I will try to not ramble on and on about this since everyone and their mother’s have Obama articles today. Coming from a suburb of Chicago, I’m even more stoked about seeing him become the next president of our great country. I just want to congratulate him and everyone who supported him. We really did it! x=)

The sad news is looking around at the McCain supporters who are just filled with so much hate. It just feels like we did such a great thing last night but, immediately, we’re made aware that there’s so much more to do. Why hate? Why lose so poorly? If Obama would have lost, I would have been fearful for our country’s future. I would have been disappointed in America as a whole. I would have been scared shitless of the idea of that idiot Palin being just a heartbeat away from the highest power in our country. What I wouldn’t have done was hate. I wouldn’t HATE McCain for winning. I wouldn’t be so blind and ignorant as to not see what McCain could offer our country. I wouldn’t be so fucking selfish to think that my views and my opinions were the only ones that mattered in this race. Just stop with the hate. It was a great and historic campaign amount two great candidates. What’s done is done and our next president will be Barack Obama. What we, as a nation, need to do next is stop with all the hatred and fear and come together to help fix a lot of what’s gone wrong with our country over the last decade or so. I just don’t see what’s gained by hating someone just because they don’t have the exact same beliefs as you. If you all just opened your minds and did a little research that wasn’t spoon fed to you, you’d understand what a great night it was last night. That’s all.

On the brighter note, I am happy that Obama won and very excited to see where our country will go from here. I have hope again and that makes me overlook all the hatred for a minute and actually see the good that is capable of us. Things will get better. America will be great again. I have hope.

Halo 3 Players was updated a few weeks ago. Most of the initial bugs have been squashed with only 1 main feature still left to be finished. I’m working on Challenges now and they should be back very shortly. The new 2.x version is a complete rewrite of the old Halo 3 Players. Since Halo 3 Players has been my first ‘real’ project, I did learn quite a bit from it and was able to improve a lot of things in the new version. So besides the nicer look and extra features, it also works better behind the scenes (and is even a little more modular so I can improve stuff even more without breaking other things). If your a Halo 3 Player and have a Facebook account, you should definitely check it out! It blows the other 2 or 3 Halo 3 applications out of the water and I’m not just saying it because I wrote this one. I promise you if you try out Halo 3 Service Record and Halo 3 Gamer Card and think they’re better than Halo 3 Players.. I don’t know. I’m confident enough that Halo 3 Players kicks them to the curb that I include links straight to their app right here..

For some reason, the last few months (no clue when this started, really), this blog has been running in a purely cached mode. Mephisto broke somehow and wasn’t even starting up anymore, so apache was just serving the static HTML pages. I just made the leap to 0.8 of Mephisto and cleaned everything up and I seem to be back up and running.. I had to update my AjaxyXML plugin for Mephisto to work with 0.8 so anyone who has been having problems getting it to work with the new version, it should work fine now. Nothing new was added, I just rearraged everything into the new plugin structure for Mephisto… So go grab that if your using Mephisto 0.8. If your still on 0.7, you’ll need an earlier revision.

I just ready an article that was written by a Windows user that has chosen not to switch to a Mac because of the problems he’s encountered with the iPhone 3G. His arguments against the iPhone is very warranted. I didn’t have a first generation iPhone and when I got my 3G, I was really excited, but still have been very frustrated with a lot of the little problems.

Calls drop all the time (although, I don’t think I’ve dropped more than 1 call since I updated to 2.0.2 almost a week ago). The GPS is flaky at times and takes it’s sweet time finding a signal. The 3G signal is spotty at best. The keyboard lag was a TERRIBLE inconvenience when I first got the phone (again, most of the lag there has been resolved for me with the 2 updates released).

I don’t blame him for being upset with how Apple has handled all of this. They bit off WAY more than they could chew when releasing the iPhone 2.0 software, App Store and MobileMe all at the same time. I would love to see an official statement by Apple that says “Hey, we screwed up, we’re very sorry but we hope to have all this resolved very soon”. Something like that.

All these things are very understandable and even a Mac user like myself is very frustrated with the bugs and how they are being handled. What I don’t get is his declaration that he does not wish to give a Mac a shot any more just because of a new software’s initial bugs.

I bought my MacBook Pro when MacOSX 10.4 Tiger was in it’s late stages. The bugs were pretty squashed at this time so I was very happy with it. I upgraded to leopard around Christmas time last year and was, again, very happy with the new OS but ran into some small bugs that annoyed me a little bit. These have been mostly fixed by now. Windows XP and Vista both had the same problems with they were released. Vista is still suffering.

