Noel Rappin Writes Here

TextMate has what seems to be a very nice blogging bundle for programmatically sending posts to your blogging engine of choice. Except that it doesn’t work for the new Blogger API. Or at least it didn’t the last time I checked. Mostly I just wanted to see if I could write my own script to send to Blogger. This is a Ruby script based on the Python script located at http://djcraven.

Now two of the big Java IDE’s are promoting Ruby language tools as a big thing. IntelliJ has a plugin in early beta, and NetBeans is also making a big deal of their new early beta support. Eclipse has had a Ruby/Rails plugin for about a year or so. This is weird, weird, weird, that suddenly all the Java tools would feel the need to grow into somewhat ill-fitting Ruby IDE’s (Eclipse has always styled itself as more of a meta-IDE, so that’s a little less strange).

It’s true – the way to get comments on your blog is to mention Apple… I do something like one substantive post in three months, and then two apple posts in 48 hours, and bang! Four comments within a day. I’m surprised, not least because I really wasn’t sure anybody was out there. Anyway, interesting points have been made, and I thought I’d pull them up to either agree, or whine defensively.

What is it about us tech fanboys and Apple… I’ve always found them interesting, even when I wasn’t a regular Mac user. Infuriating, sometimes. But interesting. So here’s another thing about Apple, circa 1995… That was right about the end of something like a two-year period where Apple was way ahead on internet integration and didn’t really make anything out of it. By the time the internet really started to escape out of academia, the Windows world was well on it’s way to catching up, and by the time it all really went mainstream, Macs would be a fading memory.

As I may have mentioned here, back in 1995 I spent three months as a summer intern at Apple HQ in Cupertino. I was buried deep in the educational technology research group so, trust me, I didn’t work on anything you’ve heard of. It was a fun summer, though. They stuffed about 15 of us, a mix of grad students and contractors, in a room that was really long and narrow.