Saturday, September 10, 2005
Getting all technical
No, not techno.
In light of it being summer, I'm currently going through what some might call "academic withdrawl". I strangely yearn to buy every book at Barnes & Noble and just spend the rest of my life reading about programming languages and web design.
I've been spending some time learning Ruby on Rails, and let me tell you, it is pretty sweet. I now have enough knowledge to put together a working schema and site, which is not too bad for such a short amount of time. Now I just need to learn AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) so that I can make some sweet change-the-page-without-reloading-it actions ala Google maps/mail/personalized and also CSS so that my pages aren't all ghetto black & white where the most exciting style change is when I bold some words.
Ruby, Rails, AJAX, and Penguins
What I'm using as a learning project for Ruby on Rails is something I've been thinking about for a while. Basically it is a database with information about different Linux distributions. My reasoning behind this comes from looking at DistroWatch all the time- seeing a new version of some distro that has come out and wondering "OK, so what makes this one different?"
The idea behind this project is that someone could go through the process of entering a new distro and choosing from categories that it might differ in from other distros (i.e. does it use KDE, Gnome, or something else?). I also want it to be extensible in the respect that if your distro uses "something else", you can enter that item (like, say XFCE) so that other people entering distros can re-use the information you have entered. To make it even more customizable, I want users to be able to add categories, like desktop environment, DHCP client, package management program, installation defaults, etc. Amazingly, I made this idea become a reality in the form of a set of web pages in one day using Ruby on Rails. We're not talking a full day either, this was like 2 hours when I woke up, 2 inthe afternoon, then an hour or so before bed. Like I said, all that's really left now is to make it look nice and to put some AJAX code in it so that if you choose "Other" for an item or click "Next Category" that it adds the necessary form fields to the page immediately. I think down the road I might also want to find a way to make it wiki-like so that if sometime replaces the description for Fedora with "TEH N00B DISTRO", then we can roll it back to when it was something useful. More on my RoR work before long.
Lastly, I leave you with:
CK's favorite OSX apps (so far)
Current Music: Scott Weiland - But Not Tonight
Link of the Day: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby - cartoon foxes teach you about Ruby (eventually)
Quote of the Day:
OK, now for the techno.
In light of it being summer, I'm currently going through what some might call "academic withdrawl". I strangely yearn to buy every book at Barnes & Noble and just spend the rest of my life reading about programming languages and web design.
I've been spending some time learning Ruby on Rails, and let me tell you, it is pretty sweet. I now have enough knowledge to put together a working schema and site, which is not too bad for such a short amount of time. Now I just need to learn AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) so that I can make some sweet change-the-page-without-reloading-it actions ala Google maps/mail/personalized and also CSS so that my pages aren't all ghetto black & white where the most exciting style change is when I bold some words.
Ruby, Rails, AJAX, and Penguins
What I'm using as a learning project for Ruby on Rails is something I've been thinking about for a while. Basically it is a database with information about different Linux distributions. My reasoning behind this comes from looking at DistroWatch all the time- seeing a new version of some distro that has come out and wondering "OK, so what makes this one different?"
The idea behind this project is that someone could go through the process of entering a new distro and choosing from categories that it might differ in from other distros (i.e. does it use KDE, Gnome, or something else?). I also want it to be extensible in the respect that if your distro uses "something else", you can enter that item (like, say XFCE) so that other people entering distros can re-use the information you have entered. To make it even more customizable, I want users to be able to add categories, like desktop environment, DHCP client, package management program, installation defaults, etc. Amazingly, I made this idea become a reality in the form of a set of web pages in one day using Ruby on Rails. We're not talking a full day either, this was like 2 hours when I woke up, 2 inthe afternoon, then an hour or so before bed. Like I said, all that's really left now is to make it look nice and to put some AJAX code in it so that if you choose "Other" for an item or click "Next Category" that it adds the necessary form fields to the page immediately. I think down the road I might also want to find a way to make it wiki-like so that if sometime replaces the description for Fedora with "TEH N00B DISTRO", then we can roll it back to when it was something useful. More on my RoR work before long.
Lastly, I leave you with:
CK's favorite OSX apps (so far)
- Instant Messaging: Adium
- Text Editor: TextMate
- FTP: Cyberduck
- VNC: Chicken of the VNC (hee hee!)
- IRC: Colloquy (IRC has never been so sexy)
- MySQL frontend: YourSQL
- Note Taking: OmniOutliner (pasting from OmniGraffle for drawings)
- Web Browser: I still don't know... Safari is decent... trying Firefox 1.5 right now, though.
- Collaboration: SubEthaEdit (multiple people can edit a document at the same time, why hasn't someone done this sooner?!)
- Network Utils:
- KisMAC (for finding the networks)
- Ethernal (for sniffing the data)
- System Utils:
- SizzlingKeys (for controlling iTunes)
- MenuMeters (for seeing what's happening)
- Growl (for getting notified)
- Games (let's be realistic here... I have a trackpad and don't want to buy a "mac edition" second copy of every game I own)
- TuxRacer
- Frozen Bubble
Current Music: Scott Weiland - But Not Tonight
Link of the Day: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby - cartoon foxes teach you about Ruby (eventually)
Quote of the Day:
jewong@chimera:~ $ lschimera is our server. ls is what you type to list files in a folder. Segmengation fault means the program is broken. jewong is Jeff, the guy who runs the server. Not shown is Jeff bashing his head against the wall and screaming obscenities (ok, so maybe that didn't happen but it's funny to picture). This is why my blog was down for a bit.
Segmentation fault.
jewong@chimera:~ $
OK, now for the techno.
# posted by CK @ 5:36 PM 
