Mc-Kenna.com

Apple’s latest Mac OSX release, 10.5, dubbed “Leopard“, does a great job to remedy the problem Rails developers had with previous releases - Ruby is now installed and works correctly, with Rails and a whole bunch of other common gems installed too. Awesome stuff. The one thing they missed, however, was the graphics manipulation package RMagick, but thankfully OnRails.org has put together a tutorial for installing RMagick that covers everything needed to get it working.

Firefox has Firebug, the best JavaScript debugger on the face of the planet. The developers came up with a subset of Firebug that works on all web browers, creatively named Firebug Lite and should be an essential part of any web developers toolkit.

I just found this, it’s the best way to run older versions of Internet Explorer on Windows:

• http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

A weird one. Had an MS Word file that would crash Acrobat (both 6 and 8) every time we’d convert it to PDF due to some embedded fonts. After searching the net I tried out PDFCreator and it worked! Go figure.

I came across this really simple button maker today:

• http://www.buttonator.com/

You pick the button style, add text, set a few options then right-click & save. If you’re interested they also have extra options you can get by paying $10 per month for a full account, but the basics are enough to get started with. One feature I liked was that you can type in text on multiple lines, handy for doing narrow buttons with multiple words.

There’s finally a ColdFusion-based project management tool for everyone’s enjoyment:

• Project Tracker

Well worth trying out, if you do a lot of ColdFusion work.

Migrating away from IIS feels like taking a breath of air on a cool, crisp morning - it is thoroughly invigorating and refreshes your entire body^H^H^H^Hserver. Aside from the basic site configuration, the only tricky part is getting the SSL certificates out of IIS and into Apache. As it turns out there are only a few short steps - export the certificate out of IIS, run three commands in DOS and then hook ‘em up in your httpd.conf! Pretty easy, as Pete Freitag explains the steps. After doing this for five domains today, I can tell you that it works and is really pretty painless, much less painless than renewing certificates in IIS.

Many corporations require that all software used have a commercial support structure available to cope with worst-case scenarios. Typically many open-source applications in use today don’t have support available from the core development team, and the ubiquitous Apache HTTPd web server is no different. To the rescue is the company Covalent who can provide not only support for several of the Apache products but also make a customized bundle available of Apache HTTPd, Tomcat and several other applications. Obviously this support is not going to be free, but if you need it they’re worth giving at try.