First Attempts With Rails: All Failures

January 14, 2006 by Eric Richardson

Though I'm definitely a dyed-through Perl guy, I've been messing around with learning some Ruby on Rails over the past week or two. The Rails framework has some ideas to it that I think are really nice, so I think it's more a practical exercise than an attempt to stay buzzword-compliant.

I keep running into problems, though, and I think they largely stem from my refusal to start with crappy little address book style learning apps. I want to do something real, and it just so happens that my real life apps, though not especially complex, each have one or two little things in them that throw me off the Rails beginner curve. — Continue Reading...

A Little Geek Moment

January 13, 2006 by Eric Richardson

So sitting beside my desk right now is a new Intel-chipped iMac. First one out of the Glendale store. I get to play this afternoon, but first lunch.

Is There Anything It Can't Do?

January 11, 2006 by Eric Richardson

Back in November I extolled the virtues of XBox Media Center. Tonight I found even a new use for it. I had ordered a pair of cds through CD Baby and today they came in but I realized that with my laptop sitting at work I didn't have a PC with a CD-ROM drive in it. XBMC saved the day, though, ripping the cd and encoding to nice 192Kbps mp3s through lame. Then I just ftp'ed them off of the XBox and into my music collection. Really, really easy and quick.

Still a Few More Days

January 07, 2006 by Eric Richardson

I just realized that the Jay Nash show I had thought was this upcoming week was actually this past Thursday.

Then I had that scary moment where you say, "I really hope I didn't miss a court date this week."

Maybe most people don't have that moment. It was a very vivid one for me. But no, my day in court is this upcoming Friday at 8am. If you, like me, have forgotten what this was all about, it's from the stupid ticket I was given heading down to Long Beach with my bicycle.

Scouting Out Options in Business Internet

January 05, 2006 by Eric Richardson

I'm looking into business Internet connectivity this evening. It's more interesting than I thought it would be. Basically it's a situation where we need a good downlink, and a pretty strong uplink, but traffic levels aren't enough to warrant T1 level service.

There are more options available here in Downtown than I would have guessed. Traditional ADSL is a strong contender, but there are also various other things to consider such as SDSL and WiMax. As Alan just asked me, "Isn't competition great?" — Continue Reading...