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A few years ago I ran a basketball tournament to raise funds for North Korean refugee orphans. The tournament was a big success and I enjoyed creating the site for it using Ruby on Rails. On the site people could register their team, update it, pay their registration fee and donate.

The site is Hoops For Orphans.

I created a simple demonstration Ruby on Rails store for my church, Highrock Church, called the Highrock Store.

The implementation relied heavily on the wonderful book Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition.

Today I upgraded to Rails 1.2.6 as I prepare to move towards Rails 2.0. Notes on this release can be found here.

Here are the steps I took.

1. Upgrade Ruby Gems to the latest version (in this case 1.0.1).
   gem update --system
2. Upgrade Ruby on Rails to the latest version (in this case 2.0.2).
   gem install rails
   To specify upgrading to Ruby on Rails 1.2.6 do this.
   gem install rails -v 1.2.6
   (What I probably should have done was a gem update because now I have installed 1.2.6 and 1.2.3.)
3. Update configuration.
   set RAILS_GEM_VERSION to ‘1.2.6’ in config/environment.rb
   rake rails:update:configs

This PC World article talk about how to optimize Wi-Fi for VoIP, Video and Gaming. I was only able to enable WMM support. Hopefully that will make a difference when using Skype though I really haven’t had any issues w/ Skype, the quality has been fantastic.

This PC World article describes how to optimize Firefox for broadband. Another site verifies that these changes are a good idea.

I haven’t noticed a change yet but it seems like a good idea.

In PC World’s January 2008 issue I saw this great tip on how to add “Copy to Folder” and “Move to Folder” to the right-click menu in Explorer.

To save people time I have already created the registry file which you use to merge into your Windows registry to create these menu entries.

On November 23rd I ordered my first Mac laptop since my Powerbook in grad school, a white Macbook. 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. So far I’ve been reasonably impressed but one thing I wanted is for the menu bar to display the full date. It always bothered me that you can’t do this on Windows w/o third party applications.Fortunately on Mac OS X there is somewhat of a hack to do this, How To: Display Date in OS X Menu Bar.The format I ended up choosing is:Thu Jan 10 7:07 PMwhich I think is a little cleaner than the one used in the aforementioned article.Update: As of March 19, 2008, this cute hack no longer seems to work.  Seems like one of the Mac OS X updates changed the way the date is displayed in the OS X menu bar.  Now my date looks like this:Wed 9:23 AM PDT 

To get Perforce to work with Cygwin is not too difficult. One just has to make an alias for p4 like this (thanks to this excellent Perforce FAQ).

if [ -e /bin/cygpath ]; then
  alias p4='p4 -d `cygpath -w $PWD`'
fi

This alias works all the time except I think when you are in a directory you accessed via a link.

Note you don’t need to go such lengths as described in this post.