Until recently, I'd been using Skype quite a lot for my VOIP phone calls.
However, unless both people in the conversation used headphones or some kind of headset, then I could hear a slightly delayed echo of my own voice. Although this didn't actually stop anything working it was very disconcerting. Also, if either party had the volume turned up beyond a whisper, then I got quite an annoying feedback whistle.
So, I decided to try the iChat application that came with my mac, with another of my mac-owner buddies. To use iChat, you need a .mac or aim name. (I found out by reading the .mac faq that if you sign up for the free .mac trial, then you can still use your .mac name for iChat after the trial expires.)
iChat suffers from neither of the problems that plague Skype. Even when using quite a high volume we experienced no feedback or echo, and both members of the conversation were just using the MacBook's built in iSight webcam, integrated mic and laptop speakers (i.e. with no headsets)
Sunday, 25 March 2007
Skype vs iChat
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Friday, 16 March 2007
Visibility in ruby
Back in January, I made this post about ruby instance variables in derived classes.
I recently came across this post by Jamis Buck (one of the core Rails guys) with some more info about method visibility in ruby. Basically, he explains that private and protected methods are visible by all derived classes.
This seems a bit free and easy, coming from a C-sharp view point. In rails, this means, for example, that the controllers can't call the models' private methods and vice-versa. But all controllers can access all of the application controller's methods, so it's hard to hide it's inner workings from the other controllers if you want to.
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Saturday, 10 March 2007
Radrails and Aptana
Earlier this month, I wrote about the demise of Radrails.
Well, Aptana have stepped in to save the day. It's not clear exactly what will become of Radrails in its current form, but anything's got to be better than all of that great work just petering out into obscurity.
Here's what the Radrails site had to say about it all.
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Thursday, 8 March 2007
NAS drive for Mac and PC
Not so long ago, I went on the lookout for a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive that I could use with my Mac and my PC.
This proved a little bit more awkward than I expected because many NAS drives only supported Macs by allowing you to format the disk in FAT32. This is all very well until you want to put files larger than 4GB on there, such as disk images.
I eventually settled on the LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini. This product uses the XFS file system, which has a maximum file size of 8 exabytes (should be enough!). It supports connections from Windows, Apple, HTTP and FTP. It lets you define shares and users, and even allows you to connect another USB disk for backups or extra storage.
Works a treat with both my PC and my Mac. Definitely recommended.
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Sunday, 4 March 2007
TextMate for rails
With the seemingly indefinite postponement of Radrails 0.8, I decided to go on the hunt for another Ruby on Rails IDE.
After scouring the web, I found that many people seem to favour TextMate, and according to this page the core Rails team use it for development, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.
I must say I am impressed. It features Subversion integration, and some built in support for developing Ruby on Rails applications. The only thing it doesn't have is a step-through ruby debugger, but there is a TextMate ruby-debug bundle which allows you to set breakpoints from within TextMate. (My previous blog post explains more about ruby-debug.)
Note that in order to get the Subversion integration to work, you need a Subversion client installed. There are now new instructions on Hivelogic.com for setting up rails on OS X which now feature how to install one.
TextMate is not free, but it is cheap at only 39 Euros.
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Fast Ruby debugging
Last September I described how to use Radrails for debugging rails apps. I mentioned in that post that it was slow and unresponsive, but bearable.
Today I discovered another way of debugging Ruby On Rails apps, but this time in a much speedier fashion.
Ruby-debug allows you to quickly debug your ruby on rails code. The debugger itself is not integrated into an IDE, but the command line interface is intuitive and adequate.
There is an excellent tutorial on the DataNoise website for how to use ruby-debug. Using this, I was able to get debugging literally within a few minutes.
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Thursday, 1 March 2007
Visual studio rotting your mind?
This is an interesting article by Charles Petzold that I came across recently discussing how good for you (or not) some of Visual Studio's features are.
I found the parts about intellisense and the graphical-designer particularly interesting.
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Where are Kyle and Matt?
The development of Radrails seems to have slowed to a crawl recently, which is a shame as I was eagerly awaiting features promised for version 0.8!
According to posts on the radrails community pages, it looks like the main members of the Radrails team are spending their time on other more profitable ventures.
All the same, for me Radrails is still the best value rails IDE. Some other IDEs have similar features but you have to pay for the privilege.
Where did the Radrails team go
Has Radrails disappeared off the face of the earth
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