Moving my Internet Gateway

Up until yesterday I had been using wireless connections throughout the house. I have a Bigpond account with a wireless modem that was sitting in our bedroom. I wanted to move the modem into the computer room so that I could have a wired network. This would allow me to connect a NAS device to the network and have some semblance of decent speed within the network. Having a few unused telephone connections within the various rooms it was a simple matter of moving one of these. Well that should have been the case. I took the line that was in what used to be the study (previous owners) and moved it into the computer room. This was the obvious choice as the line only had to be moved about 2 metres (horizontally) to the opposite side of the wall. The new and old computer rooms are adjoining. After taking the tiles off the roof, disconnecting the plates, moving the wire, reconnecting the plates, and getting a dial tone it was time to try out the connection. Unfortunately the telstra message "the line you are using is not connected" was played when I dialed a number. OK so that line was no good. So I had to undo the line that was in my sons bedroom (checked that this line actually worked first), got into the ceiling, traipsed the line across multiple rooms and put it down the wall. Back inside connected it all up, and the line works. So I now have the modem/router all within connection distance of the computers and just need some LAN cable to connect it all together. A great way to spend the day. And I don't have the loss of signal from my modem that I sometimes experienced.

Newcastle Coders Group monthly meeting

I attended the latest monthly meeting of the Newcastle Coders Group last night (3 June 2009). On the agenda were talks discussing making application interfaces cool and using Ruby. The third item on the agenda was cancelled till next month. 'Cool’ Interface design with Luke Drumm Luke discussed the dynamics of a games engine and how it keeps a users interest by setting little tasks. Succesful completion of a task leads to the learning of skills which can be applied in future situations. This incremental skill level increase keeps the user happy and wanting to come back for more. The games paradigm is all about incentivising the user Luke compared the games interface mentality with the traditional business application approach which generally comes in one of 2 camps. Either the user is exposed to all the possible functionality and gets swamped with possibility, or the user has little exposure to functionality and at the same time is not shown how to progress. In either circumstance 95% of users use only 5% of an applications functionality. The main point that Luke put forward was that games designers treat the users like adults, with some intelligence, whereas business application designers treat users like children who need there hands to be held. (Please note that this conclusion came out in the discussion but has not been portaryed all that well in my discussion) Web Ready with Ruby with William Mason William gave a presentation about the ease of developing a website using Ruby. He was using the Ramaze framework. He built a basic food menu application and showed 4 iterations of the design. The adage that anything that can go wrong will go wrong in a presentation was very true. But he persevered and game a very quick overview of the design process. William used Netbeans as his IDE. Some useful (maybe) links that he gave are:

• http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/
• http://tryruby.hobix.com/
• http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

The thing that tied the 2 talks together for me is related to my experience with setting up a rails development environment. Luke says that people want to be treated like adults, which from his talk is based upon the premise that the user wants to investigate things for himself. There are times however when its good to be a child and being led by the hand is appreciated.

Microsofts New Search Engine

I have just used Microsoft's new search engine Bing and found it to be very useful. The little pop ups that appear next to the results, show additional information about the site. I used the search term "rapid evolutionary prototype webpages" and compared the results to google. The bing result returned more relevant answers to what I was wanting. Overall very impressed from first impressions.

Workshop 1: Setting up Ruby on Rails

Well I decided that the Win7 environment was a little bit too progressive to try and get the Ruby environment operational. I was getting security issues with the Aptana IDE not recognising the MySQL installation. I downloaded MySQL v5.1 and tried to install that. The installation stalled when it was trying to create the initialisation file, so I was unable to set the root password or create the admin user. So I decided to start again. Last night I created a new VM and loaded XP SP3. I then loaded MySQL v5.1 and the MySQL v5 GUI tools. This time the installation went off without a hitch and I was able to create the initialization file. I installed Aptana, then installed the RADRails perspective, which loaded all the relevant gems. I created a default/ test project using SQLlite3 and this worked fine, first go. That working I attempted to create a project using MySQL as the database. Unfortunately there are still errors being thrown and it is indicating that their are missing files relating to the MySQL gem. This fails midstep. So I have decided that their is little prospect for me to be able to learn anything if I continue trying to get MySQL to work. Consequently all further work will involve me using SQLlite3 as the database backend. And thanks to Ken for giving that the ok today.

