Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

A while back I wrote about the Dept. Head Rawlings series of hi-tech super-spy thriller "op-eds" on The Onion.

I suspect the anonymous author of the series may have read that blog post, as when I wasn't looking, Rawlings returned to the Onion, with a new problem, and a new member on his team at the Department for Special Acquisitions and Liquidations...

Which is why Mr. Bisson is here. Some of you know Mr. Bisson, and I'm sorry you have to see him again. His specialty has become less common since the heady 1970s, but his services are still quite useful to us.

[...]

Bisson, you have your assignment. I have faith in your, shall I say, unorthodox skills and experience.

While some readers may see this as explaining my tendency to suddenly vanish on unexplained foreign trips, I'm afraid I'm going to be sticking to my cover story still just a technology journalist and not, as Rawlings says, "the world's most seductive catamite assassin".

At least the problem with the Thanatos device seems to have been solved.

Aptana is a JavaScript editing and debugging tool.

As it's based on Eclipse, it's available for most platforms. Along with the JavaScript tools there's also a Ruby on Rails plug-in, and support for Adobe's AIR SDK.

The learning curve is quite short (and shorter still if you've used Eclipse or any other Eclipse-derived IDEs), and the code completion tools are efficient - and also work with any libraries you're using. I've been using it to do some AJAX and JSON development for an article I'm working on, and I have to say it's really rather decent. It's helped me track down some rather silly formatting errors I made while I was writing code to work with Flickr's JSON search API, saving me quite a bit of time. I also found the Outline view helpful as it let me quickly hop from function to function (and see what was calling what - and when).

A recommended tool.