Tech Talk News

So I thought I’d write a little post letting everyone know that I haven’t forgotten about them.  I’ve been a little busy with working on a Rails blog that I was going to be creating, and have had a few web design projects I’ve been trying to get finished up.  Hopefully I won’t be much longer! I have a few cool things for you to check out while I’m away.  The first one is called Synergy. It’s a cool open source utility that I’ve been using at work to connect all my computers (6 in total) together with the ability to use 1 set of keyboard and mouse.  The second is called iShowU.  It’s a cool little screen recording utility that I just purchased to help with creating some screencasts on a Mac.  It’s about 20 bucks and gives me a clean looking file that through the use of a few programs I can convert the MOV file to an AVI file so I can edit and produce in Camtasia Studio.  Hopefully sometime in the near future Camtasia Studio will be for a Mac.  But until then, iShowU will do the trick for me.

I hope to have a new screencast up soon that will show you Synergy (at least on each side, Mac and PC), and maybe one that shows you a few things about iShowU.  I have a list of some ROR screencasts that I’d like to do, but I’m finding that I need to really just record and then splice together all sorts of pieces to get a screencast.  Maybe I’ll have the option soon to create shorter ones with the use of Jing, iShowU, and Camtasia Studio.

So I’ve been looking through various tutorials and such trying to find something that protects comment spam.  So far the only thing I’ve been able to come up with is Akismet. Us WordPress users know what Akismet is, but there’s some various tutorials out there that show us how to use Akismet in our ROR apps.  There is a Akismet plugin that’s out there, but what I’ve found out there, things are either too hard to figure out myself, or they are confusing.  So I’m wondering what other ROR developers are using to protect against comment spam.  I have heard of people using different plugins for captchas, but I’m looking more for IUE (Initial User Experience) in my app then a user having to put in characters for a captchas. Is there anyone out there using something different? An easy way to implement things? Your knowledge would be muct appreciated.

So I bought a new computer this week and of course it’s got Windows Vista on it. For those that I don’t talk to everyday, I use Vista at work, and have been since January.  I have to say that I really do not like this new operating system.  There are some features that I do like it, however, if you do not have at least 2GB of Ram in the computer Vista is SLOW!!!! Currently, I’m barely running anything, Firefox and AIM, and I’m using 75% of my memory! This is pathetic! I’m really seriously considering looking into purchasing an XP license and installing that on here.

Anyways, I haven’t really seen a lot of people that have really tried to install Ruby on Rails on Vista, so today I decided that I wanted to take a chance and see what happened.  I first tried to use InstantRails, however I was unsuccessful about it.  I then decided to just install Ruby/Rails, and MySQL all together on the machine.  This I had no trouble with.  I’m not sure what exactly was going on with InstantRails, but I might try to give it another try later.  I’ll give you some more info later when I get an application actually working correctly on here!