Archive for July, 2005
I don’t know why, but I can’t stop listening to Saves the Day lately. Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post.
I don’t think it has one, to be honest with you. Just wanted to drop a line and say hello. Give you all an update on my Rails progress. And other fun tidbits, I guess.
Rails is going surprisingly well. It’s a great framework and Ruby is a great language. I had problems learning even a little bit of Python, but Ruby has been a snap so far. Probably because it’s so spoken and only has two types of arrays (Python has at least 3). Not to mention the useful help you (usually) get from the IRC channel.
My first big project has actually been going well. I’ve locked down the alpha version and I’ve started really digging into to the beta. It’s a gaming database that’ll eventually support game blogging and commenting. It’ll also generate custom reports that can be saved out to PDF. Yeah, I know, sounds adventurous and over-the-top. It is. But you always do a cannonball to get over the shock of cold water.
So what does it do right now? Well, you can add games and consoles of course. Users have to log in to do anything that modifies the database. In the beta version, users can modify their profile to list their email address and a short bio of them. I’m thinking of adding a file upload so you can post a picture, but I haven’t decided yet. I’m leaning towards yes, though, since that’d make an easy addition to the blog side of it.
All in all this has taken me about 4 or 5 days of really working on it (not just poking at Rails). I’ve had a few people beta testing it, and I’d post the link here, but my host just took down Ruby support last night until some issues get sorted out (server kept crashing).
I’ve become a bit of an evangelist for Rails, too, it seems. I’ve posted about it several times on here and I’ve gotten Ray, Manny, and Pete all interested in it. I think Ray’s the only one who’s actually stuck a foot into it, though. It’d be really handy to have a Rails expert on my AIM list, though. Maybe I’ll have to try and fill that role for the others.
So, enough about Rails and programming. Elaine and John and I went to their mother’s house over the weekend. We ended up watching Howl’s Moving Castle ’cause we all love Miyazaki’s movies. It was typical Studio Ghibli goodness. I recommend it to anyone who likes animation, be it Japanese or not.
Well, I guess that’s about it for now. I’ve been working on a simple Rails app (damnit, there I go again) to use as a tutorial for any who are interested. Leave me a comment and if there’s some responce, I’ll finish it and post how to do it. It’s a shopping list. I’ll try to add in some nifty AJAX or something to make it more worthwhile.
By the way:
Which Family Guy character are you?
Ray Thinks This is Fun (part II)
July 18
So I just get back from a weekend at my mother-in-law’s and what do I find? THIRTY-NINE calls to my server in one day for one MP3 from one MySpace site. So you know what it got replaced with. :)
Shooting Out the Spotlight
July 14
So I’ve been trying out the amazing TextMate application for my Rails development needs. It’s a great little text editor that has a nice feature of saving a project. You open up/create all the files that relate to a particular piece of work, be it XHTML and CSS files or Ruby documents or even whole folders. Folders auto-update, too. Add something new to a folder and it’s new contents are added into the project listing. You save projects so you can pull them back up with a double-click on the file. Saves a lot of time.
Well, being that I’m using OS X Tiger, and I have this supposedly-nifty new feature of Smart Folders, I thought to myself “I’m going to make this easy and have a Smart Folder of all of my TextMate projects.”
Now, for those of you not familiar with Smart Folders, they’re basically a saved Spotlight search. Spotlight is, of course, the much-lauded new search feature in OS X Tiger that searches through little tags attached to all of your files (as well as their contents, filename, created date, modified date, etc…) giving you really fast access to them. Just hit the hotkeys/click the icon, type in what you want, and away you go.
Yesterday I decided to give it a go and hit my Finder’s File menu and chose “New Smart Folder”. It brought up a window and I typed “TextMate project” into the text box I was given after choosing “Other” for the Kind. The little circle spun, the beachball spun. Nothing came into the window. It actually crashed Finder after about 10 minutes. “Wow,” I thought. So I decided to give good ol’ Spotlight a chance on it’s own.
Clicked the icon, typed in “TextMate project.” A few minutes go by, nothing. Typed in the name of the project, “Gaming.” Another few minutes, nothing. The word in my head was anything but “wow” at this point.
