one.less.travelled

Oracle Peoplesoft VM Template based Install. NOT!

2011-12-18T14:36:00.000-08:00

I have just three words to describe the experience: Counter-intuitive, Convoluted and ATROCIOUS.

Yes. Atrocious.

Getting a working Peoplesoft setup using the OVM templates is about as easy as pulling teeth. After having installed the OVM, the OVM-MANAGER, Converting the template zips to an accessible format, Importing the templates, Creating Virtual Machines, Starting Virtual Machines, Going through the initial config, and NOT GETTING A WORKING SETUP, I have decided to finally give up on this being in any way "a sane approach" to getting a demo environment going quickly.

It took me a good week of farting around with Virtual Box (what I installed OVM on top off), OVM, OVM Manager and I'm still no further off than if I had just downloaded the edelivery zip files myself.

I don't know what exactly Oracle is trying to accomplish here by making things so ridiculously difficult by forcing prospective customers to use OVM... I think as far as pushing "Oracle VM" as a "virtualization solution" is concerned the writing is on the wall. Oracle better recognize that VMWare won that race long time ago. Please stop struggling with it, it will be easier for all of us ;)

I have now decided to just do a full install of 8.52 , something which I should have done to begin with. However, I was seduced by the thought of (1) not having to install 40 GB of install media, and (2) being able to get a running PSOFT environment once I got past the OVM Server/Manager installation part. Suffice it to say that OVM Server & Manager part is the easy piece...

So the plan now is to download UGGH!!! the 8.52 media kit, and just do a straight VBox->OEL5 install for the WEB/APP/DB tiers. I might even try running all tiers on one OEL virtualbox instance and use an XP or Win7 Guest as the "developer Workstation"

This is something that Oracle can very easily do since they now own VirtualBox however they choose to make things needlessly over-complicated and end up making the end product pretty much useless for 99% of their customer base.

My suggestions to Oracle:

1. Supply VmWare images or templates.
2. Supply VirtualBox importable templates.
3. PLEASE. PLEASE. KILL Oracle VM. It is done like dinner. VMWare won that war, the sooner you recognize, the better off we'll all be in the long run.

kthxbye! :)

Oracle VM Templates

2011-12-11T12:37:00.000-08:00

I have been working on getting the kinks out of an Oracle VM Template Demo install for HCM9.1, and to say the least, it has not been easy. I'd say it looks good on paper. You think you'll just head on over to the edelivery site, download the templates and off you go, but you'd be gravely mistaken.

The OVM templates are about as difficult to get going from a logistical perspective as is a new install. Maybe I say this because I'm used to direct installs, but I found that if you don't have dedicated hardware to run the OVM Server and Manager combo, you're in for a bit of a rig-a-ma-roll!! Especially if you're going to use VirtualBox or VMWare to "fake" the metal for OVM Server/Manager machines.

At present I'm looking into converting the OVM images (essentially xen images) into Oracle Virtual Box images, because for a really simple throwaway install, it is quite quick to get going with Virtualbox.

I think it's about time Oracle started supplying VirtualBox images for Peoplesoft instead of making people jump through hoops to do a vanilla throwaway install.

I'll be documenting the steps I had to take to convert the images, and the pitfalls of installing OVM Server on a VirtualBox substrate, because believe me, it is nothing short of pulling teeth to get this setup going if you don't have physicall servers to work with.

Birdwatcher 2 aka Friggin Awesome!

2010-04-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

This is a neat proof of concept on how we could be programming our computers (or our computing devices) instead of slogging away in silly multi-windowed code editors. The artifact below reminds me of some kind of alien technology I would have seen in one of the early episodes of Dr Who (before it got all preachy, sappy and stupid)

Schemer (or What Arduino Uno Punto Zero needs!)

2010-04-05T12:56:00.000-07:00

Really! I mean Really! Free us from the tyranny of 40 dollar connector cables while giving us a 10 dollar physical computing platform!

I'm sick of having to tie up a 40 dollar FTDI cable with a 10 dollar "home-duino" that I put together using bare minimum parts (see that little beauty below).

From one.less.travelled

Sometimes we need El-Duino to stay in contact with the mother-pc and update a display based on new data recieved.

