Ruby on Rails

[Matt Lawrence]

Very neat presentation, it kept me up way too late last night watching it.

As far as his comments about this list, I'm afraid that I'm not one of the
experts who hangs out here, I really am a newbie. Sigh.

One thought that occurred to me while I was watching the video is that I
would really LOVE to see someone put together an entire course or two on
Ruby and distribute it online. There's just so much that I don't have a
really solid understanding of in Ruby that I really want to know. Ok, I
haven't been a developer in years, I do mostly sys admin these days and
Ruby is my language of choice for automation.

What do y'all think?

-- Matt
The American Non-Sequiteur Society: We may not make sense, but we do like
pizza.

 

[Sascha Ebach]

Hi,

One thought that occurred to me while I was watching the video is that I
would really LOVE to see someone put together an entire course or two on
Ruby and distribute it online. There's just so much that I don't have a
really solid understanding of in Ruby that I really want to know. Ok, I
haven't been a developer in years, I do mostly sys admin these days and
Ruby is my language of choice for automation.

Yes, that would be a great idea. Using some kind of screen cam software
like RoboDemo (http://www.macromedia.com/software/robodemo/), but maybe
not so expensive. It would be great to have a multipart tutorial about
how to program the "pet store" in Rails, Cerise, Arrow, Borges, IOWA,
... Imagine what kind of effect this could have as presentation
material. No other language has that. Back in the day I stumbled upon
http://learnvisualstudio.net/ and I really liked the concept of actually
having these video tutorials that show you exactly what you have to do.
Think about it, this would be absolute killer presentation material for
Ruby. But I guess nobody is going to have enough time to do this,
including me

Sascha

 

[David Heinemeier Hansson]

One thought that occurred to me while I was watching the video is that

I
would really LOVE to see someone put together an entire course or two
on
Ruby and distribute it online.

What do y'all think?

I think that's a great idea and I've already experimented with this a
bit. There's test on http://www.loudthinking.com/share/800x600.html
showing how 1 minute of tutorial can be compressed down to 1 MB.

My plan was to make a whole series of these for introducing all facets
of Rails in a form where it's very easy to follow along on your own.
This is a somewhat time-consuming endevour, so I don't know when it'll
be, though.


Oddball Idea: What I'd really like to see is a way for the community to
hire within itself for tasks like this. Or to get the documentation
done. Or similar things. I'd love to donate cash to a variety of
projects to improve their documentation. I don't know if there's enough
interest in Ruby to make it worthwhile for anyone to make something of
it. Or if introducing money to open source documentation is really the
way to go anyway.
--
David Heinemeier Hansson,
http://www.instiki.org/ -- A No-Step-Three Wiki in Ruby
http://www.basecamphq.com/ -- Web-based Project Management
http://www.loudthinking.com/ -- Broadcasting Brain
http://www.nextangle.com/ -- Development & Consulting Services

 

[Jim Freeze]

I think that's a great idea and I've already experimented with this a
bit. There's test on http://www.loudthinking.com/share/800x600.html
showing how 1 minute of tutorial can be compressed down to 1 MB.

Sorry if I missed it, but what did you use to make the video?
This is a really powerfull educational tool!

 

[David Heinemeier Hansson]

I think that's a great idea and I've already experimented with this a

Sorry if I missed it, but what did you use to make the video?
This is a really powerfull educational tool!

It's a combination of SnapProX[1] for OS X (capturing the original
input) and Camtasia[2] for Windows (converting it to Flash). Joel
Spolsky has a perfect example of how cool this can be with narration:
http://www.fogcreek.com/ppdemo/

[1] http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
[2] http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/default.asp
--
David Heinemeier Hansson,
http://www.instiki.org/ -- A No-Step-Three Wiki in Ruby
http://www.basecamphq.com/ -- Web-based Project Management
http://www.loudthinking.com/ -- Broadcasting Brain
http://www.nextangle.com/ -- Development & Consulting Services

 

[Sascha Ebach]

Hi David,

I think that's a great idea and I've already experimented with this a
bit. There's test on http://www.loudthinking.com/share/800x600.html
showing how 1 minute of tutorial can be compressed down to 1 MB.

