Rails tip: restful_authentication without a username

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I've personal never understood the point of having a username for web sites when 99% of them also require an email address that is unique to you - just use the email address! In the world of Rails development many developers use the excellent restful_authentication to provide the user login structure, but again out of the box it uses a username. Silly thing. So instead, here's how to make restful_authentication sit rather happy with just an email address.

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Dupe Windows drive images in VirtualBox

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VirtualBox is a pretty good virtual machine system from Sun Microsystems that has several key benefits:

  • It's free, whereas most others are commercial and can cost a chunk of change,
  • It's multiplatform, so a company can standardize on it across all of their supported systems.

It seems to be pretty capable in regards to running client operating systems - it has a menu which lets it automatically configure itself for a wide variety of Windows releases, UNIX distributions, etc.

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Google earth to increase mapping detail

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Google's mapping systems (Google Maps, Google Earth, plus anything else in the skunworks) will soon have extra detail down to the half-meter / 1.5 feet mark thanks to an exclusive deal with the company launching a new geo-imagery satellite later this week:

This will be good for me trying to map out my favorite haunts back home. What's your take?

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Working around Exchange Webmail / OWA constant logoffs

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I've always found that Exchange's webmail system, aka "Outlook Web Access", to be extremely buggy regarding remembering who you are. It sets sessions cookies with a pretty far-away timeout but regardless of whether I'm connected via a VPN or from the public internet it always delights in logging me out as quickly as it can. Well, I've worked out a work-around for these all too frequent occurrences. Here's what you do:

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