August 2008 Archives

Many of us are still using OTA (Over The Air) Digital TV to get our local channels in High Definition.  I use a $10 rabbit ear w/loop antenna that I bought from Radio Shack and for the most part it's able to pick up all of the broadcast stations.  I have been having problems with reception from time to time when people walk around in front of the TV.  I've already relocated the antenna away from other electronics up in the highest spot available, which helped but didn't make for a fully stable HD picture.  I was sure that the only way to fix it was to put an antenna up on the roof, until today. 

After reading about the numerous problems with Vista, I was quite hesitant to try it in the workplace.  I work off a laptop at a client site as a software engineer for a major consulting company.  My job demands that I have 100% uptime with all applications and software development tools.  I can not afford to have stability issues or any kind of OS incompatibilities.  To make matters worse, we use 2 VPN clients, 4 different large software development tools and a suite of other smaller applications.  After installing Vista Business 64 on a new Lenovo T61p laptop, I was pleasantly surprised with the results.

So, you want to add some new features to your site using Ruby on Rails?  That's not a bad idea.  I've found Rails to be one of the quickest ways to develop small feature-rich sites quickly.  The problem is getting those new components integrated with the existing PHP, Perl, JSP, .NET or whatever other language codebase.  I've found that it's really not that hard so long as you know the right tricks.