How much longer?

fixes
Originally uploaded by roupen

It's been about 48 hours since Flickr stopped showing updates to contact's photos. How much longer I wonder.

Update: 2/29/08 5:22PM Just noticed that this is now fixed.

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100,004 views 2,759 pics

100,004 alltime views 2,759 pics
Originally uploaded by roupen

As of this post, my Flickr stream has 100,004 views on 2,759 pictures. My YouTube with 95 videos is at 85,386 video views.

My wife still doesn't get why I share this stuff -- I'm not sure I have a scientific answer for why I do it either. Seeing the views go up has its own reward (is it a "vitamin" or a "pill" hmm).

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Deeper into R-o-R

After doing a few recipe projects, I've started working on a fresh idea from scratch with Chris Sargisov. It feels much like trying to go around the block without training wheels for the first time.

The project I'm trying to do (more on this later - when there is stuff to show) has quickly taken me down the path of polymorphic many-to-many relationships with Ruby Active Record. I'm getting my a** kicked but understanding it better with every error message - thanks for Eldon Alameda, again.

If you're also into HABTM, many-to-many, has_many :through then here are a few links that Eldon turned me on to that you might find as useful as I did:

• Ryan Bate's Railscast Screencast
• Josh Susser's blog
• Gregg Pollack's screencast on ActiveRecord
• Bala Paranj's RubyPlus Ruby and Rails screencasts
  

Drop me a line if you know of others...

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My Ruby Arsinal

A few friends have asked about the books I'm using on Ruby - here they are (in order purchased - thanks for Sanjay for one of the recommendations and to Alex for a couple others):

• Practical Rails Projects by Eldon Alameda.
• Programming Rails by Dave Thomas.
• Practical Social Networking Sites by Alan Bradburne.
• Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomans and David Heinemeier Hanson.
• Ruby Cookbook by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson
• Rails Cookbook by Rob Orsini

I bought the books on Amazon - half.com didn't seem to have a price advantage. I usually buy used in good conditions.

I also picked-up the following O'Reily Pocket References:

• MySQL Pocket Reference
• CSS Pocket Reference
  
• PHP Pocket Reference
  

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The Monkey's alive!

live
Originally uploaded by roupen

What a trip! From buying my first book Jan 12 to an app deployed live as of this post - very cool. The last time I wrote code was 10 years ago after doing it for 10 years. The last time I wrote code was for embedded systems - not web.

I took a deep dive into Ruby on the 12th of January, 2008, and flintstoning.com is the end result. I'm proud ;-) What a difference a decade and the web have made when it comes to programming.

If not for the tireless help of Eldon Alameda, author of the book Practical Rails Projects. His code warrior instinct and patience are much appreciated. Also thanks to the good folks at SpeedRails.com and Maykel Rodriguez Rivero for providing the hosting and excellent and equally tireless support. Lastly, thanks for Suren for key hints along the way.

The app has a few cool things going for it. For one thing, some cool Ajax that allows for drag-and drop of todo items under "Today's Tasks" in the center of the page. Plus Chronic natural language time parsing (so when defining a task you could specify things like "tomorrow" "next month", etc. Very cool).

From newb to first app in less than 4 weeks. This has been fun!

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