http://mikeward.net Internet technologies Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:49:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en OK so I tried a bunch of twitter clients for OSX 10.5, both desktop apps and dashboard widgets. Here's my take on them. Beak - outstanding UI, but can only use one account at a time now (early beta) - this is the one to watch! Destroy Twitter - poor UI: dark ... http://mikeward.net/2009/05/15/mac-twitter-clients-reviewed/ Graeme Nelson shared a database wrapper class for sinatra that encapsulated Sequel so that he could run migrations and gracefully use it in different environments. It's nice because then it just does the right thing in development, test and production (or whatever) and keeps your main code cleaner. Here is a ... http://mikeward.net/2009/04/15/activerecord-wrapper-for-sinatra/ OK my first sinatra app released at http://tweetfindr.com. Uses twitter-search gem with it's nicely wrapped Twitter Search API encapsulation. Also using HAML for the view templating with it's lovely HTML output; go ahead and view source, see if I care! The skinny: this is another totally useless web app riding on ... http://mikeward.net/2009/04/02/tweetfindrcom/ Lots of folks tweet from the command line and I know why. Because you can customize your tweeting to suit your tastes. I tweet to several twitter accounts, so I need something that'll let me specify which account to tweet to. My solution was to use the rest-client gem and ... http://mikeward.net/2009/04/01/command-line-tweeting/ Well my first sinatra app and it took one day to write. It's trivial and useless, but was just a joy to write nevertheless. If rails is an armored tank then sinatra is a dirt bike. Good watching: screencast by @bmizerany covering some of the main topics. Anyway to share ... http://mikeward.net/2009/03/27/haml/ This video from MIT Media Lab, that eternal source of optimism and experimentation, shows a cool new wearables demo dubbed the sixth sense. Anyone who's read Vernor Vinge recognizes this notion of overlaying contextual information onto the actual visual targets one encounters in daily life. Watch the video - really, ... http://mikeward.net/2009/03/26/rich-contextual-overlays/ Three cheers for the future of our technology policy. The clearest thinker I know of on these matters is headed to Pennsylvania Ave. Nothing official announced AFAIK but it's widely speculated that she will hold the title of special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy. She ... http://mikeward.net/2009/03/25/susan-crawford-goes-to-washington/ Yeah as much as I hate to be a lemming, I registered my name in this TLD today. The underlying idea is slick - keeping more domain-specific information within the DNS system itself. DNS has proven to be the most important and robust protocol powering the Internet since TCP/IP. We ... http://mikeward.net/2009/03/24/tel-launched/ Nielsen Online reports that Twitter continues to grow at an astounding rate. Something on the order of 1380% year over year, and 50% from January to February. I for one don't think that torrid pace is going to fade quickly either. Nobody understands twitter at first look, but it invariably ... http://mikeward.net/2009/03/16/the-juggernaut-that-is-twitter/ Been so long since I made a pie at home, so I bought the basic ingredients. I used the ready-made dough from the grocery, reluctantly, but it sure saves a lot of work. All I needed beyond this was a good mozzarella, some tomatoes, basil. Everything else is optional, but ... http://mikeward.net/2009/03/03/homemade-pizza-time/