• Productivity tips from productivity gurus.
• Tomb Raider for the Wii : Video of how it works.
• The Alien made from vegetables on a computer. Why? Why not?
• On his way out the door, PCMag editor Jim Louderback loathes Vista. (Link fixed.)
• 13 blog cliches. I’m happy to say that I ditched the useless calendar a long time back. I think I’m only really guilty of #11, the echo chamber. This link dump is part of that. Oh, well.

Something every TV-watcher needs… – Commentary Track | TVGuide.com

Over the past year I’ve purchased many gadgets and electronics, but there’s one thing that I use many times a day – my Harmony 880 remote control. I was talking about the remote with my girlfriend last night and she said, “Hey, have you posted about it on your blog?” You may think I’m insane to like a remote as much as I do, but this thing is so amazing. While you can find a “universal remote” that says it’ll replace all your remotes, my experience is that most of them don’t. The thing is, the Harmony remote replaces ALL my remotes.

This is written by the guy who runs TVShowsonDVD.com, a great and invaluable resource for DVD and TV fans everywhere.

I’ll be ordering mine when the Amazon points come in, which sadly won’t be for another month.

Random thoughts for a Wednesday:

• “Boogie,” the Wii rhythm game I mentioned last week as “danceteria,” is in stores today. That was fast. (Or, more likely, I was slow.)
• The handiest UNIX function ever? “Cal.” I don’t even need a calendar hanging at my desk at work. I just type “cal” into the perpetually-open UNIX window and get what I need. I’m such a geek.
• Sign of the times: Pictures of victims of a recent multiple murder were shown on the local TV news with credits going to the local newspapers for two of them and “Facebook” for the third. Not even “Facebook.com.” Everyone just knows what “Facebook” is now.
• Word I want stricken from the dictionary today: “Anyway.” It’s nowhere near as badly misused and overused as “like,” but I’m starting to get sick of it being used as a transition device.
• Ooh, relatively cheap dSLR camera!
• Sign you’ve been diabetic too long: You wake up from a restless sleep in the middle of the night, look at the clock, see “3:41″ and think, “Holy crap, my blood sugar is high.” Ironically, it was, but not THAT badly.

Working on a couple of larger posts. In the meantime, let me buy some time with some things that grabbed my attention:

• Video of the year: At last! YouTube video to show how similar AIRPLANE! (the funniest movie of all time) is to ZERO HOUR. It’s a dead-on copy, played so straight that it’s hilarious. Someone needs to do a picture-in-picture DVD of both movies together.
• Here’s my Google Reader Feed, if you want to see the things I find most interesting on a daily basis. Many of the stories you’ll see here start there. It’s a free-flowing feed, too. LOTS of stuff passes through there. You can view it as a web page, too.
• A four port HDMI switch? Kewl.
• Linux Torvalds thinks kernel maintenance procedures does not inhibit desktop development, thankyouverymuch.
• The famed CBR Photo Parade from San Diego has begun.
• 10 rules for writing numbers.
• If AT&T ran the roads. . . Don’tcha just hate telecomm companies? Very funny stuff.
• An XBox 360 price drop? Don’t worry — Microsoft will still cover it for a number of years while it breaks constantly. . . It only cost them a billion dollars to do so. Mario Strikers Charged looks like a really really cool game. The original game for the GameCube was spectacular, as well, even if I couldn’t beat the danged thing.

This week at Best Buy:

Wacom Tablets are a mere $75, from the usual $99.  Since I started my new job last month, I haven’t been able to use a Wacom at work — I can start to feel the difference in my mouse wrist already, and it’s painful.

X-FILES: All seasons are $20 a pop.  These are, I’m sure, the shortened sets they reissued a couple years back, but still at a good price for the series that ushered in the era of season-long boxed sets.  The last couple of seasons are in anamorphic widescreen, too.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2, SHREK 2, and FANTASTIC FOUR: EXTENDED EDITION are all $20 each, and each will come with a $5 gift card you can use in future purchases.  Not bad.

