Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

If you think Huddle is ripping off Campfire

…then you haven’t seen mIRC, an irc client app that has been around for years:

See anything familiar in the screen shot above?
Tabs on the top, list of participants in the right hand pane, and chat in the main window. Change the font to Lucida Grande 12 pt and put in a browser and you […]

Dave Thomas’ testing library (thrown in github)

Dave recently blogged a very cool little test framework he whipped up. Its under 100 lines of code and he says he definitely does not plan on supporting it publicly.
At the very least I intend on playing with it and incorporating some of the ideas, so I put it up on github. […]

Make Textmate’s “find in project” faster in Rails projects

Textmate’s “find in project” feature is great, but if you use it within any substantial Rails projects it can get very slow, especially as cruft builds up in the log folder or if you use vendor/rails. This is easily fixed, however — go into your textmate preferences, then “folder references”, and change “folder pattern” […]

All Ruby & Rails APIs suck (but its getting better)

All the online APIs for Ruby and Rails suck. Thats been a given for a long time. Note that I’m not talking about the actual Rails Rdoc content itself - the doc project patches continue to roll in, and the HackFest also saw many doc patches merge in. The Ruby Rdoc content, […]

TurboTax vs TaxCut online

Its tax time again, which means its time to scramble to figure out the some sort of capable tax package for my increasingly complicated finance situation. Working from home doesn’t lend itself to the easiest tax situation, but I’m holding off on hiring a CPA for another year.
This year I tried both TaxCut Premium […]

RSS - Full Content or Excerpts

This isn’t a black or white issue…

How *not* to run an online store

Whats wrong with this picture? Taken from the front page of emusic.com - hint: there is no “browse” link.

I had heard about emusic from podcasts I listen to, and was interested to check it out as they sell DRM free music from a lot of independent artists. That sounds like a perfect fit […]

Code worth Stealing From Ruby 1.8.5 - pretty_inspect

If you look at the changelog for Ruby 1.8.5, there is a note on the addition of a wonderful little helper method for inspecting objects: Kernel#pretty_inspect. If you work in irb or script/console, you are probably familiar with PrettyPrint (aka pp) for turning this:

hsh => {:nested=>{:hi=>"i'm a nested hash, yo!!"}, :bar=>"this is a bar", [...]

Gmail Finally Adds Mass Delete

I noticed today that Gmail finally added a much request feature - mass delete by label. So say I want to delete, oh, all messages from the Struts mailing list (ahem) - just click all on the Struts page, and the option below appears. They even have a second alert to make sure [...]

Users Don’t Know (and Don’t Care) What RSS (or Ajax, or CSS…) Is

Jakob Nielsen nails a point that has been made by many others in his most recent column on newsletters. Most people don't know what RSS is, even though they may already be using it via MyYahoo or some other portal. The typical user doesn't know (or care) about RSS, HTML, CSS, or Ajax [...]