Usually the FTDI cable is about 20 dollars, but in our fair city, there is only one supplier and he likes to charge twice as much (for whatever reason). So, do I want to have my preciousssss tied up with one of the physical computing projects I've got in mind (server monitoring) ... I think not.

So, what I thought up was a processing sketch which would basically send out the new data over a "virtual serial" link by turning on off an area of the screen that I would point a photo-resistor or photo-sensor at (breaatheee!!! )

The idea being that I could just have the thing pointed at the screen and get new data instead of using a serial cable.

As it turns out, this is EXACTLY how "schemer" does it.

I guess I need to now do a proof of concept with my super duper bread-boarduino that I put together last weekend.

P.S. And the bonus is that it uses scheme to prgram the button. How cool is that? :)

WineM or Why I love the Physical Computing Revolution

2010-02-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

Yes. As computers become commodity items and cellphones carry more computing power than was used by NASA to send humans to the moon, the real revolution is happening in the physical computing space.

This "smart" wine rack by "ThingM" is so awesome, and a herald of things to come! We are leaving the boring computing phase and entering the "Technology as Magic" phase.

This is where the value will be added. In terms of design and creativity and usability. Usability to real humans, with no time for futzing with debug flags or registry entries.

Hopefully the interface simplification ushered in by the Physical Computing revolution will inform computer interface design and take us out of the dark ages of "click this, go to that tab, look in the right corner, put 0xFSD226, click Apply, Clik OK, clikc YES to the stupid dialog..." etc.

And now, I present to you, the coolest thing I have yet seen on the physical computing scene ... ahem...

Danger Shield! Will Robinson!

2010-01-17T07:26:00.000-08:00

So I finally received my parts from SeeedStudio .... that took a while, one reason was that I ordered on the 29th of December and they were closed till the 4th and then the package sat at HongKong Post for 7 frikking days! In any case, it left on the 11th and I got the lil box O goodies on the 15th, just in time for the weekend! woo hoo!

Here is a picture of the stuff. I got a half dozen shift registers, a couple Maxim Led drivers, a bunch of led matrix (red only) and some bar graph 10 segment LED's ... the idea floating around in my head is to somehow create a Server monitoring display dashboard thingy which will use blinky lights to warn of impending danger (or disk space outage or cpu overload etc... but we'll see).

And here is Le Stash!

First order of business, of course, was to assemble and solder the "Danger Shield" by Zak "Hoeken" Smith (of the CupCake/MakerBot and Sanguino fame).

Headers go on first.

Some time passes as we inhale the solder and flux fumes... the makeshift "fume extractor" fan distributes the fumes evenly throughout the enclosed workspace ... we marvel at the quality of our first time solder joints ...

... and eh VOILA!!!

I did try to download the "firmwares" (as Z.Hoken calls the sketches on his page) from the sourceforge repository, but I found that they don't work with Arduino-0017 and give weird errors.

Finally, I found, through my friend Google, link to a discussion which mentions the fix (or hack... or ugly kludge or whatever) which is to put the magical incantation of #include "WProgram.h" at the top of your _init.h file.

I put this in the beginning of my sketch (not the _init.h file, but before the include that .. ahem, includes the _init.h file.

In any case, the problem has existed since arduino-0012 ... but seems to have been on the back burner ... whatever.

UPDATE: The "knock sensor" doesn't really work ... I think it is brokeded! :-<

Controlling Katamari using a real life ball interfaced with an Arduino

2009-12-05T08:59:00.000-08:00

Another wonderful concept using Arduino. This one uses a steel ball as the interface and a regular laser mouse as the pickup device, that info goes into an arduino which encodes it through a digital potentiometer and sends it on to a controller.

Reference: arduino.cc , kellbot.com, nycresistor.com

MAGIC !!! Coolest Arduino Hack EVAR!!!

2009-12-03T07:50:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this is the kind of stuff I want to do with my recently acquired arduino kit!

I think instead of using the knocks, a grid of magnetic sensors would be much more appropriate. What you do is carry a small magnet around on your keychain (if you don't already) and wave it at the door in a given pattern right,down,left,right and the door magically opens

Now that could take care of giving temporary access to premises to whomever you wish.

