Matthew Russell has some ideas for extending the battery life of your Apple Powerbook. Since I just switched back to Macs and I was having some problems with my previous laptop’s battery life, this was an issue of keen interest. I knew about all of Matthew’s common suggestions, turn off Bluetooth (actually I had [...]

I’d like to have an easier way to track where I am reading in an on line document.
I’d like this both for each page as I am reading it, and for bookmarking my location.
And, no, I don’t want a pony.
Perhaps I am an exception, but I like reading from the screen. Having a single laptop [...]

There are many excellent features of Ruby on Rails. The technology has significant advantages for rapid development and deployment and I don’t think that I could undertake the work that I am doing to develop factscollector without it. I can prototype rapidly, and deploy the simplest thing that could possibly work. My plan is that [...]

I am starting to experiment with writing unit and funtional tests for factscollector. I haven’t ever worked with consistent automated testing.
I probably waited too long to start, both in general, and in this particular Ruby on Rails project. The general reasons are well known in the Agile Programing literature. Tthe existance of the test is [...]

Koz has a little whoops moment and deletes his installed application code.
So, say you’ve typed in:
$ sudo rm ruby gem irb rails
Then you realise you’re sitting in /usr/bin rather than ~/test/bin. You think to yourself, no worries, I’ll just kill that whole line. But instead of hitting C-k, you miss, and hit j.
I’ve been using [...]

As I noted in the previous post, Google Desktop 2.0 breaks Firefox extensions.
The most annoying breakage is of Tabbrowser Preferences. Normally, my settings are to open new links typed in the location bar, and searches from the search box into new tabs. When I first installed Google Desktop, both of these reverted to opening in [...]

In all the hype over Google Desktop, for example in the New York Times, Slashdot and Ars Technica, I am surprised that no one has noticed that it hijacks your browser and internet connection settings, and more or less hoses Firefox extensions.
Before installing the Google Desktop, clicking on a mailto: link in Internet Explorer or [...]

Windows Backup is very poorly designed and implemented for automated use. I had to jump through hoops backwards to accomplish automated backups. In the interest of preserving your sanity, here is what I did.
My environment:

Windows XP Professional
Multiple Users
Selected Folders
Multiple Disks — C backing up to D, and vice-versa
Running as a regular user, without a password, [...]

I use emacs as my preferred text editor. In general I prefer text files to more complicated or proprietary formats such as Word .doc files. Text is easy to use. Text files are small. Text can be processed with standard tools such as grep, diff, sed and awk.
In that light emacs is a somewhat heavy [...]

What do you do about commenters on your blog?
I haven’t had that many people comment on any of my entries. Unaccountably, as I posted before, most of the comments are on my post about deciding to stop using Norton Anti-virus software.
Comments on that post still continue to come in. The commenters want me to check [...]