A few weeks ago I updated to the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. This is the 7.10 (meaning October 2007) release, called “Gutsy Gibbon”. I encountered a couple of serious issues early on, but now that these are resolved things are running well. I’ll describe the issues and solutions so that anyone else encountering them can easily overcome them.
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Category: Ubuntu
Impressions of Ruby on Rails from an ex J2EE developer (me)
A friend who is working primarily in the J2EE technology world (as I was, until early 2006) asked me for a how’s-it-going with respect to Ruby and Rails.
The short version:
– Ruby is fun to program in, as you’ve probably heard
– Rails is over-hyped, but it’s still quite good (definitely not perfect)
– I like the productivity of Ruby on Rails but I wouldn’t call it a silver bullet by any means
– Ruby performance was bad and is getting less bad, and can even be good if you do what the experts say
– The real gem (har har) in the Ruby and Rails space is the community itself
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Ubuntu Linux 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” upgrade report
7.04 (meaning “the major release planned for 2007/04”, not meaning “the minor release following 7.03”) was released on April 19th. I upgraded today and it went pretty well, with a bit of manual cleanup required. More details after the jump. Continue reading “Ubuntu Linux 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” upgrade report”
Ruby Deeper Impressions
For two weeks (ending on this past Wednesday afternoon), most of my days and nights were occupied with a self-administered crash course in the Ruby programming language, outside of the Rails framework. I had struggled somewhat with Objective-C in January, partly because of the massive combined burden of learning the language, the Cocoa framework, the Xcode IDE, and the odd but brilliant Interface Builder. So, I wanted to try and attack Ruby in isolation.
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Ruby First Impressions: Backup Scripting
I started programming in Ruby this week, and so far I like it a lot. From my initial use of Ruby as a backup automation scripting language, here are my thoughts.
You might be wondering, why am I working on backup scripting now? Don’t I have some big project I’m supposed to be working on 24/7? Yes, and actually this work is in the critical path of that project.
My super fast laptop is still away being repaired for a video problem, so I’ve taken a major hit in terms of the resources of my main computer: 90% less MHz, 36% less display area, 50% less memory. In the meantime, I’ve been avoiding tasks that need a lot of CPU or graphics performance and instead working on things that are easier on my old desktop computer.
This week, I decided that I would pause working on the design and implementation of my startup project, until I had really sorted out my server backup and monitoring situation.
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