10 Feb 2007
In the first and second part of this series, we talked about some foundational concepts regarding Rails development, and walked through the process of installing Ruby on your Windows machine. Now we’re going to start getting into the meat of things and install the Rails framework itself.
Rails is pretty much a one-line install, all you need to do is type this into the command prompt:
gem install rails –include-dependencies
You’ll be greeted by a “gem update” message, followed by a sizeable list of other things that are being installed alongside Rails. Depending on your internet connection, this process may take some time, so let’s use this opportunity to familiarize ourselves a bit more with the Windows Command Prompt, which you will be using a lot over the course of this article.
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Posted in Business, Software, Tutorials | 19 Comments »
10 Feb 2007
In the first part of this guide we went through some foundational concepts in Rails development, and if you actually managed to read all the way through you’ll have noticed a series of download links at the very end. We’re gonna break the first one open now, the One-Click Ruby Installer, and get started down the road to Rails.
The Ruby Installer package for Windows has a whole bunch of interesting stuff inside it. Apart from Ruby and RubyGems, it also contains the SCiTE text editor and an excellent book called “Programming Ruby.” While writing this tutorial I used 1.8.5-22 Release Candidate 3, although you should get similar results with any version of this installer passed 1.8.5.
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Posted in Business, Software, Tutorials | 208 Comments »
10 Feb 2007
(This guide was initially supposed to be an internal syndeo::media document which I would pass around to the new people joining our team, but as I wasn’t really discussing anything confidential, I figured there was no harm in publishing this on the blog. There are lots of Rails tutorials already out there, but this one explains some fairly specific additional steps, including getting MySQL and subversion running on your Windows developer machine. The main focus of this guide is to get designers up-to-speed as quickly as possible, and as such, it glosses over a lot of the technical information that guides like these ordinarily contain.)
Before we get started, it’s important to have a basic understanding of exactly what it is that you’re installing on your Windows box.
Ruby is a scripting language which can be used for many things, although its most common use by far is web programming. When we say we’re installing Ruby, we are actually more precisely installing a Ruby interpreter. An interpreter is a little program that accepts code written in the Ruby language and actually makes it do, you know, stuff. It’s important to note that the interpreter only gets loaded into memory when it’s needed, and then get’s killed right after it’s done doing its thing. (In this manner, it’s different from servers like Apache or MySQL, which hang around in memory waiting for requests to come in.)
Ruby also has a fairly robust plug-in management system called RubyGems. Plug-ins are exactly what they sound like, they’re additional bits of code that you can “plug in” to the Ruby interpreter to make it do other cool stuff. You will use this A LOT with syndeo::media applications, as it’s simply more efficient to download and then modify a given piece of code than to try to write one from scratch yourself.
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Posted in Business, Software, Tutorials | 10 Comments »
9 Feb 2007
From ITWire:
News of the death of former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith has led to a rush of activity at Wikipedia, with administrators at the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia on high alert to keep vandalism and libellous statements out of the entry for the recently deceased starlet.
Indeed, Smith’s wikipedia entry has been closed off from editing by unregistered users. Interestingly, her boyfriend Howard K. Stern’s page (not the Howard Stern) was not afforded the same protection:
On February 8, 2007, he was present at the death of Anna Nicole Smith in Hollywood, Florida, after she was found unresponsive in a room at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.[8][9]
As of late evening February 8, 2007, authorities have reportedly held Stern for questioning, although his precise whereabouts were not divulged.
Yowza. That can’t be right, can it?
Posted in Movies, Randomness | No Comments »
8 Feb 2007
I’ve had a renewed love for last.fm recently, now that I’ve found a reliable solution for actually updating it. last.fm uses audio-scrobbler technology to grab a list of recently-played songs on your machine, and uses it to create recommendations for you, compares you with other users, etc. What finally got me using this again was my discovery of this wonderful little iTunes add-on called Synergy a few weeks ago that (among other small feats) updates your scrobbled tracklist even when you’re not online.
