Kognitive Jelly

After a long hiatus, I’ve finally downloaded and installed finalscratch 2 on my laptop again (it hasn’t been on there since the laptop crashed last Dec).

What spurred me on was the stats on my site. The only thing I’ve setup since transfering to Dreamhost was my blog, yet almost all my hits are from the podcast I setup last year (just moved the files over with no updates). The podcast has seen an update since last September, and yet I’ve had over 7GB of downloads in the last few weeks.

So it looks like I’ve got to start getting my act together and put together a mix. Something I’ve been trying to motivate myself to do for quite a while.

For anyone who enjoyed the first edition of this book (the one currently in print @ bookstores), I recommend you go and pick up a copy of the beta PDF of the 2nd edition. By beta, it means that the book is a work in progress, but as content is written it is made available to thosewho’ve purchased the PDF. And for $23.50 its not a bad deal ($48.75 to preorder the print copy and get the beta PDF)

From the update email:

It fixes a number of
reported errata (and a few that weren’t reported :), and
adds two significant changes:

1. It now uses the new Active Record decimal -> BigDecimal
   conversion. I’ve personally been waiting for this for a long
   time, and I’m really happy it’s now part of core. However,
   this code is not yet part of a released Gem, so if you want to
   use the feature, you’ll need to install Edge Rails. This change
   affects the entire Depot application, the Testing chapter,
   and numerous examples in the Active Record chapters. Speaking
   of which…

2. I’ve now reworked the Active Record chapters. You’ll find there’s
   a brand new chapter (making three Acctive Record chapters in all),
   and things have moved around a lot. I’ve documented all the
   new association methods, changes to validation, and have new
   sections on with_scope and polymorphic associations. I believe these
   new chapters are now more up-to-date than the Rails documentation
   itself.

I updated to the latest trunk of Typo today and with that got Akismet Spam Protection. Also they added the ability to moderate comments in the admin panel, with options to publish, unpublish, and delete. I had seen too much in the way of trackback spam on other blogs so I had disable trackbacks on my blog, but now I will re-enable them.

In order to get Akismet working you will need to sign up for a (free) Wordpress account so you can have an API key sent to you. Pop this API key into the Akismet Key field (under Spam Protection on Settings page) to make Akismet functional.

Just checked out http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ and it’s back up. Finally!

Looking forward to seeing things moving again, and catching blogs like Ryan’s Scraps giving the low down on what is going on in Edge.

Ableton Live 6 is scheduled for release in September. In anticipation of this, Ableton have updated their website and have done something that was desperately needed. No longer do you need your serial number to get at the software updates, now you login with an account that has a serial number registered to it and you can download updates. What makes this so wonderful is that I lost my serial number and when my studio computer and laptop crashed (both within 1 month!!) I couldn’t reinstall Live. Of course I could have contacted support, but I just haven’t had the time. Well, when I logged into the new site this morning, there was my serial number staring back at me. Awesome!!

I’m tempted to upgrade now from 4. If I do, I will be sure to review it here.