Virtual Box 3.1.0 is out (now with Teleportation!)

2009-11-30T10:12:00.000-08:00

So, the latest virtualbox is out and it supports live session migration from one host to another. Yay!!!

Other new features in this major upgrade (from the announcement):

Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one host to another (see the manual for more information)
VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well ("branched snapshots"; see the manual for more information)
2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion (see the manual for more information)
More flexible storage attachments: CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller, and there can be more than one such drive (the manual for more information)
The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
Complete rewrite of experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher
Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface; see the manual for more information)
Support for paravirtualized network adapters (virtio-net; see the manual for more information)

Get your latest virtualbox download here.

Arduino!!!!

2009-11-30T08:51:00.000-08:00

I've had a bit of a downtime in the last couple weeks, so I've been playing around with Arduino to explore the wonderful world of physical computing. I used to do breadboarding in highschool, but haven't done much since then. Recently, I listened to the Arduino founder on one of the FLOSS Weekly podcasts and was hoping to find some free time to play around with programming the ATMega microcontroller.

After having played with it a bit and making some blinkenlights and music to go along with it, I think I'm ready to move on to some real interfacing with server instrumentation and monitoring data ...

Getting server alerts on circuits you designed yourself, now that would be cool!

ref: (Photo by Nicholas Zambetti) via arduino.cc

Oracle VM Templates released!!!

2009-10-31T16:27:00.000-07:00

Exciting news! Oracle has released its PT8.50 and HC9.1 environment in the form of three VM's (one each for web/app/db tier)!!! This is really exciting stuff! I think this would make environment management really easy for Peoplesoft clients and I can see Oracle pushing out "certified" environments in the future for other applications and modules as well.

I'm not sure why Oracle is not moving into the AMI space. It wouldn't be a whole lot of work to convert these images to AMI's and run on a Virtual Private Cloud, but it would be cool if Oracle released these images with their blessing.

In a way this would put a monkey wrench in the plans of those small fry VAR's who were planning on picking up some crumbs off the Oracle table (hint hint!) but in the long run I think this is a great strategy!

Oracle and Amazon AWS behind the protection of a VPC would be an awesome combination and would really enable agile project environments! Imaging provisioning your test environments on a half-day notice after cutting gold images, and getting two teams to test two test-moves as soon as both are complete!

I haven't installed and played with these yet, but this is a development that will probably push me over the edge and I think I'll end up by a 4-8 core box just to recreate a Virtual lab for testing out the exciting new configurations possible!

References:

Via: Nicolas Gasparotto's Blog, "On the Peoplesoft Road"
Origianl Announcement: "Oracle VM Template for Peoplesoft"
Oracle White Paper on the VM Templages(Pdf)

Haskell and Java ... two great tastes that go great together

2009-10-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

Or something to that effect. Lately, I've been on a bit of a Java and Haskell binge. I hadn't done Java for a long time after doing some elementary work in it a while back. It was a treat to find this set of lectures taught by a really energetic and competent teacher (ex googler?), so I've been playing around and having fun with "Karel the Robot" following the awesome stanford lectures by Mehran Sahami for CS106A. And here is the link to the Youtube Programming Methodology Lectures (All of em!).

Meanwhile, in true ADHD fashion, I have also been fascinated by the coolness that is Haskell. And this was triggered by the most recent C9 lectures by Dr. Eric Meijer on Haskell.

Here are the links to the first two lectures.

C9 Lectures - Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 1 of 13

C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 2 of 13

And after that whets you appetite a bit, head on over to blip.tv for the Haskell talk given by Simon Peyton Jones (of Microsoft) for OSCON 2007. (it is broken into two videos)

Part the First (78 minutes):

Part the Deux (111 minutes):

References:

1. A Gentle Introduction to Haskell
2. Haskell WinHugs (Hugs98) "interpreter"/REPL to play around with on your Windows machine.
3. Haskell Platform Suite (GHC compiler, libraries.. the whole shbang! all in one easy package... just in case you fall in love ;^) ...