So, I decide to give my best friend a try. I hit the Quicksilver hotkey and when it’s comforting bezel popped up, I typed in the name of the file. Something like 0.666543 seconds later it was showing me my file. A single return launched TextMate and pulled up the file I wanted.
Now, granted, I did go back and search on Quicksilver for “TextMate project” and nothing came up. But Quicksilver isn’t made for searching fileTYPES like Spotlight supposedly is.
I got on my computer around 7:30 a.m. this morning. At probably 7:35 a.m. I decided to try the Smart Folder of TextMate projects again. It’s now 8:15 a.m. and it’s yet to return a single result.
Spotlight just became about as useful as the dock.
Fugazi
July 13
To make up for the last few weeks of no MP3s, I’m going to help educate Manny. He says he’s never heard Fugazi, so here are two of my favorite Fugazi songs.
The first is from their Repeater + 3 Songs album and is probably my favorite of their songs. The second is from 13 Songs. If you haven’t heard them, then listen. If you have heard them, listen anyway.
Addendum: Thanks Ray for catching that.
Omen
July 8
Yesterday was the bloodiest day on English soil since World War II. Four bombs in the morning rush hour.
I hate violence. I’m not a pacificst and I can’t live by non-violence (I admire Gandhi tremendously, but I just don’t have that kind of control over myself). I’m also a bit of a hardass on subjects like this. Before I get to any of that, though, Elaine pointed something out to me last night that’s kind of spooky.
She has a day calendar that sits by her bedside of quotes from the Dalai Lama. Usually just inspiration bits taken out of context which sometimes leaves them a bit confusing. Anyway, yesterday’s was:
Violence, once it starts, is by its nature very unpredictable. Originally you intend limited use of force. Then counterreaction. Difficult to stop. Devastation. So always, I feel, it is better to avoid.
Holy crap. Like I said, spooky. But pay special attention to some of his words in it later on in my post.
Anyway, horrible bombings. Innocents should never die for the actions of governments or organizations. Whoever is behind this deserves to be brought to justice. But in that is the Dalai Lama’s point.
Someone, probably the US and UK, will take it upon themselves to hunt down whoever is responsible for this and make them pay. Fine and dandy, you say. I agree. If it was done that way. It won’t be, though. Look at Afghanistan and Iraq. Yes, the Taliban attacked us (we won’t go into any mitigating circumstances into why they would want to attack us, though). But instead of rousting the Taliban, we started bombing Afghanistan. Yes, they eventually toppled and left (for awhile, as they’re coming back now), but we killed hundreds — thousands — of innocents in the process. Creating more violence.
Then, before the job was done of bringing those responsible — Al Qaeda by all reports, notably Osama Bin Laden — we left to pursue another goal. I don’t care if you think Iraq was a good idea or a bad idea. It was a horrible idea at that time and place. The Taliban, those who attacked us, were on the run. They were pinned down in a mountain range, scared, hungry, and I’m sure wounded, and we left to pursue other goals. I know we didn’t pull out and leave them to do as they pleased, but we most definitely eased the pressure. Drastically.
Violence begats violence. Those who were wounded and hurt, both innocent and guilty, in Afghanistan don’t care about our wellbeing. They have no reason to.
In Iraq we toppled another government (are there any countries (other than most of Europe, of course) that we haven’t puppeteered?) and caused more harm and bloodshed. There weren’t many active terrorist cells and groups in Iraq before we went in. Not like there are today. Part of the reason they’ve been labelled “insurgents” is because they’ve surged in. Our violence of entering Iraq and deposing the government begat the violence of increased terrorism in the area.
Egypt recently last an emissary to Iraq to terrorists in the country. Would they have lost him without our being there? Probably not. Egypt seems to be highly regarded in the Middle East. Now, though, with this climate of terror and violence, no one is safe.
Back to the Dalai Lama’s words. “Then counterreaction.” Notice it’s counterreaction. Not counteraction or reaction, but counterreaction. We’ve acted, they’re responded, and we respond again. So the violence doesn’t stop after we fight or fight back. It doesn’t stop after we fight back a second or third time, either. It’s a never ending chain of reactions. “Difficult to stop. Devastation.”