The iPhone 2.0 software wasn’t a small update to the OS. As much as things look very much just like the 1.0 version, the update is a lot more like the upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5 in MacOSX. Bugs are almost guaranteed. It sucks that most of the bugs showed up in the most frustrating places but the phone has been out for a month now and the 2 updates that have been released in this last month seem to have cleared up a lot of the major problems. With 2.1 just around the corner, I can comfortably assume that all the major bugs will be gone and there will be Apple nirvana again in my life.

So with that, Mr. Adam Frucci, I implore you to still give an Apple laptop a shot. The Operating system has been around a while and has been quite perfected. Apple computers really do ‘just work’ just like the iPhone 3G will ‘just work’ in the very near future. So give it ago! Like you said already, do you really want to move to Vista? Blech!

If you read my last article about the iPhone 3G, you’d understand that I haven’t had a WHOLE lot of time to play around with it just yet. I have had enough time to form some pretty good first impressions about it though, and I’d figure I’d give my thoughts on the iPhone 3G from the perspective of someone who never had the first iPhone.

The first thing I noticed when I picked up the phone was how heavy it felt in comparison to how heavy it looks. They pack this phone with quite a bit cause it feels really solid. I was told by someone at work that they thought the iPhone 3G actually felt lighter than the old iPhone, but in my comparison (one in each hand) I didn’t notice much difference. I might have just been tired. I just know that the iPhone feels like it will last a while. The phone also does feel really good in your hand when you hold it.

The battery life kind of stinks. Again, no scientific tests here. Just me using the phone. I used it about an hour or an hour and a half this morning and saw the battery fall about a quarter. I’m sure I’ll live. I’m not away from a computer or USB jack long enough to not be able to just charge her up when she starts running low, but it’s something to think about. I think I’m lucky in that my home is the 1 dead spot as far as 3G is concerned in my area, so I don’t have to worry about that sucking up battery life while I’m at home.

The GPS is pretty neat. On my way to work yesterday, I opened up the Map application and followed my little dot as I drove to work. It worked pretty well. Every once and a while, the dot that was supposed to be me would turn a transparent blue tint and it seemed that during this time, the movement was a little more choppy, but it still worked very well. I also jumped in to a few of the applications that use the location aware API’s and didn’t find any problems with finding where I was. I tried out the Map at work last night too, but (as I expected) didn’t get a GPS lock (or any lock). This isn’t surprising to me at all because my whole work is an AT&T dead zone. We’re kind of in a basement.

Signal seems to be very decent. Like I said earlier, my house isn’t covered in 3G, but on my trip to and from work, everything in between there (before I got into work) was all 3G. Full bars and everything. Also mentioned earlier is that my work is an AT&T dead zone. I use that term loosely because it’s not completely dead. Just mostly. My old Sony Ericsson had a ton of places where I couldn’t get a signal at all, but I was actually impressed that I was able to maintain at least 1 bar pretty much everywhere at work.

I haven’t taken many pictures with my new iPhone yet, but I’ve taken/seen pictures from other iPhones and it doesn’t look any different here.

The UI is pretty damned nice. Mind you, this is still a first impression so “pretty damned nice” could be a lot better if I was more “used to” it. But even saying that, it’s becoming very easy to get “used to”. I’ve already gotten down the process of hitting the home button quite a bit. Typing has come a lot easier than I thought it would be. Actually extremely easy. I even got the 2 thumbs a try and was able to type pretty well. Made more mistakes that way though so I’m going to perfect the 1 finger first. Everything is just very intuitive and ‘just works’ the way it should. The only surprises are things that you have to think about them even being there. Like the proximity sensor that turns off the screen when you have the phone to your ear. The only reason I even noticed it at all was because I took the phone away from my head pretty quick and noticed it was totally black for about a quarter of a second and then just sprung back to life. Just like it should have.

I could go on forever but this is supposed to be a ‘first impression’ post so I’ll cut it a little short to give my self some more time to play. When I get it all down and get more time with all the features and applications, I’m sure I’ll have a few more iPhone 3G posts in the near future.. Bottom line, here? Get one.