4. Stanford Eclipse (comes with the ACM libraries and a much leaner interface for playing around with the class assignments - if you're just starting out with Java and don't want to lose sight of the forest for the trees)
5. CS106A - Programming Methodology Lectures on Youtube (all 28 of them!)

Larry Ellison Unscripted (cross post from PeepCloud)

2009-10-02T18:21:00.001-07:00

Larry Ellison on the origins of Oracle, Acquisition of Sun, Linux vs. Solaris and Cloud Computing ...

And here is the clip where he went postal after the host asked him about "Cloud Computing".... I hadn't laughed this hard in days! :) (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!)

Source: Fora.Tv

Peoplesoft HCM 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.50 is OUT!

2009-09-25T17:06:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been out since Sep 18th, I just never got around to posting the exciting news! As the Peoplesoft Dev blog points out, the GA Release is now available. I checked edelivery and yeth!!! it is out baby!!! :)

This new version has a lot of goodies! Some of the new stuff from the blog entry:

2. Improved Developer Productivity
a. Enhanced Interactive PeopleCode Debugger
b. AppClass Drilldown PeopleCode Editor
c. Improved Integration Test Tools
3. Expanded Reporting and Query options
a. Query as Feeds enabling users to retrieve PeopleSoft data via RSS

4. Infrastructure, LCM and Security enhancements
a. Adoption of Java 6 on all server tiers
b. Latest versions of WebLogic Server, WebSphere and Tuxedo
c. Full support for 64-bit Linux and Windows
d. Secure PS_Home
e. Integration to Oracle Configuration Manager
f. Support for Oracle TDE, Database Vault and Audit Vault
g. FTPS and ADAM (AD LDS) support

Get Running/Stopped Services Using PowerShell

2009-09-07T14:44:00.000-07:00

Here is a little snippet you can use to get a list of Stopped/Running services on your Windows box color coded by "State" (Running or Stopped)

get-service | sort name |
foreach {
if ( $_.Status -eq "Running")
{ write-host $_.Status $_.Name }
else
{ write-host -foreground RED -background YELLOW $_.Status $_.Name} }

Data Quality Matters!!

2009-08-13T06:14:00.000-07:00

A real world example of how data corruption (logical/physical) can have real, tangible consequences given the nature of real time integration that exists between systems that govern our lives.

Ramping up nicely - 10 - 50 concurrent clients

2009-07-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

Here is the link to the stress test graph below generated by the loadimpact.com server hitting the main url of tingoo.com/forum with 10,20,30,40 and 50 clients (max is 50 for freeloaders like me! :)

There were 24000 total requests in the span of about 4 minutes! That is not bad for a vanilla install, given that there aren't any posts out there yet and most of it is being handled by the cache on the server side, but still :)

Details

Target:
www.tingoo.com/forum/

Test started:
2009-07-09 10:58:34

Test ended:
2009-07-09 11:09:34

Clients 10 20 30 40 50
Delay (s) 4.34 4.45 4.54 4.94 5.29

This is on a 256mb VDS (with that ungodly turbopanel turned off!) The max memory never hit more than 80mb which is pretty darned good too! I was also able to keep browing the forum and viewing pages when 50 simulated clients were hitting it. I don't think Tingoo will ever hit 50 concurrent users anytime soon.

Time to start populating the forums, but the first order of business is the selection of an appropriate theme.

GoDaddy VDS (VPS ?)

2009-07-08T12:16:00.000-07:00

Well, Godaddy has taken its share of knocks for being "this", "that" or the "other", but my experience hasn't been as bad as the one others describe. Maybe GoDaddy is working to get better? I dunno. My setup was all automated and flawless, SSL certificate and domain registration was a cinch and I even recieved two calls by their data center folks to help clear up the confusion caused by a poor choice of terms (imo).

In any case, I would say that the "help documentation" is still very elementary and instead of explaining the context of the item being "helped", it merely describes the buttons on a given panel. For example, you would see frustratingly annonying things over and over again in the "help articles"; things like, "Press the Configure DNS button to configure DNS"

All you can say to that is W.T.F. !!!

This brings us to the other issue. The basic VDS offered by GoDaddy is competitively priced, comes with 256mb of "dedicated" ram and maybe 512mb of "burstable" (whatever that means!) ... personally, I'm not counting on getting more than 256mb, if that.

