Joel Spolsky recently made some comments about TripIt, which I immediately tested, and was blown away.

This would have been infinitely useful during my past 2 years of globe-trotting.

If you travel a lot (at all?) and are tired of making up stupid itineraries in Word or Notepad or whatever, then this web app is for you.

I don’t have time to write a detailed review right now, but I just had to tell the world (AKA the 6 people that read this blog) – that FogBugz 6.0 kicks the ever-loving-crap out of JIRA. JIRA looks like a poorly made web-toy from 1997 compared to the responsive, rich, intuitive, friendly, and dare I say downright brilliant user experience provided by FogBugz. I’ve used JIRA on several projects over the past 4 years, but I can say that after two days of using FogBugz 6.0 – there is no competition as to which is superior.

...Or at least the ones I download immediately on a new OS X install.

Sorry, no nice summaries, no time, just a Del.icio.us link.

I’ve been really busy, so it’s taken some sweet time, but at long last I’ve been able to upgrade to SimpleLog 2.0 which Garrett Murray managed to push out the door. I redid all the colors, background, some of the fonts and the overall width of the content in my ongoing mantra to ‘mess with CSS’ more. The latest version also offers content and comment feeds, among other things, like a prettier admin interface.

DreamHost is continuing to aggravate me in new and special ways, none the least of which was deploying the new version of this site. I’ve got some space over at SliceHost that Nick has so nicely set up for us, but alas, I haven’t had the time or energy to get things moved over there yet.

I suppose deploying the new site isn’t a bad way to spend the afternoon after sampling a few pints with James at Pump Room Asia.

I’ve been meaning to comment as well about the relatively new and beautiful support for Ruby / Rails in both IntelliJ IDEA (screencasts here and here) and NetBeans (screencasts here and here, but I haven’t had time. It’ll have to wait for another day.

Don’t get me wrong, I love TextMate, but it ain’t no IDE.

A few weeks ago I was introduced to kayak by Nick. I’d never before seen meta-search executed this brilliantly. The filters, along with the flexible date implementation, beautifully integrated Ajaxian city searches, among dozens of other features left me with an absolutely jaw-dropping user experience.

If that weren’t enough, it made me smile a big, huge dumb grin, seeing the personality they crammed into this finely crafted application:

Well done to the folks at Kayak.

I’ve used IRC on and off for the past, um, 10 years or so. I’ve had a Mac for the past 5. For the life of me, I had not been able to find an IRC client for the Mac that didn’t completely and utterly suck. That is, until now.

Enter Colloquy – the sweetest, loveliest, most wonderful IRC client for the Mac that I have ever seen. Maybe the sweetest IRC client I’ve ever seen anywhere.

Now if only #van.rb and #singapore.rb weren’t all tombstone and tumbleweed like ;)

Did I mention it’s free?

I had a bit of time this weekend to upgrade to SimpleLog 1.5rc3. Garrett hasn’t talked about this release on the site yet (current is 1.2.1), but I really wanted to integrate comments and ‘static’ page support. The upgrade was painless, but took me a couple of hours because I had made some customizations to the 1.2.1 code base in order to have support for some static type pages and a few other things.

Also, in a shameless attempt at self-promotion, I’ve jumped on the Technorati bandwagon and I’m doing that whole “claim blog by post” thing. This seemed like a good excuse for a new entry.

As odd as it sounds, when you’re playing bachelor for the weekend while your wifey is chillaxing in Indonesia, you find a lot of strange things to do to amuse yourself.

I’ve talked before about a neat little piece that someone discovered over on the Strongspace forums about getting Subversion repositories working over there. I’ve been using this method a lot lately, and typing all the commands gets tedious. The long and the short of it is that you need to create the repository locally first, and then copy it up to your Strongspace account before you can do the checkout over svn+ssh.

As I was writing this little piece, I figured I might as well also say something about how I really love the Vibrant Ink TextMate theme that I originally discovered while reading Chu Yeow’s blog

Quite nice I think. And droplets you ask? Well, I was going through the NLMA (Neat Little Mac Apps podcast) history – and came across Photodrop – which looks incredibly useful. That triggered in my brain some memory that Transmit was actually supposed to do droplets in the latest version, and sure enough it does. So now I have a nice little Transmit droplet that lets me upload files (like this ruby app and the image above) with simple drag and drop onto this droplet mini-app thinger.

As for this ruby Strongspace Subversion app, you can grab it here

Usage is dead easy:

ruby svn.rb [strongspace_username] [repository_name]

You’ll be prompted with your password a couple times. Make sure you’re aware of what this app actually does before you run it – or you could find yourself short some files!

1. Create a new repository in your current working directory with the name [repository_name] provided as a parameter to the app
2. Copy the created repository to your Strongspace account
3. rm -Rf the local repository it just created
4. Checkout the new repository via svn+ssh.

About a week ago I received an email from PayPal which contained the first donation I’ve ever received for JarIndexer. I immediately sent a thank you note to the donator, and received this response:

I really support people like you who share tools and things like that for the rest of us, especially when it removes pain. So, thanks for JarIndexer. It saved me so much time and it was very easy to use. So, keep up the good work.

That means a lot. JarIndexer is a super simple program, gets about 30-50 downloads a month, and was very easy to write, but I’m extremely pleased that it has been of use to someone, and managed to relieve a bit of pain.

I suppose this provides me an opportunity to say my thinks as well, to the open source community in general – and to all the folks out there who provide great software that make our lives easier as developers. I suppose I could specifically mention people like James Duncan Davidson (ANT), Rod Johnson (Spring), Gavin King (Hibernate), Yukihiro Matsumoto (Ruby), David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails), Thomas Fuchs (Scriptaculous) and Sam Stephenson (Prototype). In my day-to-day coding life, when thinking of people who freely give their software to the community – these guys have made me the happiest I’ve been in years.

I ran into a fabulous (and open source!) database tool the other day for interacting with various databases via JDBC.

It’s called Execute Query and the web site is here: http://executequery.org/.

It has a ton of features I’m sure I haven’t even used yet, but it reverse engineered my schema into an ERD for me, which made me smile.

Recently I’ve been working on a web-app that uses some .png files with transparency in them. Internet Explorer totally screws up the transparency and renders it grey.

There’s a great fix for it here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/pnghowto.htm

Rumor has it this will go away in Internet Explorer 7, which will be released with Vista probably in 2027 later this year.

The absolute best ftp and sftp client I have found for Windows (and again, by “best” – I usually mean that it’s free, and works fantastic) is FileZilla.

FileZilla is an open source project over at SourceForge, and you can take a look at it here:

http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/