It’s the day after the iPhone 3G launch and I have an iPhone 3G. The task of actually obtaining one wasn’t quite as simple as that sentence, though. I decided to not sleep yesterday. I figured I could leave the house by about 6:40 to get to the Oak Brook Center Apple Store by 7am which should be fine. There was a line, of course, but I figured.. maybe 2 hours after they open, I should have a phone. Sadly, this was assuming everything went according to plan. We had some pretty good rain the evening before launch and I guess the Oak Brook Mall lost power which reset all of Apples POS systems for actually doing the activation and transactions. After standing there until about 9am, I decided to try my luck elsewhere. An AT&T store was right down the street so I went there and saw maybe 50 or 60 people in line. Throughout this line, the AT&T people kept us up to date (kind of) on the stock of certain models of the iPhone and I even got a pretty solid confirmation that by time my place came up in line, they would definitely have the white 16GB version left. 11am starts to creep up on us and I’m 3 people away from the door… Sold out. Awesome. There’s no real exciting end of the story. I called a couple AT&T stores and quickly found out that those weren’t the places to be going for and iPhone today. I went back to the Oak Brook mall and figured I’d concede my once ‘OK’ place in line and have to wait a little longer.. Except that the people who were originally standing around where I was in line when I had left 2 hours ago, hadn’t moved more than about 10 feet. Their systems were obviously still down. So to the Woodfield Mall Apple Store I went after calling and getting a confirmation that they didn’t expect to sell out of iPhone’s at all yesterday. I got there around noon and finally left at almost 4:30pm. Just in time to run home, throw on my work clothes and head BACK to Woodfield Mall for work. I was quite tired.

Rails has allowed you to do things like page caching and fragment caching for a while now but with Rails 2.1, they added a new cool feature for doing some more lower level things with cache. You can now cache pretty much anything you want, any way you want. It’s easy as pie too!

Rails.cache.fetch("my_caches_name", {:expires_in => 5.minutes}) { download_xml_file_from_web }

I’m using the above example in an application to cache an xml file from another website for 5 minutes. The expires_in option is only for if your using memcached as your cache store which I setup below in my config/development.rb..

config.cache_store = :mem_cache_store, '123.45.6.78:11211', {:namespace => 'myapp_cache'}

It’s that easy. I’m loving it. You can play around with the various settings. You can use a file store, memory store (which I think is default but won’t work well with multiple mongrels), drb store or the (imho, best option) memcached. There are other methods for Rails.cache that you can find here# in the documentation… Enjoy!

I just installed a really great Addon called CyberSearch for Firefox 3. Firefox 3 has what they call the “AwesomeBar” where you type an address and it searches your history for the most relevant pages in a dropdown menu. CyberSearch adds on to this ‘awesome’ functionality by adding real time search results as well. By typing a simple keyword followed by a search term, your awesome bar is populated with the results from that search. It’s very customizable and seems to work very well. I’m one to keep my FireFox installation pretty clean and don’t install a lot of Addons, but this one is here to stay.

P.S. CyberSearch is an experimental addon, which means you’ll need to create/login to a free account at the mozilla addons page to install it.

I just found the hidden preference for Safari 3.1 that enables Single Window Mode!! This is the first step Apple has taken to actually making Safari my main browser. Before 3.1, there was no way to make links that opened up in new windows open up in a new tab instead (Firefox has had this type of option for a loooonnnggg time). Apple has added a hidden option to Safari as of version 3.1 that lets you do away with the 100 windows you’d normally have open while browsing with Safari and keep it all in nice and clean tabs. Try this in your terminal…

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

After that, you should notice all links that would normally pop a new window up, now open in a new tab instead. I actually found this while I was bored and going through the Secrets preference pane. If you haven’t tried this out yet and are a little ballsy (i.e. know what your doing) give it a go. It gives you a VERY long list of hidden features in various Apple and 3rd party apps on your system. Sometimes you even find a gem you weren’t expecting. x=)

I’ve had my mac for almost a full year now. I honestly don’t remember exactly when I got it but I think it was near the end of June or the beginning of July last year. Coming from Linux and Windows meant I had some choices to make about certain applications I was going to use. One of those choices was Colloquy for IRC. One feature I missed from mIRC and XChat was the ability to accept ctcp SOUND requests to play a sound. My friends and I use this in our own channel as an alert system. A trigger is typed that makes a bot send a ctcp SOUND request to the channel with a filename. We each have these sounds locally installed on our computers so we hear the sound after the request is made.

Today I decided to do something about Colloquy’s lack of sound so I started researching some scripting languages supports by the IRC client. I came across F-Script as a cocoa scripting language based on SmallTalk. Since I’ve always wanted to learn SmallTalk, I gave it a go. After a little bit of time, I was able to figure something out to enable sound requests to play sounds from Colloquy!

You can grab the plugin here (right click and save) and throw it in your ~/Library/Application Support/Colloquy/PlugIns directory. Type /fscript load sounds and it should be ready to roll! When a ctcp SOUND request is received, this script will try and find the file in your Sounds folder (i.e. ~/Library/Sounds) and play it automatically for you.