Monthly Archives: June 2007

The on going experance with Ruby on Rails

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The experimental Ruby on Rails application is plodding along nicely, so far I have about six database tables with relationships between a number of them, and I’m getting it to display meaningful data from them.

I’m slowly starting to get my head round how to set up table relationships. Over the weekend I expect to have the first pass at a workable data model that records most of the required database. This is going slowly as I’m only getting to spend about an hour a day on this project.

It’s likely that I may be in a position to publish some working code late in July (or early August).

York Minster Ceiling

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York Minster Ceiling

Here’s a photo for those not wanting to read about technical things. It’s one of the many I took in York Minster on our recent holiday there.

I can only post old photo’s for  a short while as I’ve not made it out with my camera for the last week or two, as it’s been almost constantly raining up here on any occasion I could get out. I’m hoping to get out and take more at the start of next month.

Ruby on Rails (take 2)

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Since Saturday I’ve carried on looking at Ruby on Rails and so far I’m very impressed. While reading though the first part about of Agile Web Development with Rails, I wrote a simple web application which displays some data from a single database table, requires a logged in session to change data and always has user management via the admin interface. I don’t think I could have gotten this much done in so little time (and code) in any other language.My next target to get a better understanding of the data model system and set up some inter-table relationship. In about a month or so the application may very well worth publishing.

Ruby on Rails

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Last night I went to ScotRUG mainly to meet mathie, but also to find out what all the fuss is about and so far I like what I’ve heard. It being like Python (without the whitespace) is a good thing as Python has been my programming language of choice for many years.

While thinking about starting this blog I was looking at PHP, trying to get my head round it as a programing language (which is a title I don’t think it really deserves). From the few hours that I spent tying to code a simple application, the vile and loathing for PHP has come back in force.

So today I’m going to try and find my first Ruby on Rails book as I generally want to learn more about Agile Development methods and Rudy on Rails. There’s that itch forming to write something while learning Ruby on Rails, which should be interesting as I’ve never written a web application before. Also my new book on CSS can be put to good use.

Update: I’ve now got 2 Ruby on Rails books, read the first few chapters of Agile Web Development with Rails and so far it sounds like a very nice framework, next is getting an environment set up and the staple hello world!

Some sort of Thistle

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Between the large amounts of rain today we managed a quick walk in Holyrood park. It’s a wonderful place, but it’s getting really hard to take photos there which are different enough from the many others I’ve taken over the last 6 months.

This is one that stands out from in the set I’ve put on Flickr. Thistles do make really good subjects.

The lack of a open source configuration management database ?

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Recently I had given Cisco technical study a rest and did some reading about other logistical aspects of running a complex networks. There are plenty of tools to version control your software and configuration files (e.g. CVS, RCS, Subversion). However there seems to be almost a total lack of tools which allow you to track the larger picture about your systems and devices on the network.

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