Presented for what it’s worth.  Personally, I recommend shopping heavily at Amazon, using one of the links you see on this page. ;-)

• I was right — that blue highlight in iTunes is, indeed, new. Here’s a pictorial set of improvements to iTunes’ UI in the latest builds.
• The Linux-based iPhone killer – touch screen, wi-fi, and all. Most important: it’s not locked into any particular network.
• Macs to get new keyboards? It’s the one part of the Mac that took me the longest to adapt to from my days as a Commodore 64/Windows/Linux user.
• Touchscreen iPods to come at next WWDC? Inevitable, but still rumor mill.
• GameTap for Mac is now available.
• Not Apple TV: Download movies from Amazon to your TiVo without touching your computer. Cool! I set up my account, though I don’t have a clue as to when I’d ever download a movie. I might just do it as a proof of cool concept.

• You can now watch screencasts to learn how to set up your own MythTV DVR. It just keeps getting easier and easier to skip over TiVo, et. al.
• 20 about:config tweaks to improve Firefox.
• Places you shouldn’t see the Blue Screen of Death.
• John Carmack is working on a new game.
• Six ways to write more comprehensible code. Hint: Write lots of smart comments.
• A new kind of search engine spiders your bookmarks and relevant links for new information live. I’m not explaining it too well, so click on the link for more.
• Jenna Fischer discusses her broken back. Still in pain, but getting better.
• Everything that’s wrong with society today in one two minute clip: Mom takes 13 year old daughter to get a tan for school pictures. And the ticker across the bottom of the screen steals the show.

• Top 100 Ruby on Rails web sites. Some big names there, including Penny Arcade, Twitter, Odeo, vodpod, and Gravatar.
• Firefox 3 has integrated the Places code. “Places” is the new name for the database-driven bookmarking and history system in Firefox that was pulled out of Firefox 2 for Firefox 3. The early alphas now will include the first version of it.
• Microsoft’s new Milan tabletop computer gives you multi-touch point interaction.  At $10,000 a pop, they don’t expect them to enter homes for a few years yet.
• Even geekier alert: Slide shows on scaling web applications. Fascinating stuff, but only if you’re a MySQL or Ruby or PHP junkie. . .
• Major League Baseball is going after the Slingbox, saying it’s an illegal device because it allows you to rebroadcast their games. Sadly, a dumb judge will likely eventually side with the MLB, et. al.
• 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. I doubt any of them do, though. There isn’t a word on that list that I haven’t heard before, but I couldn’t give you a definition for all of them off the top of my head right now. Some of them came straight off the SAT study guide list, I imagine.
• The New York Times crossword puzzle generates a lot of Google searches.

Geek humor, but hilarious:

• The Linux philosophy is to laugh in the face of danger. Oops. Wrong one. Do it yourself. That’s it. (Linus Torvalds)
• One of the main advantages of Unix over, say, MVS, is the tremendous number of features Unix lacks. (Chris Torek)
• Ninety percent of computer users use DOS. I’d rather tell them to do drugs. (Scott McNealy)
• Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance. (Richard Stallman)

Dozens more at the link.

It will never happen. It’s nice to ponder a future where we all read books on “electronic paper,” pay bills on-line or via some wand waved in front of every cash register. It’s pleasant to imagine no more letters lost in the mail, no more unsolicited advertisements clogging our mailboxes. It’s nice to think of an earth where paper usage is so low that forests grow thicker every year.

But here’s a great example of why it will never happen:

As previously mentioned, I bought a new cell phone over the weekend. With it came a contract I had to sign. With it came a super-long cash register receipt I had to sign to decline the insurance. They have duplicate copies of both for their records. Then there’s the sales receipt, the authorization receipt to add my phone number to my wife’s plan, and the contract to move the cell phone number over to the new company, after writing it down on a slip of paper to give to the guy helping us out.

Now I need to photocopy all of my materials before I send the originals out to the place where I can get my rebate — they already have my e-mail address, cell phone number, and home address. Why are we going through this rebate process? Beats me. That’s all they ask for on the receipt that was already filled out for me when I got it. But now I can stuff that all in an envelope and mail that out in a hurry before postage rates go up.

