So I’ve spent the last four months developing Rails apps, Ruby scripts, and Perl scripts on a Fedora desktop. I cut my teeth with Ruby/Rails on my Mac at home, so I was in on the TextMate and Growl goodness. It’s comical to see that 90% of Rails developers are on the Mac, and one would assume that it’s because if one must use a trendy framework, they must also choose a trendy development platform. The truth is, I just haven’t found sufficient analogues to Mac tools in the Linux environment.

A book I still have to read is [ed. I think it was called] The Science of Happiness whose author was interviewed recently on NPR.  The interviewers discussed the emerging branch of psychology that is studying happiness.  It got me thinking about how perceived happiness is a major market factor and how people now days are more willing to pony up extra cash and make an effort to buy your product or service if it causes them some happiness beyond the satisfaction of having a need met.  

There was a controversy storming over the way Microsoft proposed to handle standards compliance in their upcoming Internet Explorer 8. At first, MS released a screenshot that showed IE 8 rendering the Acid Test (a web standards compliance test). Everyone in the web development community was ecstatic. Finally, IE wouldn’t “break” the Internet! Then, it was revealed that a special trick was needed to render standards-compliant web pages correctly: a <meta> tag instructing IE 8 to follow standards. The community was in an uproar and most everyone (including me) agreed that it was wrong to have to specially code web sites to force IE 8 to do what it should be doing right in the first place. MS’s argument was that having IE 8 follow standards correctly would mean that dozens of corporate intranet web apps written specifically for IE 6+7’s quirky behavior would break, leaving their poor customers helpless. It seemed like business as usual at Microsoft. Today, however, the IE team announced that they are reversing their decision and that IE 8 will render sites following standards by default and that developers of IE 6-specific intranet applications can stick the <meta> tag in their apps to give IE 8 the proper handicap to render their apps correctly. Phew! Now, we just have to wait 10 years for IE 8 to be adopted on a wide scale and we can dump all of our IE6+7 hacks!

It’s official!  This last Saturday, I hopped over to Grand Rapids, got to the Apple Store as it opened, and made use of my MSU ID (good as gold!) to purchase a brand new MacBook Air.