My plan was to make a whole series of these for introducing all facets
of Rails in a form where it's very easy to follow along on your own.
This is a somewhat time-consuming endevour, so I don't know when it'll
be, though.

That is exactly what I meant. I think if you would do that you will have
a _great_ advantage over other OS-Frameworks. It is, for a lot of
people, so much easier to follow such a presentation than to read
between the lines. Such video tutorials are a very powerful tool.

I don't know if it is more work than writing the documentation. It is of
course a lot more work to do both.

I think I would be willing to contribute to such a project, making lots
a small videos showing how things are done. What is holding me back for
the moment is the hefty price of the software and the fact that I know
almost nothing about Rails. What could be done would be to make an
outline of what kinds of tutorials need to be done, a big list, and than
one could pick a couple and do some...

Good luck with your exams.

Sascha

 

[Sascha Ebach]

Hi,

[1] http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
[2] http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/default.asp

Also, Macromedia's RoboDemo, which in my opinion is the best of them
all, producing the smallest possible files, because of its integration
with Flash. Now this is something Flash is _really_ useful for.

http://www.macromedia.com/software/robodemo/

It is very expensive though.

Sascha

 

[David Heinemeier Hansson]

Also, Macromedia's RoboDemo, which in my opinion is the best of them

all, producing the smallest possible files, because of its integration
with Flash. Now this is something Flash is _really_ useful for.

Camtasia can use Flash as well. The example I linked to was Flash. But
that's also kind of expensive. $300. Add that to the $70 that Snap Pro
X costs and it's starting to add up. I doubt there's much of a discount
for open source projects
--
David Heinemeier Hansson,
http://www.instiki.org/ -- A No-Step-Three Wiki in Ruby
http://www.basecamphq.com/ -- Web-based Project Management
http://www.loudthinking.com/ -- Broadcasting Brain
http://www.nextangle.com/ -- Development & Consulting Services

 

[Sascha Ebach]

Camtasia can use Flash as well. The example I linked to was Flash. But

that's also kind of expensive. $300. Add that to the $70 that Snap Pro X
costs and it's starting to add up. I doubt there's much of a discount
for open source projects

Yeah, I used that before. Last time I checked Camtasia only rendered the
movie into flash. RoboDemo has the ability to only capture screens if
something changes and it has optimizations for keyboard and mouse
movements. Your test movie could be done in RoboDemo at about 1/3 to 1/2
of the size of Camtasia (if it hasn't learned this stuff in a more
current version than I have used). Also, I found it to be way easier to
use. It seems more integrated if your target is Flash. There is even a
Flash module so you can script your recordings in AS after your done.

RoboDemo = 425,24 EUR
Flash Plugin = 99$

That is not something you would easily shell out if you can't something
regain that through a commercial project.

Sascha

 

[Hal Fulton]

Oddball Idea: What I'd really like to see is a way for the community to
hire within itself for tasks like this. Or to get the documentation
done. Or similar things. I'd love to donate cash to a variety of
projects to improve their documentation. I don't know if there's enough
interest in Ruby to make it worthwhile for anyone to make something of
it. Or if introducing money to open source documentation is really the
way to go anyway.

I've thought about this. Odder ideas have materialized IMO.

I've also thought about hiring people for bug fixes and enhancements to
my own software. Not something that has been practical for me, but might
be soon. Not any real money in most cases, just: "Hey, a hundred bucks
if you'll add XYZ support to this code."

The site rentacoder.com is interesting in the sense that it's used by
both the software "buyer" and "seller" -- and the prices may be one or
two orders of magnitude lower than they "should" be.

I once posted a little Ruby problem there -- getting ActiveScriptRuby
and HomeSeer to play nicely, long a dream of mine -- and got no takers.

FWIW, at the time there were over 80 people there who claimed knowledge
of Ruby IIRC.

But I'm just rambling now.


