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So, after buying a nice and shiny expensive Mac computer that will help a lot on your day-to-day developer life (OSX is better than anything… at least that’s what they say) you just find out that there is NO JavaME development toolkit made to run on the beloved fruity OS.
Fear not: it is still possible [...]

While no one comes up with a nice little program able to open documents on the iPhone, there’s a quick hack you can do in order to open your documents and read them on the go.
In case you didn’t notice (I just noticed that yesterday, when clicking a PDF link by accident), SafariMobile (the one [...]

One thing I noticed on each and every single PHP application out there is that they all resort in some kind of global variable defined in an include file to determine what is the application’s root. Something like:

$root = ‘http://www.bla.com/my_site’

and then all the links are generated like:

$root.’/something’

That makes all the urls absolute, and pretty much [...]

An awesome article pointing out a big bunch of performance improvement tips for Rails applications that brought down rendering time up to 700% on Charlie’s application. Quite an improvement indeed! The tip on not using link_to and url_for is quite shocking for me since I use them a lot (like almost everybody, I guess). Maybe [...]

So you installed Ubuntu, got all excited about developing your Rails application on it, and then…

No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock)

No matter what you do, database connection doesn’t work. You reinstall Rails (of course you installed it via “sudo apt-get rails”, right??), reinstall MySql, recreate the database schema, change root’s password, install Kubuntu instead [...]

One of the best Windows Powertoys I’ve ever used is the “Open Command Window Here”. What it does is absolutely simple: it adds an option to the right-click menu to open the command line in a specific folder.
Achieving a similar effect on Gnome is a no-brainer: just create a bash script inside your Gnome [...]

If you (like me) don’t like iTunes (or simply like the idea of having alternatives), Floola is probably one of the best option around. This small app allows you to playback and manage your tracks in a simple one-page interface. It also allows you to copy files from/to the iPod, so you can share [...]

Nice article on one principle that everyone should keep in mind when developing software.

While Rails doesn’t come out with a default i18n mechanism to allow internationalization of all its default messages, here’s a little trick to internationalize time_ago_in_words (and all the other nifty methods defined on DateHelper to print out things like “12 hours ago” (if your site doesn’t show dates like this, it cannot claim to be [...]

By far one of the most annoying and unhelpful messages on Rails ever. the “User expected, got User” message tends to pop up now and then when using plugins such as acts_as_commentable or acts_as_taggable, that define models on the vendor/plugins.
The solution, as pointed out by the localhost:3000 blog (nice blog name, I must say ;)), [...]