October 2005

Imagine a program that makes clustering easy to do and was also able to manage automated deployments? Well there's a tool called SwitchTower that makes both of these tasks unbelievable easy. Nifty stuff!

• http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/10/19/introducing-switchtower-distributed-deployment-for-rails

Here's a really great explanation of why you should care about the new OpenDocument format found in OpenOffice.org, KOffice and others, rather than using proprietary formats like those used by Microsoft Office. Unlike most technical articles this one is straight forward enough that almost anyone should be able to understand it.

• http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8616

I never thought I'd find something like this, a (online) book that is both informative and utterly, utterly insane at the same time. Instead of the usual dry language that tecnical books tend to be written in, this book just oozes with oddness, from cartoon strips of foxes to discussions of dogs, there's something here to utterly confuse everyone as to the point of the anecdotes. That's not to say that it doesn't explain the technology at hand, it does and does so quite well, it's just strange.

Today I ordered the book Agile Web Development with Rails, a book that explains how to use the Ruby on Rails (aka RoR) web development system based around the Ruby programming language. I've been keeping an eye on it for the past few months as its been getting more and more media coverage (ok, geek media coverage) and this past week I finally started looking at it. What I saw struck me as pretty awesome.

Lately I've been looking for a program to backup our computer's data with using the lovely DLT7000 drive we got recently. Along the way I've tried a whole bunch of different programs of varying abilities, some better than others, some that at first glance that have everything under the sun only to discover major problems later on (Genie Backup Manager), and some that seem very simple but work well.

Another backup program for you to try. Genie Games Backup is the little sibling of a range of much more powerful backup software but is completely free. Despite being free Genie Games Backup gives you a pretty wide range of options to work with, from zip file encryption to script generation for automatically backing up the important files for specific programs.