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:
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):
I'm spending some time learning Ruby and Rails. The Web today belongs to those that can implement ideas (not just dream them). So I've been dusting off my OO and C++ knowledge which I hadn't used for about 10 years (it's all coming back pretty easily).
I've invested in a couple of books on the subject and one of them is Practical Rails Applications by Eldon Alameda from Apress. From time to time, I'm going to post typos, errata and other notes here as part of this journey.
So I've been happily using Gmail and Google Calendar (along with Google Docs) and enjoying my cloud computing bliss without Microsoft Office and Outlook.
Starting yesterday, however, Google Calendar has been acting-up for me on Firefox 2.0 running Windows XP. Note that the problem doesn't happen on IE (which I have also gave up on a while back).
The problem I am having is as follows - unfortunately - and this has rendered Google Calendar unusable under Firefox :(
I start Gmail and click on Calendar and the Ajax thing starts to happen... the lower left hand corner of the browser starts to show frantic activity (contacting google.com etc) and Firefox hour glass is there - all looks normal - EXCEPT I never come out of this state. Sometimes, I get the Calendar login screen often not. It just sits there...
I tried rebooting... restarting firefox... uh-ah, not working and that sucks!
Worse comes to worse, I am planning to move to an Apple MacBook soon and maybe/probably that will solve this issue. Just waiting for the new MacBook Pros with multi-touch...
Google Calendar not happning on FireFox from roupen nahabedian on Vimeo.
I was at a meeting over lunch yesterday when one of my Vaio laptops started acting-up; I'd turn it on, Windows (XP) would boot-up I'd login and after a minute or two the blue screen of death would flash and the laptop would reboot. This happened about 5-6 times - different boot options didn't seem to make a difference - I was having a "Microsoft Moment" (MM).
This seems to happen about once every 6 months that you have to take time off, drop what you're doing, and pay homage to the gods of software and fix the problem... Normally, a MM is enough to ruin your day - you don't know if your documents and email are safe (you think to yourself "am i ever going to see my email ever again?" or "my god - all that STUFF that I can't live without"). And of course, you could/should have backed-up the stuff but...
Luckily this time around, I am no longer using Office nor Outlook - I made the transition a couple of months ago and I haven't looked back. Also this time around, the stress was much lower: my stuff and majority of my documents are on gmail and Google docs respectively. Saved!
I remembered that this kind of crash had happened on this laptop about a year ago and the solution then was to reinstall from the factory CD and wipe everything out. So not only was my stress level much less but when it came down to doing a clean-install, the whole process took about 1/3 as long since there was so much less to copy off and copy back on (at last check, my Outlook file was about 10GB).
So! A Microsoft Moment made much less stressful and painful not having Outlook and Office to deal with. Next stop? Back to an Apple Powerbook not to deal with Windows at all.