Hal

 

[gabriele renzi]

il Sun, 23 May 2004 04:08:35 +0900, Hal Fulton

The site rentacoder.com is interesting in the sense that it's used by
both the software "buyer" and "seller" -- and the prices may be one or
two orders of magnitude lower than they "should" be.

I believe the gnome project has a 'bounty' project that somehow works
like this. It would be nice if rubycentral could have one too.

 

[Stephen Steiner]

I'm trying to copy the entire contents of one directory to another:

source = "/var/www/html/sites/demo"
dest = "var/www/html/sites/newsite"

The source directory contains a file, index.html, and a directory
cgi-bin, which contains some scripts and such.

What I want is for the 'dest' to have a complete copy of everything in
'source' with all the files in 'source' in 'dest' and any
subdirectories of 'source' copied to 'dest' with all their contents,
recursively.

When I use:

FileUtils.cp_r( source, dest )

I end up with a directory '/var/www/html/sites/newsite/demo' containing
the contents of the 'source' directory with everything copied properly.

Looking in the fileutils.rb source code, the comments state that this
is the correct behaviour.

Unfortunately, this is not what I want.

I tried using one of the examples from the fileutils.rb source:

FileUtils.cp_r( Dir.glob(source + "/*"), dest )

and end up with the following error:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:747: `No such file or directory -
/var/www/html/sites/newsite/cgi-bin' (Errno::ENOENT)
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:732:in `each'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:732:in
`fu_each_src_dest0'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:724:in
`fu_each_src_dest'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:349:in `cp_r'
from /usr/local/sbin/newsite.rb:70
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:747: st2 = File.stat(b)

The way I interpret this is that FileUtils.cp_r(), when it's given a
list of files, doesn't create and recurse into directories that it
finds along the way.

Can anyone tell me how to get FileUtils to do what I want i.e. copy the
contents of one directory to another directory, recursively?

Or, is there another way? I'm not clear on whether FileUtils is up to
date, etc. and just want to get the job done!

Thanks!

Steve

 

[Stephen Steiner]

Sorry for the typo!

The 'dest' variable does contain a leading slash.

Steve

 

[Aredridel]

il Sun, 23 May 2004 04:08:35 +0900, Hal Fulton

I believe the gnome project has a 'bounty' project that somehow works
like this. It would be nice if rubycentral could have one too.

You could contribute, too, to the fundme.net project. It's early on, but
it'll be coded in Ruby, I think.

Ari

 

[Michael Neumann]

Hi,


Yes, that would be a great idea. Using some kind of screen cam software
like RoboDemo (http://www.macromedia.com/software/robodemo/), but maybe
not so expensive. It would be great to have a multipart tutorial about
how to program the "pet store" in Rails, Cerise, Arrow, Borges, IOWA,

I've set up the PetStore project on rubyforge.org:

rubyforge.org/projects/petstore

Indeed, it's also good to demonstrate the quality of the different data
modelling libraries (SDS, TapKit, ActiveRecords, Madeleine, pure SQL
etc.).

Everyone interested in contributing to the data-model code or the
web-application is welcome. Very nice would be to document each step
done during the development.

Regards,

Michael

 

[nobu.nokada]

Hi,

At Sun, 23 May 2004 11:52:00 +0900,
Stephen Steiner wrote in [ruby-talk:101077]:

Can anyone tell me how to get FileUtils to do what I want i.e. copy the
contents of one directory to another directory, recursively?

FileUtils.cp_r( source + "/.", dest )

 

[Gavin Sinclair]

FileUtils.cp_r( source + "/.", dest )

That shouldn't be necessary, surely!? I consider that a bug.

Gavin

 

[nobu.nokada]

Hi,

At Wed, 4 Aug 2004 17:07:45 +0900,
Gavin Sinclair wrote in [ruby-talk:108287]:

That shouldn't be necessary, surely!? I consider that a bug.

cp_r("foo", dest) copies "foo" underneath dest, but Stephen
wants it to copy files under "foo", doesn't he?

The error certainly is a bug (and I've just posted a patch
[ruby-dev:24018]), but still I'd recommend the above method
since Dir.glob doesn't return dot files.