Industry Figure Tom Chappell

As I work through my Ruby on Rails starter projects, I’ve found quite a few helpful resources — so many that I’m beginning to forget where they all are (or soon will, at least).
So I’ve started collecting these resources on a separate page, here: now you can benefit from my diminished mental capacity!

My buddy Chris Ravenscroft says that Apple’s recent ad lampooning Windows Vista’s security exactly captures his Windows Vista experience. True, after 30 minutes, he got kind of disgusted, and threw Vista off a cliff, so maybe that 31st minute would have been outstanding! — we just don’t know.
See the Apple Ad:

Click here, which takes [...]

I recently began a campaign to learn Ruby on Rails in earnest (more on that later).
The hosting company that I had been using does not directly support Ruby (though I’m free to install whatever I want on the VPS). So, I tried that, and it worked for a while, but then my little learning-Ruby [...]

Google, borrowing a page from Microsoft, suckered me into ‘trying’ their new version of Blogger, and soon all sorts of things were not the way I wanted them, and of course they don’t offer a way to export my blog to other software, or even to just revert to the old version — it’s a [...]

I have a groovy 2 terabyte RAID array on order, and as part of that, I had ordered a nice Hitachi Deskstar 7200 RPM, 500 GB (actually more like 465 GB) Serial ATA drive, featuring a 16 MB data buffer, and (especially!) a three-year warranty.
But then my old friend, Industry Figure Curt Welch, who has [...]

As the second part of a major office overhaul, I’ve replaced the 10 MHz hub that used to infest my office with a Gigabit Switch from LinkSys.
For those of you who don’t know, a switch is much more than a hub. Hubs are basically a big piece a wire: they immediately retransmit [...]

I have two computers in my office, a Mac and a PC, and for a long, long time now, I’ve been making do with a dual-ported display that is shared between the two computers, and entirely redundant keyboards and mice. But it’s a big hassle, and I only had amplified sound with one computer, [...]

At long last, tomchappell.com has moved to a VPS (a Virtual Private Server, an entire virtual machine running in an emulated environment that goes mostly at full speed, but whenever the operating system tries to talk to the hardware it finds itself cruelly interrupted and redirected to a controlling authority, which then issues the appropriate [...]

IBM and top scientific research organizations are joining forces in a humanitarian effort to tap the unused power of millions of computers and help solve complex social problems… The massive volunteer project will be unveiled Tuesday by Sam Palmisano, CEO of International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the world’s largest computer company, along with United Nations [...]

I got word today that my patent was issued by the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office on August 31, actually a full day earlier than the September-October timeframe that I’d been promised. That’s service!
I filed the initial paperwork in January 2001, so the whole process took somewhat less than 4 years.
Alcatel gives us [...]