I can’t think of anything more devastating than the loss of innocents. People that had no reason dieing. I’m not talking of the people in the World Trade Centers. Not them alone, at least. Nor the people commuting in London. The commuters in Madrid last year. The weddings and schools and hospitals we’ve attacked in Iraq and Afghanistan, to take out a “terrorist threat”. Or a supposed threat, in the cases of the weddings.
Some of you may feel I’m a cold-hearted bastard over this. Maybe you think I’m not American (to me, protest is patriotism) ’cause I feel we have created cause (not necessarily just cause, mind you) for being attacked. I don’t believe we should be killed in our homes and in mass situations like September 11th, 2001. But I believe every life is sacred and special, be they Muslim, Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist. No one is Iraq is any more or less special than anyone in Canada or the United States or North Korea. Every human is of equal importance and value and each is worth saving.
“An eye for an eye just makes the whole world blind.” — Gandhi
Baby, It Will Be Alright
July 5
Guess this is the obligatory weekly post. I swear I really was going to write more often. Who knew my life would suddenly become so boring?
Anywho, the Ruby on Rails learning is still going well. I haven’t had a lot of time to sit and work on stuff, but I’m satisifed that I have a good grasp on the simple bits of the language. Manny has bought the Agile Web Development With Rails book for me, which should get here this week. Hopefully it kickstarts me into ever expanding realms of Rails goodness.
I had a fun eye-opening experience this weekend as far as programming goes, actually. Elaine needed a todo list application that she could use at work. Well, she’s restricted to IE 5.2/Mac there, so tadalist was out. My host doesn’t support Ruby on Rails yet, so I couldn’t just move the application I had made here at home, and my ISP is an intrusive whore, so I couldn’t just open some ports and redirect her here. So what’s a geek to do?
I sat down on Friday night to write a todo list for her in PHP. I wrote some more on Sunday. I finished it on Monday. That’s three days I spent on it, writing script after script to handle pointless little functions just to give the needed functionality. I finally finished it with about twice the code of my Ruby app (counting the rhtml templates for output) but without some of the nicer functionality of the Ruby app. For example, the Ruby app features checkboxes next to each item that can be checked to mark the item as done (moving it to the done section of the page). I didn’t even want to think about doing that in PHP. So I didn’t. Twice the code, half the functionality.
I really hope my host gets Ruby on Rails installed soon, since I’d love to be able to share some of what I’m trying to make and maybe help spread the word and education of Rails.
OK, enough geek talk. My parents came up over the weekend, since it was a long holiday, and we got to spend some time with them. Don’t get to see them as often as we’d like, so it was nice to have them around. On Sunday we (my parents, Elaine, John, and I) went to the War Eagle Grist Mill and then to Eureka Springs. The Mill is a lot of fun. You can splash around in the river that powers the Mill or go inside and buy stuff. They also have two annual arts & crafts shows, if you’re into that sort of thing. So, we waded and skipped rocks (we all suck, except my dad who is an old master), then went inside and tasted samples and bought foodstuffs.
After the Mill we all drove off to Eureka Springs to eat lunch at Bubba’s, which is the absolute best barbecue place you will ever try. The best. Best, you hear. But they weren’t open, buggers, so we ended up at a catfish restaurant where John and I taught a couple of my cousins some dastardly devices (homemade blow guns and how to freeze stuff with cans of compressed air). Then everyone split up and it was just my parents and Elaine and I.
We drove around the town awhile, stopping by the Christ of the Ozarks statue and the Crescent Hotel. Neither of them really impressed Elaine. I had seen them both before as my parents rarely went anywhere other than Eureka Springs for vacation. Finally we ended up getting ice cream and then drove home. Elaine and I took my parents on a walk around the neighborhood here (right at 1.87 miles) and then everyone was tired and they went back to their hotel. They left early on Monday.
Monday saw us doing a whole lot of nothing. Mostly just getting stuff organized and taken care of around here. I fell asleep on the floor for a couple of hours. Those are some of the best naps to me. Anyway, eventually John met up with us for dinner and fireworks, which we watched on a friend’s lawn. They were really nice. We were close enough to feel the boom, but not so close as to have burning ash fall on us. Then it was home to bed.
I know a lot of you don’t like the “here’s what I did this week” posts, but that’s too bad. I don’t have anything else to write!