Savannah W-ITS

Rhomobile bills itself as: Smartphone apps made easy.
AND:

Native applications with full device capabilities.e
Write once: instantly build for every device.
Native applications with full device capabilities: GPS, PIM, camera & more.
Single codebase. Build for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android.

Note – at the time of my testing (early December, 2009) I did not see support for all [...]

ROR (Ruby on Rails) is advertised as a data-centric development framework.  I did what I considered Data-dev back in the 1980’s using 4GLs:

you created a schema for your data (it was a bit more involved since data fields were ‘typed’)
you created views, reports, etc. for your data (just drop your fields onto screen forms, apply [...]

Your mileage should vary, but for me this device was both a poor/bad investment and a trouble-shooting time hog. I picked this up at Office Depot for $20 (regular price ~$50.)  While relatively simple to configure (via a web interface) the device seems to have performance issues (i.e. both dropping established wireless connections as well [...]

Bash – Changing from a proven, ubiquitous tool to a new one – need a reason?  In this case it’s time to explore Ruby – I’m not ready to change yet but I do want to see what Ruby might bring to the table.   I’m starting with a simple Ruby script (extracted from a [...]

Systems Administrators (SAs) need some Whoops! time.

In addition to knowledge breadth and depth, system administrators need experience; this is, perhaps, the defining aspect between senior and other levels of technology creators, managers and maintainers.  Been there – done that.  Some less than positive examples (usually experienced early as a SA):

• made a small tweak/system change that caused everything else to fail OR
• accidentally locked out all users and/or auto-magic processes

Root Cause Analysis – it’s not about finger pointing (or at least, it shouldn’t be.)

Sometimes it’s just easier if you can blame some thing (or some one entity.)  We all are more comfortable when a handy scapegoat is available – if, however, you really want to solve problems then you have to dig; sometimes (if you are lucky) the digging will be brief but usually, it will be

If global economics were a computing system where the heck is THAT SA?

So what is radical about current trends in computing, economics and US politics?  **

Google-define:radical – revolutionary: markedly new or introducing radical change…

Are any of our recent economic, political or computing changes anything more than a natural evolution?

Are we seeing YAPS (yet another paradigm shift?)  Physical to virtual to ethereal?

Politics

The US political scene is