a Mac mini! Just sign up at the link below and complete one offer. Most of them are free, and you only have to do one. Napster is pretty cool. Just be sure to use the link I post: http://www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=18535324

I hate finals!

Well, it's the last week of school. That means finals are coming up Thursday and Friday. I have so much to do to prepare. I need to make an outline, create a notes sheet, plus my normal homework. Thankfully, I'm exempting one of my finals, so I'll actually get to leave school at 10:10 on Friday. What's the point of going if I'm leaving two hours later? Well, I have to or else I'll fail chemistry. Wish me luck!

I've got Tiger!!!!

When I got home from school today there was a package on my doorstep. I opened it and behold: there was my Mac OS X Tiger box. Almost immediately I opened it and commenced installation. I decided to first install it on a separate partition to make sure it worked first. So I erased my Ubuntu Linux installation as I never used it much anyway. Tiger installed just fine. After I had it working for a little while I installed it on my Panther volume, choosing the Archive and Install option. I have heard this is more reliable than just an Upgrade. So Archive and Install I did. After it was installed, I had to upgrade a few apps, namely Desktop Manager and Quicksilver. I also had to install the Xcode Tools, which hung in the finishing installation stage. I don't think it messed anything up though. I then downloaded the Ruby on Rails Tiger Installer, which worked perfectly. I will need to install mod_fastcgi though.

Most of my apps still work. One thing Apple doesn't mention is that Mac OS X Tiger includes an iWork 05 30-day trial. Both of these apps, Keynote and Pages, are very cool. Both are perfect for two projects I have at school. What a coincidence. I do like many of the new features in Tiger. Spotlight is very cool, finding a Pages file by typing in a word found only once in it. Dashboard is the coolest thing since sliced bread. Automator requires a little bit of getting used to, but you can do quite a bit with it. Unlike many people, I'm pleased with the new Mail interface. I enjoy searching in System Preferences. Safari RSS kicks ass. All in all, a solid OS which is now much faster. However, it was pretty slow while Spotlight was indexing.

Unlock Full Screen Mode in QuickTime 7

With the newest version of QuickTime, Apple has still made you pay $30 for the Pro version. One of the things you can't do in the normal version is the fancy new full-screen mode with controls. The ability to do this is there, it just hasn't been unlocked in the player. However, there is an AppleScript that will show whatever movie you're playing in full-screen mode:

tell application "QuickTime Player" present front movie end tell

That's it. Run that script while you're playing a movie and it will go to full-screen mode.

Looks like I'll have to wait for Tiger

Not that much longer though. My mother told me yesterday morning that she was paying for Tiger for me as a birthday gift. I love the idea of not having to pay for it, but this also means I have to wait a few more days 'till my birthday on May 12.

On the other hand, I did get one present yesterday from my grandparents. It's a new Acer flat-screen LCD 17" monitor! This thing is awesome, and it doesn't have any dead pixels to my knowledge. It works perfectly with my iBook, and now I have so much more screen space.

By default, though, iBooks and certain other macs don't support dual head displays, meaning that you have different windows and desktop and stuff on each monitor. Usually, these computers only support mirroring, where they display the same thing on each monitor. In addition, these Macs don't take advantage of all the resolutions that some monitors can use. For example, on my Acer monitor, the default resolution is 1280 x 1024, but my iBook said it only went up to 1024 x 768. However, there is a program that can help with all of this. It's name is Screen Spanning Doctor.

I found it with a simple Google search. All I did was run the simple program and select Enable Spanning. After a reboot, my display preferences had many more features. Now I could setup my monitors the way I wanted.

I'm getting the tiger

That's right! Mac OS X Tiger has been released and I have just placed an order. I can't wait! I'm so excited about Spotlight, Dashboard, the new Mail (ugly buttons and all), and Safari RSS. I'm so glad that Apple has decided to take features that once required third-party applications (Quiksilver, Konfabulator, NetNewsWire) and integrated them into the operating system.

In addition, they decided to appease us Ruby developers as well. Ruby 1.8.2 is now included with Tiger, instead of 1.6.8, which won't work with Rails. Also someone created a package with Rails, FCGI, and RubyGems. SQLite 3 is also included. I just can't wait for it to come.

CocoaMySQL has met it's match: YourSQL

Ever since I got a Mac, I've used CocoaMySQL as a client for MySQL. However, I haven't seen a new version in the year that I've had my iBook. But now a fellow Rails developer has posted about a new application: YourSQL. I like the interface even better too.