So, you get your shiny new Virtual Dedicated Server, and despite the fact that it only has 256mb of ram, you think you can run a few websites off of it before you hit the memory wall? NOT SO!

Not if you plan to run their "Simple Control Panel". That thing uses tomcat and ends up hogging about 140mb of real RAM out of your allotted 256MB! So, I found this helpful little article here which explains how to optimize the memory situation on your VDS and how to stop this thing. (see here)

The gist of it is as follows:

To stop running turbopanel and tomcat daemons:

su - root
/etc/init.d/turbopanel stop
/etc/init.d/tomcat55 stop

To stop autostart of "turbopanel" and "tomcat" on reboot, do:

chkconfig turbopanel off
chkconfig tomcat55 off

To only start it when you want to use the Simple Control Panel, Do this:

/etc/init.d/tomcat55 start
/etc/init.d/turbopanel start

To turn it back off:

/etc/init.d/turbopanel stop
/etc/init.d/tomcat55 stop

Well, how much memory would you save? About 140MB! YESSIREEBOB!!

I was using around 178MB before and after turning my turbopanel/tomcat instance off, I see that it is down to about 38MB with apache, mysql and postfix running.

Happy VDS'ing!

In praise of "lowest common denominators"

2009-06-30T05:03:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I blogged here. Have been busy with life and other things but plan to restart a more technology focused blogging effort here and see where that takes us. Also have been exploring the possibilities with the FaceBook platform. Never thought I'd say this but I'm actually not allergic to the idea of working with PHP.

This deserves an "LOL" ...

In any case, I think this goes with my (borrowed) philosophy of working with the lowest common denominator scripting/administration tool for the longest time that I can remember!

When everyone was advocating VBA and ExecuteMonkey (no such product exists btw) I was using the humble MS-DOS Command interpreter to do some funky stuff (Thank You "FOR" statement!) similarly, it is much easier, IMO, to write an SQL script, shell out to windows and do things rather than wring an extended proc in SQLServer. With the advent of PowerShell, things have no doubt changed drastically, but it will take time before it becomes 'ubiquitous' as it were.

So then, why not PHP? The way I see it, PHP is still the work horse of the web and still running millions of forums without much fuss on $10/month accounts. So be it! I says to this predicament!

I have discovered some wonderful PeopleSoft blogs which I will be adding to my blogroll and hopefully blogging more regularly about Peoplesoft Technical issues as well.

Wish me luck.

KING NERD??

2007-10-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

This is not possible, I don't think I'm _that_ nerdy!!! WTF???

Also, I don't have a slide rule! That should be a question, and also, not owning one should be 20 points off... dammit!!

jeez!! but I like the results of the v2.0 test though, seems like I'm only 18% dumb/dork/awkward or something like that ...

U.S. Population Functionally Illiterate?

2007-06-02T20:55:00.000-07:00

An interesting post that claims that the U.S. population (or large parts thereof) is functionally illiterate, and bases that on some statistics on the U.S readership trends. I suppose that all depends on the definition of "functionally illiterate".

Here are some numbers s/he uses to back up the claim:

1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.

80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

57 percent of new books are not read to completion.

70 percent of books published do not earn back their advance.

70 percent of the books published do not make a profit.

If this is indeed the case? why are all these bookshelves on all these bookstore monopolies filled with all these books? I sometimes wonder about that. If nobody is reading these books, then what are all these books doing here.

I also seem to notice a "trend" as it were , in the types of books printed. Before the Iraq war, it was ra-ra-ra.. then it was all the anti-bush-junta stuff that filled the shelves and now it is all about the "new threat", namely, Iran and the new geo-politial wars being fought.

Maybe it is my own bias towards books on politics etc which makes me notice these things, but sometimes I wonder if books are actually printed these days to be actually read or just to be browsed in the bookstores. Their catchy, "sound bite-ish" titles seem to indicate to me that to some extent, they also serve as subliminal messages.

Walk through a bookstore and you get the idea what the boys up in the capitals are upto.

Hackety Hack Video

2007-05-21T16:18:00.000-07:00

The Boston Ruby User group has a number of good Ruby related videos up on google. I especially like the 3rd one which seems to cover some of the technical details of the project.

