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After much, much agonizing over digital cameras, I finally pulled the trigger and ordered a Nikon D50 with the 18-55mm kit lens the other day. I went to a store a few weeks ago just to see how some of the cameras I was looking at handled, and in the end decided that I prefer an SLR to any of the super-zooms. As far as the super-zooms go, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H1 handled a lot better than the Panazonic DMC-FZ5, which turned out to be a lot smaller than I expected. The Panasonic DMC-FZ30 was nice and chunky, but it was almost as big as a Nikon D50 and didn’t cost a whole lot less, either. When I looked at the ISO issues that the super-zooms tend to have, the D50 just made more sense. ...

My wife had an interesting customer service experience yesterday that I thought I’d write up. My wife ordered something on the Internet and the company shipped her the wrong item. She called to let them know about it, and the customer service rep who she called asked her for some identifier for the person who packed the order, which was printed on the invoice. My wife just wanted to get the correct item, and didn’t want to get the person who packed the order in trouble, so she tried to avoid telling them who the person was, but they helpfully directed her to the spot on the invoice where the packer number could be found, so she gave it to them. Sorry packer #23. ...

Let’s say you were asked which software should be included on the CD that is packaged with a book on Web publishing? What would you recommend? Here’s a list of a few things that come to mind: Mozilla Firefox Opera HTML Kit XAMPP MAMP Any other ideas? Please leave a comment.

Google engineer Cedric Beust argues that Ruby on Rails is not destined for mainstream acceptance. Here are his basic arguments, which he explains further in his own post: Ruby is too hard for most people. Rails is too clever. No credible IDE. Fanaticism of the user base is off-putting. Ecosystem for Ruby Web development frameworks is monopolized by Rails. Rails is not proven to be scalable. Not enough ISPs support it. I’d say that items 3, 6, and 7 will be fixed in time, assuming that Rails continues to grow as it has. Java was growing in popularity for years before really top notch tools like Eclipse and IDEA were released, and I think that the Ruby tools space is maturing more quickly than that. It will be very interesting to look at the feature set of TextMate in 18 months to two years, for example. If Ruby on Rails continues to grow in popularity, someone will solve the scalability and deployment issues, and ISPs will pick it up. The question is whether other things will keep Ruby on Rails in a niche. ...

The other day someone was explaining to me that the reason Apple laptops don’t have particularly interesting form factors is that Apple’s volume is low enough that a broader spectrum of laptop models would mean that each individual model wouldn’t sell enough to cover the development costs. A small fraction of the PC laptop market is still a pretty big market. A small fraction of the OS X market isn’t so significant. ...

You know, Apple’s announcement of Boot Camp, a tool to make it easy to install Windows XP on Intel-based Macs, was a stroke of strategic genius. Not everyone is happy with it, but that doesn’t matter. None of the unhappy people are going to refuse to buy Macs because they don’t like it. They’re Mac users who will stick with just OS X or Windows users who aren’t going to switch. And there is a significant set of people who will like and who will buy Macs who otherwise wouldn’t. Here’s a short list: ...

I mentioned last Monday that I was taking about a week off from my aggregator. By the weekend I had about 1400 unread items, and I finally caught up last night. There were a few feeds that I marked as read, but most feeds I at least skimmed. What I discovered is that just leaving my aggregator closed for the week is a bad idea. There are several kinds of feeds that I follow. Some of them, I need to keep track of for work. For example, we use wikis for collaboration at work, and following the feeds to see what pages are getting updated is important. It was a bad idea to skip those feeds for the week. There’s also the comment feed for this site. If I don’t follow that feed a lot of comment spam stays around longer than necessary. ...

The developers of Ruby on Rails have come up with yet another small but important innovation in the world of Web applications. Way back in release 0.14, they added the ability to freeze rails, which copies all of the system-wide Ruby libraries you might depend on into a directory in the application so that if the packages on the system get upgraded, your applications won’t break. This makes for fatter applications, but vastly reduces the risk that anyone will break your stuff. ...

I just came up with a good idea for dealing with documentation and I wanted to post about it. One application I’m working on is fairly complex but has no real documentation. Because want users to be able to contribute to the documentation, I decided to put it in a wiki. It occurred to me that since the pages in the application have (or at least should have) good titles, I could automatically link into the specific help page by constructing a wiki URL based on the page title. We happen to use Mediawiki, so I just included the following line in the top level layout file that wraps every page: ...

This week I’m busier than usual, so I’m giving NetNewsWire a bit of a rest. Yesterday was my first day of completely skipping the aggregator, and I was amazed at the overall productivity spike. (I also skipped a few other things I normally do.) This tells me that when I come back, I’m going to have to change my aggregator habits, perhaps not leaving it running all day and instead checking it once in the morning and once at night, or using some other schedule to manage how much time I burn keeping up with everything. ...