Entries from February 2007 ↓

How many of you are like me and need the reminder to not cut the cord to your electric razor? I walked into my bathroom this evening and noticed this immediately and just started laughing. I couldn’t believe it was necessary to provide such caution. This ought to uplift my week by a lot.

I have been prolonging this long enough and finally decided to start reading the book I got for Christmas regarding Ruby on Rails. With all of the hype around this language, one has to wonder, why I am not trying this out? What is with all of the big fuss? Could I benefit from this language?

Well, I am here to start answering some of those questions. Ruby on Rails, has shocked me right out of the gate on how well it separates and forces you to separate the Business Logic from your User Interface. This is something you are taught to do in Web Development but many do not put it in practice.

My only nit-pick so far is I haven’t been able to get the MySQL interaction within Ruby to work just yet. I must be missing a package of some sort, but I am sure I will get it worked out shortly. In fact, I did just solve it. I was missing the libmysql-ruby library.

The book I am working with is ‘Ruby on Rails: Up and Running’ by Tate & Hibbs. It is an O’Reilly publication and I must admit, I love their books. They are easy to read and well broken up into chapters that are easy to manage in a few sittings. The book isunder 200 pages and assumes you know a bit of programming (not necessarily in Ruby, but in at least one language). It also assumes you know how to work with MySQL and you are capable of installing Ruby and Rails by yourself.

These assumptions are good, but I wish it would have pointed out I would need the MySQL library as that would have saved me an hour or two of going ‘WTF…’ why is ‘rake migrate’ displaying “rake aborted! Mysql::Error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query: SELECT version FROM schema_info”?

Anyways, I have that part up and running and so now I can continue on with the book. But to sum up my post, get the book, prepare yourself for problems and using Google or something similar to find the answer, as the book isn’t a problem solver, it is pretty much a tutorial.

For anyone who uses Linux, especially Ubuntu or Kubuntu, you will want to read this! I personally hate how Ubuntu and Kubuntu setup my partitions. They typically setup two partitions, the swap, and the rest of the hard drive. I personally prefer to have a partition for the following: / /boot /usr /var /tmp swap.

Now, the reason I hate how Ubuntu and Kubuntu do this, is it is very easy to fill up the entire drive and not know where the bulk of the data is. With separate partitions, when one fills, you know what caused it, or more specifically, what folder is growing too large. I use several development packages and pull down the source to a lot of packages for experimental use, and so a 160 GB drive can fill up fast. With that said, partitioning things out allows me to quickly identify where I need to allocate more storage, and put in a new drive to handle it.

I wish Ubuntu and Kubuntu would allow the Guided Partioning that Debian allows under expert mode to create a multi-partition setup.