Friday 28 December 2007

Ruby on Rails on cygwin

Just spending a few days of Christmas 'downtime' getting to know Ruby on Rails. Tried out InstantRails with no problems but decided that I'd like to use cygwin, partly so that I understand how the various bits of rails fit together without the InstantRails magic, and partly because the Unix like environment seems a bit more 'native' to Ruby on Rails.

Cue, loads of problems.......

1. need to ensure that gem is up to date - "gem update --system" seems to help here, but then you need to uninstall/install rails and rake.

2. problem with /dev/urandom can be at least bypassed by making self.supports_urandom? return false in secret_key_generator.rb.

3. Following Agile Development with Ruby on Rails, but using Rails 2.0.2 means that 'scaffolding' has been deprecated. This can be fixed with "ruby script/plugin install scaffolding"

After all that, decided to revert to Rails 1.2.6, as this should make following the book easier.

Wednesday 5 December 2007

Do Postman regularly nick your letters?

I've had several cases recently of my post going missing, always parcels, sending and receiving. Are they thieving gits, or are the sorting offices just so shambolic that stuff just lies around in the corner until someone tidies up. I suspect a bit of both. Certainly, it seems to be a recent phenomenon.

Sunday 2 December 2007

John Pudney

Over the last couple of years I've been collecting (via Ebay) a series of childrens books that I read when I was a kid. They are called the "Fred and I adventures" by John Pudney. All very old fashioned now, but still have a sense of escapism, even for an old git like me. The books are called
"Monday Adventure" thru "Sunday Adventure" and "Spring Adventure" thru "Winter Adventure". I have now got 9 out of the 11 and last week "Autumn Adventure came up on eBay, so I setup a snipe for £25 using auctionstealer thinking that was rather extravagent! The bidding quickly settled at £13.50 early the week, so I thought I'd be in with a chance.

Unfortunately, my snipe didn't even get a look in, and the last minute scrum saw the book go for £72!

Gutted!