Enjoy and check out their other videos as well (click on "From User" link in the sidebar)

Rails 1.2.3 LOC

2007-05-13T14:16:00.000-07:00

Here are some interesting numbers. Just for the heck of it, I counted the number of lines in the ruby files (including comments) and here are the numbers:


* actionmailer-1.3.3     =  10224
* actionpack-1.13.3      =  34142
* actionwebservice-1.2.3 =   7096 
* activerecord-1.15.3    =  32750
* activesupport-1.4.2    =   7049
* rails-1.2.3            =   7433

Total:                   =  98694

I used the following sh command in each directory:


 find . -name "*.rb" -exec wc -l '{}' ';'  | cut -d . -f 1 | (tr '\n' +; echo 0) | bc

What difference does it make?

2007-05-13T07:19:00.000-07:00

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

- Mahatma Gandhi

The Trouble With the World

2007-05-08T06:16:00.001-07:00

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

- Bertrand Russell

Using Twitter as a backup alert system

2007-05-06T17:28:00.000-07:00

I was just wondering today that it would be cool if I could have secure twitter channel for all my server alerts. Twitter doesn't seem to have a secure email interface and it would be hard to convince "powers that be" to allow production system messages to a public site, but if the channel was encrypted, then maybe.

But I find the idea intriguing. Along with system level alerts, one could also get numbers on system loads, cpu usage, runaway queries etc. The possibilities are endless.

Sarkozy Wins! :(

2007-05-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

Damn! Damn! Damn! BLASTED!

Reaching another Critical Mass?

2007-05-06T06:45:00.000-07:00

Looks like the sacked Chief Justice of Pakisan is becoming the catalyst for the people to come together under the same banner. It is interesting to see the flags of PPP and the various right of center parties in the same rally supporting the ousted judge.

What will Musharraf do? Pakistan's institutions are rotten to the core. The one that remains standing, still is the Army who thing they are gods sent to earth to "guide" this country.

Looking at the video's of the protest and the number of the people reminded me of the historical Rally in lahore in 1986 (or was it 1988?) to welcome Benazir Bhutto back from exile. I was in that Rally, and it stretched from the airport to downtown Lahore. It was literally kilometers long!

Is this the latest 'Lahore Spring' ?? Not sure, but certainly, it seems that the democratic forces in the country are coming together. This rally may be regarded as a watershed moment in terms of cooperation between the right/left and centerist parties.
Could this become something bigger than this? Not unless Musharraf does something stupid like the Shah did.

The utter disgraceful state of education, and therefore political confusion helps the Army junta as well. Takes ages for people to recognize they are being exploited, and every movement for democracy peters out because the new set of leaders are just as corrupt as the army which they want to replace. (see exhibit a: Benazir Bhutto, exhibit b: Nawaz Sharif)

Oh well, the cycle goes on.

Spimes, Newscloud, Japanese Curry Beef Buns

2007-05-05T15:59:00.000-07:00

Listening to Bruce Sterling's talk on 'spimes'. While enjoying a Curry Beef Bun yum!

I wonder why newscloud.com is not more popular? Seems like a nice opensource platform for publishing a community news site??? According to Alexa.com, reddit.com has 50 times more traffic than newscloud.com .. hmm..

One humiliation after another

2007-04-22T13:57:00.000-07:00

But the movement's implosion is nevertheless astonishing. One neocon sums up the prevailing mood in the movement. The neocons are a “laughing stock”. Their “embrace of power” has been “a disaster”. Once upon a time they commanded an audience among Arab democrats and European conservatives. But now they cannot make themselves heard above the din of criticisms of Iraq. The “surge” is a desperate response to failure. Many people see Messrs Kristol and Krauthammer as exhibits in a Ripley's Believe It or Not exhibition: they marvel that they can ever have been so influential, rather than want to follow their advice again.