Workshop 1: Loading MySQL

I have been attempting to get MySQL installed on my VM for the past few days, have had no luck and am not going to devote anymore time to it.

I goy the Aptana IDE installed, and it seems nice enough, and relatively easy to use. I followed the demo video on Saturday and had to replay the steps a few times to see what options they selected. I got the example to work. Was unable to get anything working if I chose MySQL as the default database. I get errors stating that the machine is denying the request. I don't have a screenshot of the error message unfortunately.

Having had no luck I decided that I would attempt to install MySQL on the VM. As I said above, this has proven to be unsuccessful. As this course is not about Installing and configuring MySQL I don't believe it is worth the time to track down the cause of the issue.

This is a screenshot of the Aptana IDE showing the working test project. It may be that I am impatient, or far to used to a Windows wizard as far as installations go. I say that because the InstantRails install that I did left a lot to be desired. If you install something why do you then have to actually find the documentation that tells you how to configure it. Why wasnt that part of the installation process. I experienced this with the MySQL install as well. I only found the InstantRails config documentation tonight when I was trying to fix up the MySQL install. Well thats enough for now, back to the exercises. Until next time ...

Exercise 1: Weirdness, response to Karens comment

The issue I was trying to bring to light can hopefully be better explained by the following 2 screen shots:
The first image shows the gap I am talking about.
The second screen shot displays the code that is somehow generating the gap.

Exercise 1: Getting weird and unexplained layout using a table.

You may be able to see my problem that is causing me to lose hair. Have just wasted umpteen minutes trying to get the table positioned correctly in the blog. But as you can see it is appearing WAY down the page. Has anyone experienced this before. I am not a html expert, have done very little in fact so not sure why this table is being pushed down. Hoping that someone could provide a hint.

Workshop 1: Learning Ruby

I downloaded the Audio (Lessons 1-8) from LearningRails and also the Screencasts (Lessons 9-23). Having never used a podcast in any form before, and not one to burn music, copying these to a format I could listen to in the car on the commute to and from work turned into a challenge that wasn't.

An aside:

The iTunes player didn't work very well in burning to disk. This may have been for a number of reasons. There may be a bug in Win7 RC that caused my DVD burner to lose itself intermittently. The burner itself may have had a problem. The iTunes interface may have been my problem.

In the end I stopped using my main machine and used my laptop. This is a dell XPS1330 and also has Win7 RC installed. This showed the benefits of the homegroups concept introduced in Win7, and the ease with which network setup and connections is now handled.

Now back to the point of the blog. I finally got the podcasts (audio lessons 1-8) copied onto 3 CDs. Listened to the first 6 episodes today and found that they give a very good, yet brief overview of the Ruby language. Hopefully 7 and 8 tomorrow will give me some idea about actually getting started with Ruby development.

Workshop 1: InstantRails success – Ruby now working

Got to have some fun with testing Win7 and creating a virtual machine. Worked fine after I had fiddled a bit with some of the settings.

Got my completely vanilla Win7 virtual machine set up about 4pm. Have run the InstantRails app and it has all worked.

Have played with the Cookbook app, sort of but am not sure what I am connected to. Have never played with a Hosts file before so am presuming that when changed to point mycookbook to 127.0.0.1 it worked, but when you run the site how do you tell?

Workshop 1: Ruby fun

I am having a wonderful time trying to get ruby to work.

I have downloaded itunes64, installed it and have proceeded to download lots of podcasts(in the learning rails series)

On unzipping the Instantrails zip file (this took longer than I expected, in the order of 5 minutes or so. Seems excessive for a 170MB expansion)and trying to run the InstantRails app was informed that my file path could not contain spaces. Painful to say the least.

Got a new path and copied all the files (only about 40000 of them)

Ran the InstantRails app and get the following error:

My machine is running Windows 7 64bit, have VS2008 professional installed with SQL2008 standard edition installed.

I guess this has something to do with SQL server??

Somewhere in all of this is the answer to my problems.

I may have to resort to creating a vanilla virtual machine with nothing installed. Unless someone has some other advice.

The documentation for installing Ruby leaves a lot to be desired.