March 2006 Archives

For everyone that wondered why fedora used mono in fedora core 5. They have released a statement about why.

Here are a few of the smaller changes that made it into Rail 1.1. They maybe small but the look very useful.

I just checked my mail and Rails 1.1 is out. Read DHH's post for more info.

A few minutes ago I stumbled across the Rails Recipes forum. Then I saw a link to it's code called opinion. Here is a overview from its trac.

Opinion is a Ruby on Rails based Forum system that tries to approximate a "blog <-> comment" system rather than imitating busy and noisy traditional forum solutions that already exist.

To get VMware running:

1. Install the linux vmware rpm
2. Download http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/vmware-any-any-update98.tar.gz
3. Untar it and cd into the created directory
4. Execurte: './runme.pl' as root

This information was found here.

Start testing...

Here is a list of changes from 1.0

Sorry to disappoint, but today was worthless. The talks just weren't worth reporting on. But I did see some of the city today. Washington is a lot bigger than I thought it was. I didn't see very much of it but I did see the Washington Monument, the WWII Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Korean War Memorial, and the Air "and" Space Museum.

Pictures

I started the day with Timecruiser Corporate Presentation -- Portals for mortals. This was a decent talk given by the two Daves. One Dave was a peon the other was a vice president. This was the first time I looked at CampusCruiser. It seamed to be pretty customizable in the design/css sense, not the programmable sense. There were two things that I thought were interesting.

1. They support single sign on with moodle (an open source learning management system).
2. They are building their own course management system into CampusCruiser.

And to honest I thought there CMS was much better that blackboard.

Next was HiJax Your UniData Data to the web. I don't remember their names but they called themselves code monkeys. Basicly, the presented a way of pulling data out of unidata using tomcat/.jsp as middle ware providing XML to the calling program. They showed us an example of one of there web sites and seems to work well and preformance was good too. The best part was they gave us some of there source code. I'll have to see if I can talk Raymond into letting be try it.

Then there was Upgrading to Web 2.0. This was the best talk I attended today. His talk was very well formatted and structured. The other talks were mostly run by people that you could tell were a little uncomfortable talking in front of people. The best quote from him was "I don't buy the false religion of PHP". He showed us some of his ajax based web apps that pulled data out of unidata. One site made use of an applying student's preferred address and made a Frapper type map of there locations. He did other things with directory and a google suggest like interface. I plan to go to his next talk tomorrow.

Then I went to Cascading Style Sheets for WebAdvisor 3.0. The whole time I'm thinking I've been here before. It really wasn't that informative. Most of the information you can find by looking in .css files.

Web Single Sign On (beta) with Version 3's Simple Sign-On. This talked wasn't what I expected. I didn't get much out of it.

This was my first real day at the conference. The first thing I noticed was the people treated each class as one of two types.

1. Run by datatel
2. Not run by datatel

During the question sections people would just lay into them. Seemly trying to make the datatel people cry.

The first class I went was R18 New Release System. The guys talk went well, only a few problems with his presentation. But he was from datatel so during the question, off came his head. The most memorable event was one woman that didn't understand the purpose of the code revision version and the fact that you can back changes out once you had applied an update. I thought for a second she was going to rush the stage.

Then I went to the R18 Migration class. This one wasn't run by datatel so the crowd was much more pleasant. Questions we asked but no blood was letted.

After lunch was the Running Colleague on Linux class. The class was good. The guys talking ware really honest about their problems. Plus they gave us little penguins. Another cool thing was that they wrote there own web student information app. I look much better than web advisor and had much more functionality.

Next was the Intergrating Web Services with WebAdvisor and Novell Products. I know what you're thinking. I went because I wanted to see how they the got the data out of Datatel and Novell. Their solution won't working for us because they have oracle as a backend database and can query it directly.

The last talk was Troubleshooting WebAdvisor 3.0. This was also a datatel talk so I expected the worst, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I guess people were tired and wanted to leave so they didn't bother these guys so much. There talk was good but a little boring and there attempts to make little jokes didn't work. But I will download the powerpoint for future reference.

Over all an interesting first day. People really have some issues with datatel but at the end of the day they are still datatel clients(and may God have mercy on their souls).

Steve Yegge at O'Reilly Ruby has a blog post called Transormation. This is an article about refactoring and it a good read.

Rake, if you couldn't tell by the name, is Ruby mAKE . You can make tasks and set dependencies all in ruby. Here is an example:

Rakefile:

task :hello do
print "Hello, "
end

task :world => [:hello] do
puts "World!!"
end

Then from the command line:

rake world

and you get:

(in /Users/robert/ruby)
Hello, World!!

As you see by running the world task it runs its dependency before hand. Rake also does file time dependency. So if you build a task that needs files to be built it checks the file stamp and determines if any thing has changed and the files need to be rebuilt just like make and unlike ant.

Anyway, here are the official docs for rake. And here is the API.

Just in case you've not heard of him. Why_ is a very active member of the ruby community. He has written many modules. For example:
* YAML
* Camping
* Markaby

He also has two ruby tutorials.
* why's (poignant) guide to Ruby
* Try Ruby

He has many web sites, but the one I use the most is RedHanded.

why_ is a lunatic that you have to keep your eye on.

Here is an article about using lighttpd with rails on FC4. So if you've been curious about lighttpd here's your chance to try it out.

Guess there was a conference called "The Future of Web Apps". I never heard of it before today. The cool thing is they have the audio from the talks on their site.