So after a couple of weeks of this, I’ve finally got enough “real world” data to start doing weekly tops. (Woo.)
Most of my listening this week was dominated by two things: the Stranger than Fiction OST (from which the two Spoon songs are taken), and Sloan’s Never Hear the End of It. The Sloan album is a strange beast; at 30 tracks, I initially mistook the collection for a “Best of” release. Sloan is for people who have never tired of the pre-Revolver Beatles sound, and Never Hear actually adds some hardnosed dance punk into the mix as well.
The new Modest Mouse track “Dashboard” is also a current favorite (it channels quite a bit of Razorlight though). Don’t really know if the new album is out already, but I haven’t spotted it on any of the usual pirate channels yet.
More next week. In the meantime, check out my last.fm page here.
Posted in Music, Software | No Comments »
4 Feb 2007
Hollywoodland
Review it on Filmcrowd.com »
Interesting retelling of the unsolved mystery of the death of George Reeves (the first TV Superman) in 1959. The keyword here is that the mystery is “unsolved,” and Adrien Brody’s character wanders aimlessly through the streets of post-Silver Age Hollywood knowing that he’s never really gonna find out whodunnit. I guess my issue with this movie is that it’s largely an exposition on the movie industry’s dark underbelly, without really exposing much of anything. It’s the kind of subject matter that movies like L.A. Confidential handled with aplomb, but is strangely diminished in Hollywoodland.
Babel
Review it on Filmcrowd »
Fascinating film from the Mexican director that gave us Amores Perros and 21 Grams. The expansiveness of Inarritu’s vision is startling here — the movie takes place in Morocco, Mexico, the US, and Japan, and the story jumps deftly from scene to scene with unusual grace. As you can imagine, over half of the dialogue (some of it in Japanese sign language) is subtitled, but fortunately the storyline is not too intricate as to lose yourself in. Although the poster makes this movie sound like a socio-political thriller, it’s actually a very intimate portrayal of how a bullet fired from a hunting rifle affects the lives of 4 groups of people across 3 continents. Brilliant, brilliant movie.
Stranger than Fiction
Review it on Filmcrowd »
This movie feels like it was written by Charlie Kaufmann, and it has the same kind of quirky surrealism we’ve come to expect from movies like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. If you enjoyed the mind-trip that Kaufmann and the gang are famous for, you’ll love Stranger than Fiction. Directed by Mark Forster (Finding Neverland, Monster’s Ball), Fiction is about a guy named Harold Crick who discovers that he’s a character in a book, and that (oh boy!) he dies at the end. What follows is wonderful, endearing and deliciously bonkers. Of the three movies we saw this week, this was by far my favorite (not to mention it had one of the best opening sequences I’ve seen in a really long time — up there with Dawn of the Dead, Thank You For Smoking and Catch Me If You Can).
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2 Feb 2007
I was doing some cursory research for one of our new social network gigs when I chanced upon this funny Wikipedia entry on Pupil, and vocalist Ely Buendia’s recent heart attack:
Buendia was finally released from the Hospital and was allowed to stay at home and rest by his doctors on the night of January 15, 2007. [... ] This event prompted rapper Francis Magalona who is a longtime friend of Buendia and the other Eraserheads, to state the following on his personal blog: “Fast forward to right now, 9:58 am, Jan. 9, alot of what ifs scenarios pop in my head. What if the E-heads members are back, like long-lost blood brothers? What if “the most significant OPM band of Pinoy Rock” would be in one room, what would happen?” And in postscript he adds, “Para sa akin panahon na para mag-reunite ang E-heads. Sugod na mga kapatid…rock & roll na hanggang umaga.“”
Way to motivate a guy there, Francis. Give Ely another heart attack by quoting lyrics written by Raymund.
(Curiously — although not unsurprisingly — Marasigan’s name is NOT on the list of local artists that Buendia and his wife Diane thanked after his recovery. The other two Eraserheads were though.)
Posted in Music | 4 Comments »
