Musings

I was looking at my Campfire Chat and checked out the Account tab when I noticed that the 30-days option had turned into a “free” option. In addition, the paid options have a checkmark next to “ad-free”. Have the 37signals given us yet another free application? In the beginning, they said that there would only be a 30-day free trial. I’m still holding out my final opinion on campfire. I really like the way it’s designed, I like the simplicity, but I don’t (yet) see the real benefit of using Campfire vs. for example IRC. And my biggest gripe is, that I can’t specify which people are allowed into which rooms. As it is now, I can’t have rooms for all of my clients, because everybody can see everything. Openness is good, but it only goes so far… ...

In preparation of the Rail Course I spent some time writing a couple of pages of “cheat sheets” or quick references of the materials presented. In the end, I got about 20 pages, mostly of short code snippets. I also have a presentation to start things, and I did that in Keynote. Beautiful program and I think I managed to create a good presentation. So the choice of the program to write the text was easy: Pages. At least that’s what I thought. But while Pages is quite simple to use, and it produces good looking pages, it is slow. Slow as molasses. Typing a character seems to pain the computer no end. After writing one or two pages I gave up in disgust and turned to Microsoft Word. The Mac version actually is quite good and I managed to write the 20 pages. ...

Recently I was deciding what new digital camera to buy. A friend of mine lent me his Canon EOS D1 Mark II with some high-end lenses. I lugged several 1000 $ of equipment and several kg’s around for one long weekend and was able to snap around 1000 pictures. This camera is incredible good, the picture quality is great, and the controls make so much sense (once you get used to using two hands to change anything). Clearly a DSLR is the way to go. Maybe not a D1, but an amateur version, maybe a D350 or a Nikon D70 or similar. ...

My - time flies. If you’re in Zurich, come by tonight. There might be cake. There might be wine. I’ll be there.

On February 27. and 28. I will be hosting Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich, Switzerland. There still are open slots, so if you want to learn hands-on how to build web applications using Ruby on Rails, now is the time to sign up. Details: Venue: Badenerstrasse 585, 8048 Zurich Cost: CHF 750.– Language: German Content Introduction to Rails Database to prototype in 15 minutes Building an attractive, performant and secure web application Using AJAX for dynamic user interfaces Testing using unit and functional tests Using agile development techniques Send an email to info@invisible.ch to sign up for this seminar. ...

37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Ruby On Rails have launched their next application: Campfire. Campfire is a chat application, that shares some traits with Internet Relay Chat but runs inside a web browser. There are some added benefits like searchable transcripts, file sharing. Plus, it looks really nice: I’m running on the 30 days trial account to see, if it solves enough problems that it’s worth to shell out $12 per month for a regular account. ...