X Window System == awful handy
I just got around a little annoyance that's been bugging me for a few days, and I'm so happy that I had to share. This will be old news to *nix users, but you with the macs and the windows, listen up, because this is some wild and crazy stuff you can't do so easily (unless it's easier in OS X than it used to be).

OK, here's the situation: I've got two computers in front of me. One is a desktop that I have my monitor, keyboard, and mouse hooked up to. Would also like to attach headphones to it, except 1) it's not close enough to make this practical without an extender that I do not possess, 2) the output has a ton of noise, which detracts from my enjoyment. Next to the desktop is a laptop which has a decent audio output. Unfortunately, its nub-pointer-thing is possessed and keeps wandering all over the screen, which makes it hard to do things like click on the UI to my music player. Other than not being able to control the music player, this isn't a problem, because I just use the laptop as another server and do everything over ssh. Today it hit me that the music player can be run in the same way - I just ssh to the laptop, and from the command line, start my music player. Through the magic of ssh's X11 forwarding, the player's UI pops up on my desktop machine, and music comes out of my laptop's output. Cool, network transparency. Big ups to Jim Gettys, Bob Scheifler, Ron Newman, etc.
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typo made my head hurt
Spent a little time tonight setting up a test instance of Typo, a Ruby on Rails weblog tool, and was sad to see that Rabble may not have been wrong about it. Off the top of my head...

1. When trying to start up with incorrect database connect info, I got a blank screen and a 500 error in the log. No word about what the actual error was. Fortunately I'd been through this dance earlier with a Rails scaffolding app, so I was able to guess what was unhappy about.
2. Stack track on all access attempts after I opened two tabs, one viewing the admin screen and one on the public side. Had to restart browser and only check one at a time to avoid this.
3. After fiddling with some settings through the admin screens and clicking around a bit, typo's ruby process started chewing up RAM like there was no tomorrow. I saw it at 300+ meg shortly before my laptop locked up...

This is with the latest stable versions of the relevant software: typo 2.6.0, ruby 1.8.4, rails 1.0. Not having spent the time to figure out what is actually going wrong in the latter cases, it could well be something in my environment - not as many people are using postgresql, and I've just got the pure ruby driver, for example. But I've seen enough for now.
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