This weekend we drove up to Raleigh for the simple pleasure of giving Apple, Inc. a handful of money. I’ve wanted one for over a year, but the timing or the budget just didn’t line up until now. We purchased an iMac last year as a “Shared Family” computer. Wrong. After 3 days, my wife decided it was hers and the rest of us were never to touch it.  Ever.

First Mac

I ended up getting the 2.53Ghz, with a 320GB HDD and 4GB of RAM.  I also purchased a wired keyboard with the number pad and a magic mouse.  The mouse is pretty good, like magic.  So far it’s been very easy to set up and use.

Now that I have the Mac I hope to take a little time to get to know the platform, try out some Obj-C, PyCocoa, and maybe try my hand at an iPhone app.  I’m very curious to see where this differs from my Linux platform.

If you want the play by play, here’s the Whrrl story to document my experience.

Last month when _Whytheluckystiff (_why) “went missing” I was not sure how to respond.  I needed time to process what was happening.  A lot of people, including some big names in web development were quick to step in and give a heartfelt thanks and goodbye to a man that had done so much for the Ruby community.

When I first started learning Ruby, I used the “Try Ruby in Your Browser” that _why made and hosted.  I read some of the coveted “Why’s Poignant Guide” and his blog, “Red Handed”.  I enjoyed exploring Hackety Hack and suggested it to friends.  His Shoes framework was also something I enjoyed, if only for a brief moment in time.

So here’s where I diverge from what seems to be the overwhelming sentiment of the majority of other people speaking out on the subject.  When _why left, he did not just abandon his projects and walk away.  He destroyed and deleted as he left.  He burned it all down and walked away into the wind.  I have 4 year old twins and a recent trip to the beach had a very similar outcome.  One child didn’t want her sandcastle to be used by anyone else, so she destroyed it before we left.  We talked about why she did it and what impact it would have.  She’s only 4 though, what’s your excuse _why?

So while _why doesn’t owe us anything, he surely didn’t leave in a way I could characterize as honorable or even mature.  Many people talk about the impact he made on their lives or learning process with his projects and his art, but to me his contribution will always be marred by his destcructive exit.  In my version of reality you’re not allowed to get full credit for the gifts you provide by  taking them back.

So _why,  good luck and Godspeed!  Your final and lasting impression is negativity.  Dude, I totally hope you come back only so I can sit next to Zed at a Ruby conference and huck milkduds and chunky bacon at you.

A collegue (really a mentor) of mine knows Sharepoint like nobody’s business and she posted an interesting article this week about when moving to Sharepoint, there is a shift in the mindset how you look at and classify information.  It’s a quick point with a list of good references and I think it’s a good primer before jumping into Sharepoint.

Because I can. Because I should. Because cool developers do it. I’m really doing it because I agree with an article from Geoffrey Grossenbach of the Nuby On Rails and PeepCode (actually, the guy does tons of stuff – go check his site out) fame. In it he says,

“I’ll add to this and say that every beginning Rails developer should write their own blog software. It’s a great learning experience and you can try things that aren’t possible with just an app running on localhost. It’s also a great environment for learning without the pressure of a mission-critical app. When you’re working for a client and deploying an important application, you’ll have made all the beginner mistakes on your own time (hopefully).”

It’s somewhat of a personal pride thing, as I want readers that come to my site to know that I took the time to build my own blog engine. It was a great introduction to Django and provided me a means to applying the knowledge I have gained from the tutorial and other reading.

So far I’ve done three 45 minute sessions during lunch and I have the Articles, Categories, Links, and Announcements working.  I’ve been keeping track of the time and once I’m done I’ll provide the stats on time and effort along with the source.

Last night I tried the RM-Install product from Five Runs. It’s a multi-platform (Linux and Mac) Ruby on Rails Stack powered by BitRock. It is very similar to the Windows RubyStack offered by BitNami, but it is also supports a production install option.

I tried the development install and it was very easy to click next a few times and let it run. The very first thing I tried doing was updating the gems with “sudo gem update”. It failed giving me an error about not finding a file in require for some ELFClass. I’d never seen that before when updating gems, so I’m inclined to think that it may be something from within the RM-Install package.

So at the end of my first experience with the RM-Install stack, I think it’s a better solution to just create your own shell script for installing your Ruby/Rails environment.

If you still haven’t tried Sinatra (which you should have by now) then maybe you just need some additional resources.  Here is a site with some tutorials and a screencast.

I saw a lot of buzz about the new Sinatra web framework and decided I’d give it a try. I have a client now that has a simple site they need up now and then I can migrate them to Rails over time. When I saw how easy Sinatra looked, I thought I could give it a chance to see what it could do.

I installed Sinatra via RubyGems:
gem install sinatra -y

After that I created a simple file following the example:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
"Now we're cooking with gas"
end

But much to my dismay, nothing happened when running this on my windows box. I instantly searched Google for “Sinatra on windows” and found the Google Group for Sinatra and a post explaining that Sinatra doesn’t run on Windows yet. As I read into the thread, I found someone had some suggestions for making it work.

John Bledsoe had the following suggestions:

My humble suggestion would be to remove the FileUtils#touch from
Sinatra::Server#tail and update Environment#prepare_loggers to
something like:

def prepare_loggers(logger = nil)
if logger.nil?
FileUtils.touch(Options.log_file)
logger = Logger.new(open(Options.log_file, 'w')
end
end

Making these changes allowed Sinatra to run, but it wouldn’t server the page. Instead it returned an error:

Fri Nov 09 16:26:26 -0800 2007: ERROR: undefined method `info’ for nil:NilClass

I made a post to the group and was promptly replied to! The general advice given is that it is a rapidly emerging framework undergoing a lot of changes and to check back soon.

More on testing Sinatra in Linux coming soon….

As I write this post, I’m using the Safari Beta for Windows. My initial impressions are:

1. Is kinda like FireFox with Mac bling (gel UI elements).
2. I’m not seeing the increased page loading speed, but I’ve been using it for less than a half hour so far.
3. It came loaded with a ton of plugins that you have to load seperate in the other browsers.
4. No CTRL + Enter shortcut! There had better be a shortcut so I don’t have to type in “www” and “.com” all the time. A quick search of the help points to NO.
5. It was a small download and a quick install.
6. It tends to render pages like FireFox (whereas Opera tends to load pages like IE) for the sites I visit most (YMMV)

I’ll keep using it and let you know. I’ve viewed a couple of the ASP.Net based blogs that I visit and have already noticed some differences.

Jim has already scooped this story….
A new site from the creators of LearnVisualStudio.Net have launched LearnExpression.com! The site will offer video tutorials for all of the new Microsoft Expression products. They have done well so far in creating a community surrounding the LearnVisualStudio.Net site with forums available for the lifetime subsrcription members to converse and find more information. I suspect they will be doing the same here.

They have really done well with the streaming via Camtasia and you can see a free video here.

Since Microsoft has implemented a lot of this interface into Visual Studio Orcas, you might want to check it out!