Defend your Castle (where you fling away attacking stick men) will be one of the first WiiWare games released.

Defend your Castle Wii version

The first video looks like part of a montage you’d see at the beginning of a Terminator or Matrix movie when we made our first mistake. The second one not so much.

SproutBuilder is probably the coolest Flex app I’ve seen yet. Picnik is great but Sprout blows my little mind.

They’re still in beta so you’ll get some errors if you have the debugger version of the Flash player.

And by ‘it’ I mean Blockbuster (and possibly Netflix but they’re a bit more agile). If weren’t one of the gazillion people hitting on the Engadget and Gizmodo live blogs Apple released a bunch of new shise today.

The MacBook Air will get most of the attention but I think Movie Rentals is a bigger deal because it revives the Apple TV as their stake in the living room. Think of all the companies that had (have) an in but have funked it up, Microsoft and Sony have the XBox and PS3, and were so preoccupied with the blue-ray HDDVD war they didn’t even think of adding a Movie Rental service into their boxes. If any one at Blockbuster had half a clue they would have been begging Microsoft/Sony to help them deliver movies over the net and into a gaming box. Instead Blockbuster can only see Netflix as its main competitor and copies their service while Apple sneaks past both of them.

Flickr on Apple TV is pretty cool too, I was *this* close to signing up for SmugMug account over Flickr pro literally two days ago (price and smugmug’s craptastic templates were the deciders then).

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For a long time deployment has been the giant stinky Grey elephant in the beautiful Ruby colored room. Rails makes developing an app a joy but for many, including me, deployment has been a bit of a nightmare. If you wanted shared hosting you went with folks who seemingly built their Rails set up by the seat of their pants; only allowed production apps with no errors (yeah right), killed your apps (sans restart), had non-existent tech support, or worst of all a magical combination of all of the above (I think I’m still waiting for my Dreamhost activation letter). The other solution, which I opted for, was to roll your own hosting on a VPS or dedicated server which involved a lot of research, conflicting docs, and the horror that is FastCGI. Mongrel has saved my arse on the private server front, and now it will be the foundation of Rails hosting for Media Temple’s new Grid Server (gs).

Putting the dog in the box

Each (gs) account has the ability to create Rails Containers into which you install Rails, MySQL AND/or PostgreSQL bindings and of course Mongrel. You then create your Rails app ‘rails appname’, create a user for managing the app, generate a .htaccess file, create a sym link and um… that’s it! You can then start/stop/restart your app with ‘mtr start appname’.

That is by far the easiest Rails install I’ve ever done shared or otherwise. A lot of gems are installed already and if anything is missing you can install it. There’s also up to 1GB of dedicated RAM for Ruby Apps. I’ve been helping beta test the setup and my apps are running on the (gs) as fast if not faster than on my VPS server that Media Temple also hosts.

Bu wait there’s more… Capistrano support is baked right in.

What else do I get?

I mentioned you can choose between MySQL or PostgreSQL dbs, PHP4 or PHP5 (if you must), plans start with 50GB of storage space and 1TB of Bandwidth, multi-site hosting with unique users for each host (i.e. sales@site1.com and sales@site2.com won’t conflict) and the whole reason it’s called the grid - you can expand instantly in case of traffic emergencies. Last but not least 24/7 tech support online or by phone.

I know this sounds like they’re paying me (no, but if you sign up make sure to put ‘vixiom.net’ in the referral box). I’m excited because they’ve met or surpassed all my Rails hosting needs and I don’t even have to switch companies! A lot of my projects for smaller clients can now be hosted for a fraction of a VPS or dedicated server.

Thank you (mt)! With a special thanks to Nate for answering all my RoR questions.

*UPDATE* Here’s a coupon for 10% off

Here’s a shot of the new control panel:

Adobe have created a great interactive overview of Flash for it’s tenth anniversary. The piece itself is a showcase for what the Flash player can now do, audio, video, and advanced interaction (make sure to give the world a spin with your mouse).

They do break two of the Vixiom design rules

1. Don’t use overly long transitions between content (cool the first time, annoying thereafter)
2. Kern all type including numbers!!! (All the years in the 90s, 1996 etc., have a gap you could drive a truck through after the ‘1′, my typography professor would have failed them on the spot)

Found a great website historyshots.com selling information graphic prints. A perfect storm for design nerds.