Another reason to prefer Skidmore over Bowdoin – ask, and the network folks open up a hole in the firewall so that my box is available from off campus. Easy as pie. As a result you can now get to my work weblog and wiki from anywhere. Assuming you’re interested, that is. I do occasionally bring up interesting apps on the box, it’s basically my test machine at work. Anyway the best way to get there is from my official skidmore website, where you can find a link to my blog. I’m running WordPress 1.5 in test mode on that box (after yet another instance of snipsnap shit the bed on me – this is absolutely the last time I touch that package. Very cool ideas, decent implementation, mediocre stability and totally crappy documentation).
Ruby on Rails is completely awesome.
I’m having an experience similar to one I had 5-6 years ago when I first starting tinkering with XML, this feeling of ‘woah – this is going to change how I do everything!’ What’s causing it? Ruby on Rails, this completely awesome framework for building web apps. I first starting looking into it after reading through some of the stuff about the development of instiki, the excellent wiki engine I linked to a few weeks ago. It turns out that the development of instiki inspired the work that became Ruby on Rails. Anyone building web apps would be well served to do a little reading on RoR. I’d be curious to hear if you have a similar reaction to the one I had. A few good starting points:
- Drop dead simple tutorial which uses construction of a simple todo list as the sample application.
- onlamp.com’s tutorial – there is a second part to this one as well.
- a response to the onlamp tutorial on slash7.com. There are a couple of other really good posts about RoR on slash7 as well.
- An introduction to Ruby for non-programmers – Why’s Poignant Guide – this is just one of the best introductions to programming I’ve ever read – fun, funny, well written, and it has an elf with a pet ham. What more can you ask for?
To give former colleagues a sense of how good I think this stuff is, I’m fairly confident that I could rebuild the notoriously buggy and never quite finished Flight to Freedom project myself, without the assistance of a programmer or DBA. I’m almost tempted to do this just for the exercise.
Anyway, check it out if you’re doing web app development. I’m glad I’m not at Bowdoin any longer – in 4 years there I couldn’t convince them to give me access to PHP despite the fact that outside of Java virtually all interesting web app development was happening on that platform. God knows how long it would take them to give me Ruby. Here at Skidmore I’ve already got it up and running for myself and am experimenting with using Rails for a project I have slated for this summer.
My name is David, and I have an almond problem
I eat 2-3 pounds of raw almonds a week, and perhaps as much as 5 pounds of nuts and seeds in total. Shocking isn’t it? They’re one of my primary sources of protein. This gets expensive – at close to $7 a pound for the good kind, almonds cost substantially more than almost any other protein source I could buy. I’ve been looking for ways to save myself money on this. My average weekly grocery bill comes in at about $150, of which about $50-60 is seeds and nuts. Happily, I discovered this ebay auction. With shipping they ended up costing me just under $4 a pound, a substantial savings, and the nuts were much fresher than anything I’ve managed to get outside of a Trader Joe’s. They’re smaller than the ones I usually eat, but if you have an almond habit like mine, this is definitely the way to go.
Now I just need to find equivalent bargains on pecans and sunflower seeds.
Tivo’s bacon out of the fire?
The news is all over the tech sites today so I won’t bother linking to it, but it looks like Tivo signed a deal with Comcast yesterday to provide the interface for Comcast’s DVR’s. This is great news for Tivo fans. Let’s hope they have more tricks like this up their sleeve, including (to my view most importantly) a more rational and consumer friendly approach to DRM.
New ‘The Shield’ season starts tonight
If you haven’t seen it before, give The Shield a try tonight at 10pm on the FX network. I had no idea how great this show is until I caught a reference to it one night (on the screensavers of all places), which led me to the reviewer’s weblog. Long and short of it is that it’s a great show – if you enjoy the Sopranos or The Wire on HBO there’s more than excellent chance you’ll enjoy The Shield.
More Soolin pics
Yeah. So. Been pretty busy, haven’t been posting much. A number of folks have been asking for more Soolin pics, fortunately when I was visiting my Aunt Melissa this weekend she took a bunch ant put some up on her flickr site, so if you crave a glimpse of the ‘growing ever so rapidly’ Soolin, check out the link.
It’s raining wikis from the sky
Another day, another cool desktop wiki. This time it’s a macosx implementation of moinmoin that’s been bundled up and runs like a desktop app. It’s as easy to get up and running with as instiki is, but moinmoin is a more feature-rich wiki and the OSX gui that’s been wrapped around it makes it a bit easier to manage than instiki does and it comes with a handy data export/import feature. If you’re running OSX check it out, it’s a small download.
Promising new Diabetes research
What’s old is new again. Recent research shows that consumption of a beverage that contains the herb Salacia Oblonga, which has been used as medicinally in India for ages, helped folks reduce their post-prandial blood sugars by more than 25%. That would easily bring me into ‘human normal’ range. I’m going to try and acquire some to test on myself.
[edit] So I’ve been looking for sources of this herb on the net and not finding anything, aside from an indian import/export site where you can bid on bulk lots of the raw herb. I’ve already been burned once importing a bunch of stuff from india so I’m a bit leery, on the other hand the idea sort of intrigues me. Anyone want to go in on a lot of Salacia that we’ll then process down into extract for ebay sales? We’ll make a killing, I promise! (mostly kidding, though Andrew, you’re a likely candidate!)
Check out blockland
Imagine running around in a 3D world building stuff out of legos. Then go download blockland and have fun playing around. This is actually pretty cool stuff and is perfect if you’re looking for something non-violent for your kids to dink around with on the computer. It’s also free and built on garagegame’s Torque engine, so in theory should work on all platforms, though for now the main developer is only releasing win32 binaries. There are links in the forums to OS X binaries that others have put together. I’m testing this on my home windows box, I might pop up a server for folks to play with during the day while I’m at work.
Amazing bargain – free sql tool
Check out Aquafold’s aqua data studio, an sql visualization and editing tool that’s free for personal or educational use. Folks pay $$$ for tools like this in the commercial environment, it’s cool to see a company offer up a tool like this for free. If you’ve ever tried tinkering with mysql and struggled on the command line you will find this tool’s a godsend. Works across all platforms via java and also has binary downloads for Windows and OS X. If you’re running OS X these days there’s actually been a proliferation of these tools – YourSQL is my favorite but cocoamysql is also quite good. Any of the three is worth checking out if you’re interested in tinkering with mysql.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 