As more and more of our lives go digital, privacy and security are becoming much greater concerns. Here’s a tutorial on how to encrypt files on a flash disk.

There’s been a lot of excitement brewing these days, it seems… I’ve noticed, and can’t help but feel a little (a lot) excited myself. Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path takes a shot at describing what’s been going on.

If you’re not yet amazed, inspired, and a little anxious, you might want to consider it. Then get a good night’s sleep and perhaps take a rejuvenating vacation. We’re going to look back at Spring 2005 as a milestone. Watch closely, ladies and gentlemen. Things are about to change in a very big way.

It’s hard not to get excited when she puts it like that, no?

Cellphone providers in Canada have agreed to let consumers keep their numbers. The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association has come to an agreement on number portability that will allow consumers to take their phone numbers with them if they choose to switch providers. They’ll also be able to carry numbers between celular and traditional phone services. This important step forward should encourage more competition between cellphone companies, always a benefit to consumers.

Hooray for that. It’s about time.

You got your Ajax in my Ruby

David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals and Ruby on Rails has something to say about your choice of development environment: “I have run all but dry of understanding for programmers that willfully pick Windows as their platform of choice.” Which of course sparked much discussion, anger, shouting, squabbling…

Personally, I’m still stuck on Windows for development. Not willfully. I’m working on my exit strategy. My desktop has an XP box and a Dual G4 866 sitting side-by-each. I use my G4 for just about everything except coding – at the moment, I’m most comfortable and work fastest in Homesite+. I’m still looking for a development environment that I’ll love on the Mac – or, alternately, I’ve also been messing with a Linux install on a spare box.

It’s really just a matter of finding the right package that will let me work the way I want in comfort.

Redirecting and rewriting URL’s.

Post, share and sort code snippets. Sort by Tags and People.

Edit-in-place with CSS and Javascript and some other cool proof-of-concept javascript bits. I like the Edit-in-place stuff that Flickr has implemented and have been thinking this is something I want to explore in my applications, where appropriate.

So it’s my first day without a job. Well, actually, it’s my second. But Friday was spent running around buying stuff and cleaning for the party in celebration of my freedom from the chains of gainful employment. This is the first day I’ve had to really let it sink in.

It feels great so far. I woke up at 11:00, made some coffee, talked to my dad for a while, called some employed friends, and just generally have been soaking in the fact that for the first time since I was 14 years old, I don’t have a job. Should I be nervous? Probably. Should I be hitting the ground running looking for opportunities? Probably. But not today. Today, for the first time in years, I get to enjoy the fact that I have absolutely nothing to do. No responsibility whatsoever. Well, there’s that whole mortgage thing… but I’ve got the next bunch of payments covered, so today, I’m just going to be unemployed. And enjoy it. A lot.

Since Google launched Gmail last year with it’s 1Gig of storage space, competing services from Yahoo and Microsoft have been scrambling to ramp up storage capacity – in Yahoo’s case from 2Mb to 1 Gig. Now, apparently in an attempt to take the wind out of their competitior’s marketing sails, Gmail is one-upping them again by pushing storage to 2 Gigs and beyond… From the Gmail site:

Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn’t mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we’re giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able. We know that email will only become more important in people’s lives, and we want Gmail to keep up with our users and their needs. From Gmail, you can expect more.

This is awesome. Google is destroying their competitors because they have no premium service to sell. 98% of Google’s revenue comes from targeted advertising. They have no reason to reserve more storage space or bandwidth or features for paying customers. And given that bandwidth and storage costs are dropping at exponential rates, it costs them so little to offer the upgrades.

Personally, I’ve moved all my correspondence to my Gmail account. It’s just such a great service. The SPAM filters are amazing, the interface is responsive, and I can store anything I want for as long as I want and access it from anywhere. And I’m one of those people who never deletes an email – I have correspondence dating back to 1996 – that’s a lot of data and it’s growing all the time.