What can I say folks? except that someone told ya so! (via Reddit)

Starting the Erlang Debugger

2007-04-22T13:45:00.000-07:00

A comment from 'tobbe' on PragDave's blog entry regarding extending his erlang tutorial example:

Just for the fun of it, try the debugger:
(if you've got the right gui libs. installed)

1> c(ranks, [debug_info]).
2> im(). % a window should pop up, ignore it for now...
3> ii(ranks).
4> iaa([init]).
5> ranks:fetch_in_parallel().
After the last command, you should get yet another window.
From here, single step, set break-points, study varable contents, etc.
Note: the first windows shows the processes running the actual code,
double-click on a line to attach yourself to that particual process
and you'll get the second window.

And this is what it looks like on my MacBook Pro :

HOWTO :: Erlang TextMate Bundle

2007-04-22T08:38:00.000-07:00

#!/bin/sh

LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
SVN=`which svn`

echo Changing to Bundles directory...
mkdir -p /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
cd /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles

if [ -d /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/Erlang.tmbundle ]; then
 echo Erlang bundle already exists - updating...
 $SVN up Erlang.tmbundle
else
 echo Checking out Erlang bundle...
 $SVN --username anon --password anon co http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Bundles/Erlang.tmbundle/
fi

echo Reloading bundles in TextMate...
osascript -e 'tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles'



More here at netcetera

Odd things

2007-03-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

I posted this comment to PragDave's Blog re: his entry titled: The RADAR Architecture: RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient

I'm not sure why all transformations on the data received cannot be performed in terms of the basic primitives (C.R.U.D in database parlance as it were)?

I think the trouble is that sometimes we insist that an operation like "EDIT" is somehow atomic, even though by its very nature, an EDIT implies a GET!

Even in 2-tier fat client versions, a "GET" is implied. The presence of the form which recives data from the server (be it DB or HTTP) is an indication that a "GET" happened during the development/analysis phase and is sort of frozen in time, so whenever a "fat" client does an EDIT operation, the GET has already been done for us (convention).

The issue with the slightly sexier TN3270 terminal (i.e., IE, e.g,) is that when it want's to do something called "EDIT", it needs to know WHAT it would be editing. Maybe stating the obvious here, but what I'm trying to say is that EDIT is a PUT, yes, but before a PUT, it is a GET. The thing is that what we need are "smart" GET operations. A GET for an eventual PUT (for EDIT purposes) is not the same as a GET for it's own sake (for eventual, and ultimately SHOW only purposes).

A really naive way of handling this in one GET would be that whenever we make a GET request on a resource which can also be edited, the RESPONSE has two parts, a SHOW part and an EDIT part. Now, if we want to EDIT it, we use the EDIT part, and do a PUT on the resource back to the server. If we just want to SHOW, then we just don't do a PUT with the edited stuff in the next REQUEST cycle. What i'm implying here, essentially, is an out of band channel, except that both "channels" are marshalled in the same response (to a given GET).

Same thing goes for CREATE. Before we create it, we need to know what the resource is (DESC TABLENAME in oracle terminology). That information can come via the GET and only then can we create it on the second part. I think this can still stay stateless and avoid all the monkey business of tacking on the action at the end of the URL etc.

So in C.R.U.D every single 'verb' is preceded by the READ verb by default.

C -> R+C
R -> R
U -> R+U
D -> R+D

I guess the crux of my argument is that a READ is _always_ implied, and since it is, we need not worry about what action is "legal", the GET/READ on any given resource should bring with it all that would be needed to do a CREATE/UPDATE/DELETE. All actions should be broken down into primitives, and one should not conflate the protocol with the internal implementation of how a framework or a server will serve a resource.

Also, techincally, an XML version of a page ought to be treated as a different resource than an ATOM version of it. Doesn't matter if it is being generated by the same controller or whatever piece of machinery is in vogue at the moment. From the protocol purposes, it ought to be treated as a separate resource, so a get for README.XML is different than a get for README.HTML or README.TXT althought it may be the exact same object being rendered by some smart piece of code in n-ways from sunday.

snip..snip..snip...

"CLOG"

2007-03-29T19:11:00.000-07:00

What is really needed is a comment log, so your comments can be treated as a coherent narrative all across the internet. I think the age of "clogs" is near! :-)

Obviously, this would mean a protocol (yet another one) which identifies not only the place where the comment was entered, but also the owner of comments. The possibilities of mashups in this area give me the jeebies of the heebie kind.

