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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.  

Anyone who owns a T-Rex 450 or 500 knows that one of the big downers is the short flights and long charge times.  I have a Thunder Power 610c charger which is capable of charging a 6 cell pack, however I only have 3 cell packs for my T-Rex 450.  I read a forum post somewhere where someone built a parallel balancer lead which let him charge 2 3s1p packs at the same time.  He had the right idea but the problem with charging them parallel like that is that the balancer can't see the true voltage of any one cell.  It can only see the combined average voltage of the 2 that are paralleled.  The only way to safely charge and balance 2 3s1p packs is to build a serial balance lead that combines the two packs into a proper 6s1p.  The charger can then see each individual cell and will charge up to 25.2v, balancing the cells to 4.2v each.

After having run Windows Vista (Business 64) for over a month now, I can say that with a few tweaks, I believe it is ready for full-time use.  I'm a full time consultant so I work off of a laptop in the field running a full suite of software about 10 hours per day.  This means that if my OS is misbehaving, I'm in big trouble because if I can't work, I can't bill my hours and if I can't bill my hours, I'm getting a serious call from the guys above. 

Despite all of the dogging of Vista from XP and 2000 users, I've found that I'm faster in my day-to-day activities than I was in Windows XP.  Here's my list of Vista must-knows:

A single instance application is one that only allows for 1 of the application to run no matter how many times the user tries to launch.  Windows and linux native applications have an API to detect the instance of an application but when in Java, it is not quite as easy or reliable.  To complicate matters, often times the requirement will be for the original application instance to react in some way to the launch, as in bringing the window to the front, opening a file or displaying a message.

Fortunately it's not all that difficult to code this if you know the trick.  In this article I'll give you all the code you need to copy and paste into your application to make it single instance.

I've had to do this for several of these laptops now so I thought I'd just make a picture tutorial to explain.  It's been pretty much the same for all models T60 and greater.  What we've been doing is upgrading machines with either 1 or 2GB up to 4GB.  The memory is located under the touchpad on the front panel, which is removable via long screws on the bottom.  All you need is a philips head precision screwdriver and your new ram, which must be compatible with the machine.

If you have a need to use the command pattern and want to have a standard interface but with type safe parameters, I have come up with a solution.  This is one of the most interesting uses (or hacks) of generics I've ever seen or come up with and being that it took a little bit of deep thought to get worked out, I'd like to share it with you all. 

One of the prerequisites of being able to stick 180s is the ability to ride "switch" proficiently.  Switch-stance just means riding facing the opposite direction of your normal stance.  If you ride regular-foot, your normal stance faces to the right and your switch faces to the left.  If you ride goofy-foot, your normal is to the left and switch is to the right.  It can feel very awkward to begin riding switch, but without acquiring the skill, you will struggle to balance or ride away from a 180 or (don't get ahead of yourself yet!) a 540.  

I was recently stuck in a situation where I had absolutely no broadband connection or phone line to dial up.  What's a tech-nerd to do when in need of the internet but only able to use a laptop, cellphone and no wires?  Get this - Not only did I get this to work, but I successfully connected to my company's VPN over it and was able to work for the day, slowly but surely over the 115kbps EDGE network.  Just to push the point home, I connected to our mail server via VPN via Internet via EDGE via Cellphone via Bluetooth.  No wires needed.  The sweet part is that it doesn't cost me anything to do this because it's part of my unlimited data plan and uses no minutes.  I use T-Mobile, but will give settings to the best of my knowledge for all the other providers.

Hibernate is an excellent tool which saves many projects from substantial amounts of code.  Gone are the days of writing massive datasource layers full of obnoxious JDBC code.  As gravy you also get simple query objects, caching, connection pooling and countless other great features.  GWT on the other hand provides a robust API using a revolutionary new paradigm for writing javascript and complex dhtml interfaces.  The latest version of Hibernate supports annotations, meaning you can ditch all of the XML that was previously required.  This feature of course requires Java 5 to support annotations.  Unfortunately, as of GWT 1.4, only Java 1.4 is supported on the client-side.  I have created a solution to bridge the Java 1.4 to Java 5.0 gap.

Everyone knows (or at least they SHOULD know) that they need to back up their data but so few people actually back up what they have properly or regularly.  It's always once you've lost your entire digital photo collection or that book you've been writing that you realize you've been totally neglecting your back up discipline.  I can't tell you how many hard drives I've seen or had crash over the years.  I've probably had 20 crash under my own accord.  I didn't let them overheat, bang them around or do anything out of the ordinary.  The fact of the matter is that much like how your car engine will eventually wear out, so will your hard drive.  Your hard drive contains moving parts that WILL wear out over time.  Making sure your data is in at least one other spot is absolutely essential if you care at all about your digital property.