You remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series? You’d read a paragraph or two, then be presented with a question, the answer determining which of several pages you’d turn to in order to continue the story.

I may be giving too much credit to Mike Stackpole, Rick Loomis and the rest of the crew at Flying Buffalo for inventing the genre, but I give them credit for coming up with an interesting way of bringing interactivity to paper.

Creative as it was, the resulting stories were difficult to read. Continue reading →

Noticed some, um, interesting, gotchas when setting up ruby 1.9 and the nginx web server on FreeBSD.

The issue with the ruby install is subtle, and doesn’t really show up until long after you have installed it. The issue is it points the gem repository to the wrong place. It points the gem repository to /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 which is where the 1.8 gems should reside, not the 1.9 gems. Continue reading →

More and more I hear the refrain that as a developer you can “circumvent” Apple’s AppStore and “walled garden” by developing web apps for iOS devices.

I even hear Apple and Steve Jobs positioned as wanting to “destroy the web” with their focus on “native apps.” That their “focus on native apps” is “splintering the web.” Continue reading →