Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

Recently I have been working with the ruby on rails guru Daniel Morrison on a rails app for one of our web clients.  Daniel along with Brandon and Brian form Collective Idea, a ruby on rails house that also runs Sessions, RoR and other training sessions in Holland, MI that I attended a couple of months ago.

Anyhow, Collective Idea produced the open source (free) Ruby on Rails plugin called acts_as_geocodable (free to download/instal from github), which we were implementing for the project I am developing.

While working on that, Daniel showed me the quick google maps mashup he produced over the past weekend to map political signs.  The basic idea is to map where you see Obama or McCain yard signs to get an idea of the overall political composition of your neighborhood.  Pretty cool, and a good showcase of acts_as_geocodable

Map your neighborhood’s political signs here.

UPDATE: signs.collectiveidea.com is now yardvote.com

So I have been using Chrome almost exclusively as my job as a web developer permits.  I have to say now - I am switching back to the Fox.

Its not that I didn’t like chrome, but it had a couple of problems that I can not overlook any longer.  So here is the quick rundown:

What’s Hot:

Explosive performance, slick simplistic (googlish interface), built in “run as application” ability, task manager

What’s Not:

Extreme flash / shockwave performance issues, lack of plugins, some site incompatibility

Summary:

If it could handle flash and youtube stuff without completely choking, and had a more accessible web developer plugin, I would still be using it.

Note: I have since attempted to make the Trusty Fox look and act more like chrome as per the lifehacker instructions. The act like chrome is working somewhat thanks to Prism and a couple of other plugins, but the look like part was a bit too glitchy for prime time.  Maybe in the future….

Rating:

I have just been listening to the google Chrome press event live as it has been happening, and I have to say that I am indeed impressed.  The new browser looks pretty amazing, and while I personally do not do much web app development, I am really looking forwards to trying it out for its increased stability and speed.

One funny thing…. at the end of the presentation the google gears download site went live and i found quite the google glitch.  This screencap shows their broken download link =(

This may be the biggest software news this week!  oh wait….

//edit//

The download is now working.  Get it here

People like to hate on Microsoft.  People REALLY like to hate on Vista.  I feel that is mostly because (unfortunately for Obama) people are resistant to change.

Regardless of those feelings, anybody who has bothered to give Vista’s sister product, Office 2007, a proper try have nothing but praise for the latest offering of the office suite.  It is more user friendly, and quicker to work with at the same time.

Microsoft is making an incredible offer to students again this year, $59.95 for the entire office 2007 Ultimate (the big one) suite.  Very nice.  I took advantage last year, and am going to try to get another copy so that I can run Groove on more than one of my systems.  =P