August 25th, 2008 mattdaddy
I am trying to put that in the title of my posts so my honey doesn’t bother reading it 
I’m making attempts to branch out in our infrastructure by using different technologies. Right now, almost everything is Microsoft using SQL Server and C#/.NET. Not that I’m totally against MS, far from it – IF you’re willing to spend the money. I’d like to start saving some, and I needed a bug tracker, and I like the way Ruby and Rails look, so I chose Redmine.
this walkthru over at MartinLanner.com is very good if you’re going to Ubuntu, which we decided on as a linux server platform. The server guy and I are familiar with it, as is the VP of IT (man, just make the guy CIO, save me some keystrokes!).
Now all I have to do is figure out how to set up LDAP and we can all log in! I can, and any id’s I create can, I just want to get it so anyone in our Active Directory can without having ANOTHER id and password.
Posted in RoR, geeking out | 4 Comments »
July 7th, 2008 mattdaddy
Okay, so I got started with Ruby tonight. I went out on saturday and bought a book on it, and decided to dig in. As a developer, you can’t really say you’ve attempted a language until you’ve built your first Hello World application.
It’s official, I am a Ruby on Rails (ROR) Newbie. I built it on the new mac machine I got my from work and after a problem with a file inconsistency:
MissingSourceFile in SayController#hello
no such file to load—sqlite3
I googled around a bit and found the answer (http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/msg/366ae75593ed8b46). It’s amazing what you can find
Okay, so what does this all prove? That I’m almost 40, I can learn new things, and it’s past my bedtime.
Goodnight Mr. & Mrs. Internet.
Posted in RoR, geeking out | No Comments »
July 5th, 2008 mattdaddy
First and foremost, I’m writing this post on a Mac Mini. I’ve been a fan since my roommate in college got a computer from his dad and it had this thing in it that he paid an extra 150$ for. “Dude, it’s too expensive and no one’s going to produce stuff for it”
Well, it was a CD-rom, and he’s never let me live it down. This was 93. It’s 15 years later and I’ve had a few Macs here and there, but this one’s probably the slickest. Granted, it’s a much better OS and the graphics and hardware have come a long way, but after downloading a VPN client to connect to my work network and installing a few programs, I’m running perfectly.
Leads me to my next new thing – Ruby on Rails. Yeah, it’s a buzzword language, and I’m jumping on the bandwagon, but I’ve been looking for a lightweight alternative to the C# generator I’ve been using. Truthfully, the way RoR is structured, it’ll really force me to learn more about the language in order to do things, but from what I’ve seen so far, there’s a lot more I can do with RoR, and I won’t code myself into as many corners thank god.
Is it going to solve all my problems and do everything for me? No. But I’d like to become a little uncoupled from Microsoft, and this is a decent step in that direction. If anyone wants to see stuff built in RoR, check out Basecamp. The guy who wrote the Rails stuff, wrote Basecamp in Ruby and decided that a lot of the code could be reused, so he created Ruby on Rails.
Keep an eye out, I’m going to start creating small apps because my hosting company will host them for me, so I’ll be able to show you what I’ve learned. “Hello world” should be coming soon 
Posted in RoR, geeking out | 1 Comment »
