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Dr. Jeff Masters has bad news for my people: While this is cause for some relief, Rita, like her weaker sister Katrina did, will still bring a Category 5 level storm surge along a 60 - 80 miles stretch of coast to the right of where the storm makes landfall on Saturday. Storm surge heights will peak at 20 - 25 feet in some bays, and bring the ocean inland up to 50 miles from the coast. Large sections of I-10 between Houston and Beaumont will be inundated, and the flood waters will reach the cities of Beaumont, Orange, and Lake Charles. Wind damage will be severe, and Houston can expect a hazardous rain of glass from its high rise building like was experienced during Hurricane Alicia in 1983. If the eye passes just west of Galveston Bay, the storm surge will push 1 - 3 of water into some of Houston’s eastern suburbs, such as Deer Park. ...

Rivka at Respectful of Otters has a good post on the role cognitive dissonance has to play in people’s reaction to hurricane Katrina. I am currently fixated on hurricane Rita, which could just as easily hit my home town as anywhere else. When it does come ashore, the good and wicked will be affected alike.

Someone pointed me to Kevin Hemenway’s series of articles on setting up OS X 10.4 for developers over at macdevcenter.com. Here are the articles so far: Web Apps with Tiger: Getting Started Web Apps with Tiger: Security and MySQL Web Apps with Tiger: MediaWiki

After watching Fink try to compile 53,000 packages and reading Kellan’s comment on my previous post, I decided to abandon that approach for getting this laptop set up and go for precompiled stuff instead. Here’s a list of the key packages: Subversion client - precompiled binaries are provided by Metissian Apache - comes preinstalled, appears to work fine PHP - version 4.3.11 comes with OS X, you just need to edit /etc/httpd/httpd.conf to turn it on MySQL - official binaries available That basically gets everything squared away for doing real development on this computer. I’m not sure why I chose not to follow the path of least resistance in the first place. As I mentioned yesterday, I already have Eclipse up and running, so now the only thing that’s left is Tomcat, which I’ll deal with a bit later. ...

This is quick document explaining the trials and travails of setting up a Powerbook G4 as a development box with Apache, PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Java, and Tomcat. After turning on the Powerbook and connecting to my wireless network, the computer automatically downloaded and installed all of the latest and greatest updates from Apple. I proceeded to install Firefox, Adium, Microsoft Office and some other standard productivity applications before turning to my real task – getting my development environment up and running. ...

Opera is now giving away their Web browser. The unstated reason is, of course, Firefox. Looking at Opera’s financial reports, I see that last quarter roughly 80% of their revenue was from their products for “Internet Devices” rather than personal computers. Even without any revenue from the PC version of the browser, the company would still have broken even last quarter. Furthermore, looking at past numbers shows that the share of their revenue coming from mobile phones is only going up. This gives the PC version of Opera a fighting chance at remaining relevant in the face of Firefox’s growing market share and Internet Explorer 7 when it’s released. ...

Bill Gates on software development: There’s only really one metric to me for future software development, which is – do you write less code to get the same thing done? It’s difficult to argue with that. Microsoft developer Mike Champion talks about getting there. The way I see it, there are two tracks that you can take to less code. One is more and better libraries, and the other is less language and environment overhead. I’d say that the Java ecosystem has a good story to tell in terms of libraries, and not such a good story to tell in terms of overhead. Ruby on Rails, at least so far, seems to succeed in both areas for a pretty large class of applications (though not as large as Java). I’m not sure where .NET falls into the mix. PHP, I’d say, is just OK in terms of libraries, and the amount of overhead varies widely depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. ...

Christopher Allbritton says it’s civl war in Iraq, but you can judge for yourself. Here’s a list of conditions that describe a civil war that he supplies: A weak central government with incompetent security apparatus. Spread of sectarian and ethnic killings. Existence of armed sectarian and ethnic militias. High threat perception among the sectarian and ethnic groups of the country. Insistence of each group on its demands. Foreign interference and support to feuding groups. It’s hard to argue that Iraq fails to meet any of those conditions. ...

I’m in the process of reading Agile Web Development with Rails, the introduction to Rails written by Dave Thomas and Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson. I plan on writing a full review once I’ve finished, but I wanted to go ahead and start talking about it because both Rails and the book have prompted a lot of thinking on my part. I’d recommend that every Web programmer read this book, even if you’re never going to install Rails, just because it will give you some ideas on how to make your own applications better. Rails does the best job of codifying the best practices for Web application development of any framework out there today, regardless of language, and once you read the book you can bring some of those practices to the platform you use and become a better programmer. ...

I’m going to incorporate this idea into the next iteration of my Web site.