david sidlinger

Compubeaver via digg.

I noticed something interesting on Netflix today. When I looked at the “Information for Parents” for Signs, there was a yellow flag for social behavior. The reason given was “Most characters white”.

No matter what your take is on race in entertainment (I happen to believe that minorities are usually under–represented), I still don’t understand why that would be a reason to be wary of showing your child a film. I could be wrong (obviously).

Note: The information provided by Netflix actually comes from Common Sense Media.

Rafe at rc3.org posted about an interview with Twitter developer Alex Payne where he discusses some of the problems with scaling Rails-based applications. The title of Rafe’s post, Twitter developer: Rails performance blows, was pretty inflammatory and provoked a strong response from interested parties.

The benefit, for me, is that a lot of interesting posts on how to scale Rails.

• Ryan Tomayko has weighed in with a great post on making use of multiple databases with ActiveRecord and scaling in general.
• Another Twitter developer, Blaine Cook, has let us know that the Twitter team has developed some tools to deal with the problem that may be released at some point. Blaine will also be giving a talk next weekend, partially about this topic.
• DHH has posted about a plug-in for Rails that addresses (somewhat) the multi-database issue.  It appears to be a work in progress, but at least the ball is rolling.

All I can say is that I hope to work on a site one day that is popular enough to really worry about this.

John Gruber has a good post over on Daring Fireball clearing up some misconceptions about the AAC codec.  I have to say that everyone I’ve talked to about this thinks it is an Apple proprietary format.

Do you think they would have let this bug escape if they cared just a little bit about unit testing?

I guess I’m officially an Apple fanboy.

Last year, I was in the market for a laptop and decided on a MacBook. I really wanted something small that wouldn’t be a burden to carry around. The fact that I could run Windows easily on it won me over, but I don’t find myself running my Windows VM that much at this point.

A few weeks ago, I talked my wife into getting one, because the HP laptop she had been using was constantly giving her fits. It didn’t really take that much persuading. I’d say it was a good move, because, in spite of the fact that she moved to a completely alien OS, she hasn’t had any problems with it. To top it off, the ‘Books are sexy as all get out.

Then the Apple TVs came out. I have always dreamed about slashing our ridiculous cable bill. With all of our media firmly entrenched in iTunes, it was kind of a no-brainer. Sure, there are other, more flexible solutions out there, but none of them were dead simple enough to turn my son loose with the remote and not worry about. I picked one up the first week they were available. It will pay for itself in short order, as I no longer feel like I need anything beyond basic cable and internet service; I had digital cable and two (sucky) DVRs from Comcast. I’d ditch the TV service completely, but the need for cartoons and Food Network has been made very clear to me.

Last Sunday, my router went to the bit bucket in the sky. Want to take a guess where this is leading? I took my first trip to the local shrine Apple store and walked out with a bright, shiny, new AirPort Extreme base station. I didn’t comparison shop much at all, and I’m sure they are more expensive than most, if not all, of the other routers out there, but there were three things that drove me to it: the router is no longer an eyesore in the media room that looks like something from 50’s sci-fi, the built-in NAS and print server is awesome, and everything I get from Apple just works like it should.

Today, the final nail was driven in the PC’s coffin at my house. The iMac arrived from Amazon. We needed a desktop for my son to use and to serve as a warehouse for the big media files we don’t want to carry around on the laptops. The plan is to stream all the movies and TV shows from the iTunes library on it, maybe with an external drive. One of the big selling points was the ability to lock down my son’s activities. I hear that Vista has some new features in this area, but I would bet they’re not as dead simple to implement.

So, to recap, in the past few weeks, we’ve picked up a MacBook, Apple TV, Apple’s wireless router, and an iMac. I think that definitely gets me into the fan club.

The thing that makes this really funny is that I make a living writing business software exclusively for Windows on top of the .NET framework.  Guess you could say I’m leading a double life.