16 Apr 2005
Ruby’s been a language I’ve wanted to try for some time now. Jon Udell’s reference to Ruby on Rails finally did it.
Ruby is close to Python and cleaner than Perl. Not a hard language to pick up. But Rails is the killer app. While everything has been done elsewhere Ruby on Rails remixes the techniques in such a fashion that it really works! A couple things that impress me so far:
- Setting up a Rails application is sooo smooth you don’t even need an IDE
- Database stuff is so cleanly done that you are freed up to think about what it’s supposed to actually do.
- I’ve been through the whole MVC thing before (java, etc.) but with Rails it is a good bit easier
My only gripe is I wish I had this with Python…
06 Apr 2005
Half Life 2/Counter Strike is a decent game. It’s definately a change of pace from Rainbow6. The story of Half Life goes deeper. My personal PC manages to keep up better than it does with Doom3…I may need to upgrade my mouse just to keep up tho.
There was one particularly rewarding game this past weekend. For some reason I seemed to do best with the big ass machine gun 😉 And at one point I found myself the last one alive. The bomb was set and ticking down… I came up along side some terrorists waiting to ambush. At least that’s what they thought. I let rip with damn near the entire belt of ammo and took them out before they knew what hit them. And then thru nothing but luck I managed to disarm the bomb with 2 seconds left! WOW!
05 Apr 2005
I tried to install WordPress a few months back but got tripped up during the process. There were too many other things were going on at the time…
WordPress requires a webserver, PHP and MySQL. This time around everything went off without a hitch. It took maybe fifteen minutes tops.
Tried a number of the themes available. There are quite a few great themes. In the end the default theme was modified toward consistency with the rest of the netsNbytes website–Plone, MediaWiki…
It is pretty cool that Tasks-jr has a feature that allows it to integrate with WordPress.
Most of what was in Drupal is now in WordPress. Nothing against Drupal but it was overkill for what I used it for. There were a few database problems using Drupal that consumed more time than I had…
05 Apr 2005
Tasks-jr requires a webserver — Apache2 in this case, PHP and MySQL. The actual setup is pretty simple for the most part. There is only one table in the database for Tasks Jr!
There was an issue with getting iCalendar going correctly. Tasks uses PHP iCalendar to present a calendar view of the task list. The calendar was displaying with holidays, etc. but the dates for the task items were not included. After some investigation of the php code the problem turned out to be the way that the netsNbytes.net website is configured. Tasks Jr is served up via self certified https. The php code that queried the iCalendar couldn’t handle the certificate. So I simply configured it to query the iCalendar on localhost to get around it.
calendar.php</p>
< ?
require_once('objects.php');
...
$URL=$custom-> ical_URL."month.php?cal=".'http://localhost/tasks-jr/ics.php'."&getdate=".date("Ymd");
...
header("Location: ".$URL);
?>
Evaluate Tasks-jr or Tasks Pro for project management is up next…
30 Mar 2005
“e-mail is like a boundless watercooler, magnifying the effect of gossip, jokesters and less positive communications many fold.”