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Blog has moved

I've moved over to my new blog at 3rd World Startup. You can continue following me there.

Regards,

Ray Dookie

Why the Breathalyzer in Trinidad will Fail

So recently I heard on the news that our lovely government of Trinidad and Tobago is in the process of implementing the Breathalyzer on our nation's roads in an attempt to curb the carnage. This to me is a waste of money...much like the rented $US300,000/mth blimp that did what??...absolutely nothing.

First off for the breathalyzer to work we need police on the road to stop driver and test them. Then again, if we DID have police on the road stopping drivers you're telling me they can't tell if a guy is drunk or not??

My predictions as to what will happen are as follows :

1. Breathalyzer introduced - public praises government for trying to do something to curb road fatalities
2. For the next couple months lot's of police on the road stopping every man jack and harry.
3. Police presence starts to disappear from the roads.
4. Road fatalities pick back up.
5. Governemnt decides to spend some US$ n million (where n tends to infinity) to implement something else to curb road fatalities
6. Repeat Steps 1-5 with new product/measure
   

Installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Linux

These are the steps I took to get Ruby on Rails up and Running on Ubuntu.
Go to the Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and run the following apt-get commands.

1) Install ruby and ruby on rails

sudo apt-get install ruby rails

2) Download and Extract Ruby Gems

Ruby Gems .tgz file

3) After extracting the Ruby Gems file, navigate to it in your terminal and type :

sudo ruby setup.rb

4) Next we need to install all of Rails. To do this just type at the terminal

sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

5) After that is finshed you have rails up and running. To create an application first navigate to the folder you want your app to be stored and type:

rails "Application Name"

where "Application Name" is the name of your application. eg (rails Demo).

6) Now just run

ruby script/server

and your're up and running. Open your trusty browser and navigate to http://0.0.0.0:3000 and you should see your application.

Ruby on Rails

Last year some time when the Ruby on Rails hype was picking up I decided to download and give it a try, following the tutorials I got online. Now, I've been a fan of Ruby for a while now (ever since one of my lecturers told me about it). Ruby to me is simplistic, and comes close to what a modern day OOP language should be. Although people might say that dynamic type checking is a security concern, from my experience, I beg to differ. Python has been around for a while and its dynamic typing has never been a bother to the people I know who uses it.

Although Ruby by itself is a nice language, for Web programming purposes, it takes a little bit more effort that one would be willing to to get a website up and running.

Enter Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is a nice Web Framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern. With Rails I was able to get a prototype of a site up and running in under an hour, complete with add, delete and edit forms, to edit data in my tables. To me rails shines with the modeling of table associations (1-1, 1-many, many-many). It's just so simple to create your site, you'll find that you'll be spending less time on the nitty gritty code, and more time on modeling your data/site to the way it should be.
Another plus to mention is that Rails is 100% ruby code and your web files are in the .rhtml format. Ruby like python is nice in that you could get much more done with much much less code than other commercial languagues on the market today (Java, C#...).

Along with all of this there are many
Plugins you can download for your application. Actually it's so easy that I got a Login Generator up and running with my application (using SaltedHashLoginGenerator) in under 5 minutes. Now this is with role based authentication, e-mail verification on signup etc. basically the whole works you would want from a Login Module. Uploading and resizing Images to your site is also as easy as that with RMagick and FileColumn. For those of you who are afraid to try rails, don't be. First off, Ruby is an extremely easy language to learn, and if you're coming from Java or any other OOP language, it will be a breeze.

Ill post up some helper tutorials later on. But for now, head on over to Ruby on Rails and give it a try. If you're feeling it's not for you, download the videos and see a little bit of the power you get. And I do mean a little bit, because it is much more powerful than what you will see in those videos.

Odeo - Audio Blogging

Over the past few years blogging has become somewhat of a worldwide obsession. With the second phase of the internet under way, web 2.0 websites and web 2.0 terminology has become somewhat of a buzz word on the internet today.