And all of this is so I can enter the brave digital world of wireless communication.

Ironic, don’tcha think?

• You can’t have the internet without open source.
• But Microsoft wants to sue that all away. Hey, it worked so well for SCO, didn’t it? ::sigh::
• Looks like Mozilla does want to compete with Silverlight, et. al.
• Jonathan Coulton and others make music on the internet.
• Jonathan Coulton’s “Code Monkey” is a must-listen if you’re a programmer.
• Y Combinator Boot Camp jump-starts wannabe start-ups.
• Web Usability Guru Jakob Nielsen doesn’t like Web 2.0 designs.

• Here’s how the free Firefox makes $55 million a year.
• They Might Be Giants have a new album coming out soon! “The Else” is due out in July, but will be an iTunes exclusive starting on May 15th first.
• 10 Attributes of Really Lazy People
• The Perl Job Market Blues: Ironically, this is the biggest ray of hope I’ve read in my job hunt so far. Given the number of web-based Perl jobs I see out there right now, I think I have to concur with the author’s findings.
• A Perl 6 primer. Still scares me a bit. I like the bit about using fewer parentheses, though.
• Top 15 Han Solo Quotes to use in casual conversation.

In case you’ve been wondering what computer language I’ve been learning this year, this link dump should provide a clue or two:

Ruby Articles:

• Five Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Ruby
• Top 30 Ruby on Rails Tutorials
• Rails Live CD: Live Linux CD Distro specifically for Rails
• Essential Ruby books. I’m almost afraid to admit to how many of them I own.
• Working With Rails: business using Ruby
• Real World Rails: A list of websites running Rails.
• Imagine if John K. directed a Ruby on Rails ad. Shudder.
• RLisp: Makes my head explode just looking at it.

Ruby Blogs:

• O’Reilly Ruby Blog
• Softies on Rails
• Ruby on Windows
• Ruby Inside
• A Fresh Cup

Ruby Tumblelogs:

• On Ruby
• Project.ioni.st
• Anarchaia
• Koz’s Web

It goes a little slower than I had planned on, mostly because the only time I have to work on it is at night in the hour or two before I go to bed. Being sleepy while training to learn a web framework is not a good way to go. Nor is learning in half hour chunks. It takes longer, sometimes, to get into that flow.

But I did luck across an answer to a question I asked here a couple of weeks back. That is, why won’t my relations between objects in my database show up in the scaffolding? I found it while reading SitePoint’s RoR book:

However, scaffolding does have its limits, as I mentioned earlier. For example, it can’t cope with ActiveRecord associations such as “a Story belongs to a User,� which we saw in Chapter 4. Additionally, since most applications end up requiring a fully fledged administrative interface, you’re often better off just creating the real thing rather than fiddling around with a dummy interface.

I’m also liking how things are starting to knit themselves together. The more I read and the more I try and fail to do things, the more I learn. Some books explain things in more direct ways than others. Some leave out details the authors don’t think are important, but which I struggle without knowing. If you read enough Ruby books, you’ll eventually bring the best elements of each into your vocabulary. And all will be good.

The trick is, as Kevin commented in the original post, to skip the scaffolding. This way, you also learn your way around the code quicker.  Forcing yourself to tediously code the most basic CRUD stuff is a great way to learn some of the tricks of the trade.

April 7, 1969: Birth of That Thing We Call the Internet -

1969: The publication of the first “request for comments,� or RFC, documents paves the way for the birth of the internet.April 7 is often cited as a symbolic birth date of the net because the RFC memoranda contain research, proposals and methodologies applicable to internet technology. RFC documents provide a way for engineers and others to kick around new ideas in a public forum; sometimes, these ideas are adopted as new standards by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

There was a time not too long ago when people on the internet knew what an RFC was. I know I used a few of them in creating reports back in college. It’s amazing how many of them have survived to this day. The basic outline for the handling of all your e-mail, for example, is RFC 821, from back in 1982. In 2001, it was updated/obsoleted by RFC 2821. But much of it remains. The beauty of the internet and its underpinnings is its simplicity – simple short text messages passed back and forth enable all of the wizardry you see today.