Greetings from RubyFools in Copenhagen

The first RubyFools ever is placed at the IT university of Copenhagen. The buildings have just been build, and everything is nice beautiful, straightlined and very grey and Danish.

Dave Thomas gave the introduction keynote, where he talked about why he is a ruby fool. As it is custom, the keynote didn't really introduce anything, but was just a nice relaxed talk about the things that Dave likes about the language.

Listing to the talk, it seems to me ( even if it makes me sound old) like history is repeating it self. Some of the things that Dave points out as the new good things about Ruby is also some of the arguments for leaving C++ and go to Java:

.- multi paradigm language,
-.- OOP, prototype based, almost functional
.- expressiveness
-.- lots of ways to say the samething

After listing these things he went on to say the it was imperfect, and said that was a good things, things "Perfection is the enemy of all creation" (He was very convincing and I agree with him on this point)

Then followed some notes about how much Ruby and the community had grown.

always remember
TO HAVE FUN


-- pictures will be added when I can --

My list

I have this list of things that I should study, to get up-to-date on the new things in the computer science world. The list changes all the time, but today its:

1. Ruby programming language
2. Javascript
3. Ruby on Rails.
4. RestFULL webservices.
5. Git (version Control system)
6. Behaviour Driven Development(BDD)
7. erlang (Erlang is a general-purpose concurrent programming language)

To support the first element on the list, I was encouraged to buy the following books:
- The Ruby Programming Language
- JavaScript the Definitive Guide.

Anybody ( if anybody reads this) have anything else...

A dead horse

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

I found this page that describes this old saying and (if you follow the link) gives a few stupid examples of what businesses today do when they discover that they are in fact riding smelly one.

Cant help wondering how many people are currently riding a dead horse, and knows it. one can always say that there is fair risk that a software project fail, but thinking back on projects and friends projects, there is a surprisingly large number of riders who have been on dead horses and knew it was dead.

What about your project, is that a dead horse.....

rails 2.0 with sql-server


gem install activerecord-sqlserver-adapter --source=http://gems.rubyonrails.org


get the Ruby-dbi from this site rubyForge

After downloading it, use WinAce (or something else )to unpack the files and copy the following file lib/dbd/ADO.rb to /ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/DBD/ADO/ADO.rb

Now insert the following in the database.yml file (in \config dir of your rails app)

development:
adapter: sqlserver
database: "DATABASENAME"
host: .
username: "USERNAME"
password: "PASSWORD"

where databasename, username, and password (remove comeplete tag) should be inserted. and if the sql server is not running on the local host, then the "." should be exchanged to the proper path. fx. if my server was called "ruby" and my username was "user" and password was "user" then it should look like this:

development:
adapter: sqlserver
database: ruby
host: .
username: user
password: pass


How to get ruby on rails

To get rails, one can just download ruby, and then ask it to fetch the gems, that contains rails.

First download ruby (following link is to the currently most present version):
rubyForge

when everything is installed correctly, run the following command:


C:\private\projects\ruby>gem install rails --include-dependencies

this will generate the following output:


C:\private\projects\ruby>gem install rails --include-dependencies
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Successfully installed rails-2.0.2
Successfully installed activesupport-2.0.2
Successfully installed activerecord-2.0.2
Successfully installed actionpack-2.0.2
Successfully installed actionmailer-2.0.2
Successfully installed activeresource-2.0.2
Installing ri documentation for activesupport-2.0.2...
Installing ri documentation for activerecord-2.0.2...
Installing ri documentation for actionpack-2.0.2...
Installing ri documentation for actionmailer-2.0.2...
Installing ri documentation for activeresource-2.0.2...
Installing RDoc documentation for activesupport-2.0.2...
Installing RDoc documentation for activerecord-2.0.2...
Installing RDoc documentation for actionpack-2.0.2...
Installing RDoc documentation for actionmailer-2.0.2...
Installing RDoc documentation for activeresource-2.0.2...


Now to the coding!

MS video and youtube

Isnt it wonderful with Microsoft. I just read in a Danish paper that Bill Gates is leaving Ms, and that he have made a video about his last day at work. The article included a link to MSN video, to where the video should be. Instead I get "Sorry the video is unavailable". Going to YouTube (The competition), search "Bill Gates", and the Video starts.... The following, is the YouTube video. which works:



Bravo Microsoft.

Do we learn from our mistakes

Its always very easy to tell when something has gone wrong during a project, and often also easy to see why its has gone wrong. Yet on the next project, the same things often goes wrong.

Then what ? Get use to the fact that history repeats its self, or try to actuly think and learn about things that were good and bad, in just finished projects, and try to avoid pitfalls and enhance good tricks. This revolutionary thought is being examined in the following Google representation, given by Diana Larsen: