CD-R King’s Cheap Solid State Drive, Part 2

Plextor SSD

It’s no secret that I have a guilty pleasure of going to CD-R King to look for decent stuff in their inventory. And I do find some nice stuff once in a while, for example, I only recently found out that they sell digital scales that allow zero resetting, an invaluable tool in the kitchen especially when baking. The PhP 380 – 580 price range is just too low when compared to the scales you’ll find in stores like Gourdo’s which sell them from PhP 1,500 to 3,000.

Anyway, I’m just here to point out that CD-R King has a new 64GB SSD in their inventory. At PhP 3,990, it’s cheaper than the one I have on my rig right now, but based on reviews it’s supposed to be crappier.

Still, there are worse ways to shell out P4k (like, say, attending a cloud computing conference when you’ve already been using it for years) so slapping one on your on-the-go workhorse laptop isn’t that bad of an idea.

Free Windows Ruby/Rails Editors: Redcar and Sublime Text 2

Last Saturday was the third time this year I’ve gone to a college to talk about Ruby and Rails. And, as expected, the general lack of experience in developing in Windows was the main cause of problems in that whole day event.

The experience wasn’t as bad as what we would have gotten had we conducted it last year, though. Installation used to be the hardest part about Rails on Windows, but thanks to RailsInstaller and RailsFTW, installing Rails on Windows nowadays is practically easier than installing it on Linux or OSX.

However, another problem still remains: the lack of good text editors for Rails on Windows. The vast majority of Ruby developers don’t use IDEs, while their choice of text editors are either OS X exclusive (TextMate) or has a steep learning curve (vim, emacs). On the Windows side, Notepad++ and Crimson Editor both have dismal Rails support.

Fortunately, there are a couple of good upcoming text editing options for Rails developers on Windows.

Redcar is a text editor written in Ruby running on top of JRuby. It’s cross-platform and free but still in alpha. It’s heavily inspired by TextMate, and it even supports some TextMate bundles.

Redcar only requires Ruby and Java. You don’t need to have JRuby; any combination of JRE and Ruby interpreters should work. Running the installation commands

$ gem install redcar
$ redcar install

will download Redcar and JRuby JAR files and install them in your local user directory. After installation, you could run Redcar just as you would run TextMate

$ redcar PATH/TO/APP

Here’s a screenshot of Redcar viewing my depressing lotto app (click to enlarge):

redcar

Sublime Text 2 is another cross-platform text editor. The original Sublime Text isn’t free, but the upcoming release is still free because it’s still in alpha.

Here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge):

sublime text 2 alpha

Sublime Text 2 doesn’t require Ruby or Java, making it more feasible to be shared around in a coding workshop with spotty internet connections (e.g. last Saturday’s event), but its eventual proprietary nature may prevent long-term development use.

EDIT: Quick write-up on Notepad++ v6.0 here.

Why Diets Make You Fatter

yoyo

Why Diets Make You Fatter — And What to Do About It via AlterNet

Stumbled upon this article yesterday. It pretty much sums up the current state of weight control science. TL;DR:

So while stuff like Paleo Diets (gluten is evil!) might work, weight control (and personal fitness as a whole) is still very much trial and error. Don’t be excited about the latest fad, but at the same time, don’t be discouraged if the results don’t appear as fast as you expect it to show.

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Yoyo pic from XuliánConX via flickr