macdiggs.com

Yesterday I guess the hell froze over, AGAIN :) Apple have released firmware update, AS WELL AS special utility to help in installation of Windows XP SP2 on Intel-based Macs. The new firmware is said to add support for BIOS (originally only EFI was supported), and the utility called Bootcamp allows you to painfully make Windows partition on your Mac as well as burn a CD with all required drivers to run Windows (including full support for graphics drivers!!!)

Now to the installation.. I tried to install it yesterday, but didn't have any luck yet. There were some problems with the Bootcamp repartitioning my hard disk. Some files could not be moved, as I was told. Seems like the problem is with some big files for which the utility can not find enough free continuous space (or something like that??). I tried to boot into safe mode and login as root, as well as moving as many files as possible to my external 80Gb disk, without any luck. So today I will be backing up my whole disk contents to another harddisk (of my old PowerBook connected in target mode), and will try repartitioning again. Hopefully it'll work this time because I have F.E.A.R. waiting for me and I don't want to make it too lonely ;)

I've been playing with Ruby on Rails by reading and executing example from this book and it seems to be a really nice thingy I must admit… I guess there is a huge amount of behind-the-scenes overhead, but on the other hand, the speed-up in development process is just stunning. Not having to write these input-checking code stuff over and over again is sooooo nice..

Also, I'm using RadRails IDE and find it much better than TextMate which is thought as a default editor for Ruby on Rails programmers, because it integrates all the necessary tools into one development environment. Currently at version 0.6.1, it's a very promising development and I'm looking forward for a next version release.

Well I don't know about where the NetApplications.com gets its data about popularity of various web browsers, but I wish this data would be correct, as according to it the Firefox browser increased its marketshare to 2-digits' 10.something percents.

Personally I use Camino on my Mac most of the time, which uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox but is faster and has way better UI (although doesn't support extensions)

Anyways, I'm happy Firefox with it's standards-compliant rendering engine is (although pretty much slowly) gradually earning more and more users. IE 7 is in beta, but already has lots of complaints about (oh of course) its standards-compliance. I don't think Firefox will ever take more than may be 30% of overall marketshare, as AT LEAST 70% of users will have IE preinstalled on their machines and be too lazy to explore alternatives EVEN if you hit that with Firefox on their lazy heads. But anyways, good news are nevertheless good news. Way to go Firefox team!

Ever since I have first found out about Ruby on Rails I was eager to at least scratch the top of the new technlogoly. But yeah, no time (well, on the other hand I had some time to play my PS2 games, but.. that's not THAT time, right?), and actually no books to learn, and being pretty busy at work - just didn't have a chance. But today I finally got a chance, and my book on Ruby on Rails arrived.

So, I have setup the Ruby on my local Apache server and ready to jump into the whirlpool :)