The Volunteers continue to take a lot of criticism as a whole football package (though, not as much today as usual, having had a great day yesterday). In this post, I’d like to try to break down the first six games for the team under coach Lane Kiffin, and explain why I think that he and his coaching staff are doing a great job so far of starting to turn this football program around. As with all major changes, things will take time, but I think they’re off to a great start, and here’s why:

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There’s been a buzz around the web development community recently about this tool call Less, for CSS development. I saw the links, checked it out, and pretty much the first thing I saw was the big fat Ruby icon on the web site and thought to myself, “meh, its a Ruby tool…not for me”.

We were back in Dayton this weekend and got a chance to catch up with a bunch of friends we hadn’t seen in a while, and Ben was showing me some of the work he was doing with Less. I said to him, “I thought you were doing ColdFusion development…how is it that you’re using Less…I thought it was a Ruby on Rails tool?” He corrected me. Its a tool that runs on top of the Ruby language, that parses “less” files and spits out CSS files. So you just write a .less file, run Less against it, and it generates a CSS file that you use in your web site. Oh wow I thought…COOL!

So I decided to see if I could get it to work on Windows (he does his web development on a Mac). Turns out, it was much more simple than I thought it would be…

I did a Google search for Ruby on Windows, and it took me to RubyForge where I found a link to download the Ruby One-Click Installer for Windows. Downloaded and ran it. Ruby was installed in about four minutes (it actually took a LONG time to run, longer than I expected), and then it was done.

Then, based on the documentation on the front page of the Less web site, I opened up a command line, and typed in “gem install less”, and 30 seconds later, Less was installed. I was immediately able to create a .less file and generate a CSS file from it. Nice! Pretty sweet little tool for writing CSS, I’m very impressed with it so far.

Any self-proclaimed fan of punk/metal owes it to themselves to check this out. The Crucified RULES!

Last night and tonight I’ve been slowly but surely trying to get caught up on reading my blogroll in Google Reader. I subscribe to several difference Apple community blogs, and have noticed that Microsoft’s recent “laptop hunter” ad campaign seems to have really struck a nerve with Apple enthusiasts. I’m not going to bother linking to all of them (there really were several), but if you scroll through some of the recent entries here and here, you should see what I mean.

The common theme across most of those entries seems to be all of the “fallacies” in those commercials. You know, all of the stuff thats *not* being said in the message of the campaign…

What I find most interesting is how the people/organizations voicing those complaints didn’t seem to have any problem with all of the fallacies that were being thrown the opposite direction for the past coupla years in the ads in the “Get a mac” campaign. There was an awful lot of untruth going on there as well.

Frankly, as much as I LOVE my mac, its refreshing to *finally* see Microsoft waking up and fighting back. As consumers, I think we’ll all end up benefitting in the end (in price and quality), no matter which camp we live in.

UPDATE: OK, I guess I was further behind on my blog reading than I thought I was. The articles I’m referring to seem to be further back than I originally thought. For examples of what I mean, see here and here.

I was apparently having some problems with my reCAPTCHA plugin that I was unaware of before this evening that was preventing people from being able to post comments here. Sorry for the inconvenience. Should be working OK now (at least, it works for me again anyway).