Enter Odeo - A simple yet very useful way to creating audio blogs/clips, which can be emailed to your friends or embedded in your website(s). Audio blogging although no new concept has taken a new form in this web 2.0 ajaxified setting. Bear in mind Odeo comes to us from one of the former co-founders of Blogger... and was also recently working at google. Who knows, maybe some day in the not to distant future Odeo, just as Blogger was, may be another Google acquisition.

Ubuntufied!!!

Recently I got my hands on Ubuntu 5.10 from the office. That evening I rushed home to install it, and wow, I was impressed, this was the first Linux distro that I've tried where everything was configured for me. Even my wireless was working straight from the install.. all that was need to configure this was to set up the SSID and the WEP key (basically the same thing you would do under windows). And, being the bleeding edge software geek that I am, I realised that Ubuntu Dapper 6.05 was out for download. Although this is still an unstable released, I had to get it.

The next day in the office I put Dapper to download, 2hrs later I had it, 8 hours later at home it was installed. And my oh my do I love this debian based distro. The only other distro that can claim my love would have to be gentoo. Once you use gentoo, you seem to never want to go back to any other, the only reason I'm using ubuntu is that I find it's easier and faster to get things installed and done.

Last week when boredom struck in the office, I decided to give SuSE 10 Eval DVD a crack. So yet again, set up the download, and by the next day, SuSE 10 was installed. Now, I've always liked SuSE since I first tried SuSE 9.0, when those kind guys shipped me the Eval DVD's for free. However at that time, my only dislike with SuSE was that I found it was too much of a resource hog and a little bit...actually a good bit bloated. And, up to today when I removed SuSE from my machine, it still is very bloated. So back to Dapper I went, actually as I speak I'm doing a dist-upgrade. For those of you who would say that Ubuntu is also bloated, I would HAVE to agree with you, however, from my experiences, I don't think it is as bloated as SuSE...it just feels lighter.

I think Ubuntu would be my main distro for a while. Having said goodbye to Windows, I must say, I really don't miss it...well other that for my Visual Studio Development and the Games...ahh the games. Hopefully Cedega or Wine will solve my gaming problem, otherwise ubuntu may find windows as its new best friend on my harddrive.

For those of you setting up your ubuntu boxes I must recommend this article
http://www.elijahlofgren.com/ubuntu/
- it's a nice guide to get all your usual windows stuff up and running under ubuntu.

BTW. Hats off to the creator/s of XGL. I recenty installed and ran it, and my oh my was it impressive. I think its even more impressive due to the fact that at the moment I use only 1 monitor. Since I usually have to use more that 1 desktop, 1 for work, 1 for chat etc... it just looks nice switching between them now. I feel like I'm using a mac. And for some reason I actually find my destop move and respond's faster with XGL enabled.

Hat's off to those guys at Ubuntu and XGL.

The Birds, The Bees and the......

I'm back..

It's been a busy couple of months but I'm finally back into the blogging scenes. Started work at Illuminat some time back, doing alot of Oracle stuff. It's amazing the kinda stuff you could do with SQL, even more with PL/SQL.

Work has started on some of my side projects..I'll keep you guys updated on that sooner or later.

BTW... look out for the new and improved version 2.0 of my blog to be out soon. I promise I won't disappoint. I'll be moving away from blogger and publishing from my very own ruby-based blog engine.

expect more soon....

Just checking in

I know its been a while since i last blogged buy i found these 2 sites, well actually from one of my former lecturers (gardler), thats a must look.

the first...
Googlezon is a look in the future about the past, which would be todate, kinds freaky when you think about if this would happen, and from they way of things, it just may.

the 2nd, for all you IT ppl - IT Conversations are podcasts (mp3 format to DL available), about some very very very interestering IT/future related topics.

Be sure to check them out.

Anyhow, Ill be back soon..