DEfusion.org.uk

Just to get you up to speed if you don’t know what Hulu is and what situation is before I get to the rebuttal I found today:

Hulu is a (US only) website which allows you to stream TV shows (in pretty good quality) to your computer via Flash, it has deals with some of the major US TV companies and has shows added very shortly after they are originally aired and seem to stay available online for a long time (e.g. much more than the 7 days you get with the iPlayer). You get very few advert interruptions, roughly 4 or 5 for a program that would run an hour on TV, and the adverts generally only last around 15 seconds or so, aiming to take the amount of time that you would normally spend fast forwarding through 3+ minutes worth of adverts if you recorded a program on your PVR.

It really is a top-notch user experience and it is the kind of thing that could really take off big, and from what I’ve seen of other services is the closest thing in to my In an ideal world thoughts when I wrote about the BBC iPlayer over a year ago.
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I’ve just come across this post on dead simple task scheduling in Rails by the guys at intridea. It looks like a really nifty way to setup scheduled tasks in your Rails app, previously I had my tasks in rake files which I would then hit with cron.

While that is working perfectly adequately for my current setup it does have one downside, when I setup a new server I will have to setup the crontab file too. With this method when I deploy my app my scheduled tasks would get deployed and be running out of the box. Nice.

Yesterday I went for a root canal. I wasn’t entirely sure what the process involved and somewhere in the past I had gotten it into my head that a root canal could possibly be quite unpleasant. However I have never really had much of a problem with going to the dentist or having work done on my teeth so I wasn’t worried (much), but I can imagine that others might not be so lucky.

I had been referred to a dentist that specialises in doing root canals, so this was my first visit to this dentist and he did a few things that showed he really empathised with his customer.
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