OMFG! HOBO!

2006-12-27T17:34:00.000-08:00

Hobo is out! and it is teh awesomeo! What is "HoBo" ?? According to the site (for those too lazy to click on the link I so nicely provided)

Hobo - the web app builder for Rails

Hobo is an Open-Source project that makes development with Rails even faster than it already is. It features:

A template engine that extends Rails' standard ERB templates with user-defined tags
A powerful library of pre-defined tags for knocking up ajaxified data-driven sites in a snap
(lots still to do — help us)
Smart support for ajax - easily re-render fragments of your page without extracting them into partials
Themes - stick to Hobo's conventions and your apps will be themeable out of the box. We'll have some nice themes for you too!
A flexible generic controller - write your controllers with just a few declarations
Some ActiveRecord extensions to help stitch it all together

Building a classifieds site Screencast here.

Building a ToDo app zip bundle here.

I know I got kind of excited when streamlined came out, but I think this looks promising and worth watching for a while.

Good work Tom!

My Rails Cross Reference proposal got the nod YAY!!!

2006-12-27T16:48:00.000-08:00

Courtenay over @ teh Caboo.se writes

I think this is the best starting point so far.

Full blog entry.

The wiki link that Courtenay points to., And the text of the blessed entry:

Problem: You know what you want to do, but you don’t know what method is appropriate.

As Is Situation: Right now, the search of the RAILS API documentation is one way. In other words, the “documenters” decide what goes into the description of a method/class etc. So if they are not thinking of that other usage for a particular class/module/method, you will not find it.

Example: For example, I’m looking for some method to do task X, I use keywords A or M or Q to search for it, they seem intuitive to me, but I don’t find it. This could be because I have a different perspective on the problem, or I am using diffferent terms to describe the situation. Finally, through trial and error, I find that keyword F and Z are what this is under (ie; if I search for keyword terms F or Z, I’ll find the thing I need which performs the thing I’m trying to accomplish).

Now, the user would like to propose that keywords: A, M, Q should also be added to the cross reference “Tag Set” so that people who look at the problem domain from the same point of view as myself, would find it easily. (Kind of what Google does automatically by correlating queries with the eventual click etc.)

So, if there is a way for users to submit “tags” for each method, and those tags get included in the official documentation.

(Amr Malik amrmalikNOSP@Mgmail.com)

ENTJ - "The Leader"

2006-12-18T19:59:00.000-08:00

I found this Meyer-Briggs type test link from digg which is supposed to test what kind of a programmer are you. Well, it turns out I'm part of a group which is only 1.8% of the U.S. Population.

What is my breakdown (as it were?):

E=7 Extraversion
I=4 Introversion
S=2 Sensing
N=18 iNtuition
T=12 Thinking
F=7 Feeling
J=10 Judging
P=9 Perceiving
You are an ENTJ

Here is a little blurb:

ENTJ - Business executives, CEOs, organization founders, business administrators, managers, entrepeneurs, judges, lawyers, computer consultants, university professors, politicians, credit investigators, labor relations worker, marketing department manager, mortgage banker, systems analysts, scientists. They are born to lead and can steer the organization towards their vision, using their excellent organizing and understanding of what needs to get done.

A more detailed view is here

Profile: ENTJs take charge quickly and deal directly with problems, especially in situations that involve confusion and inefficiency. They provide structure to the organizations to which they belong and design strategies to accomplish their personal and organizational goals. They are 'take charge' people who organise their own and others' external environments. They use their resources to find a way to meet the challenge. They are at their best in using their analytical and strategic thinking.

ErlyWeb 0.2

2006-11-02T17:28:00.000-08:00

Yari Sadan is going gang busters with his ErlyWeb MVC framework written in Erlang. I have been meaning to get into Erlang just to learn about it to some extent, so this maybe the perfect opportunity to do so. ErlyWeb 2.0 just came out. Go get it while its hot!

Some interesting Ruby Code

2006-11-02T08:47:00.000-08:00

Just so I don't forget, this has some good examples of reading and scanning files and building a new config file out of it. Incidentally, this creates a Django admin interface from a RoR schema.rb file. But that is not the purpose of me posting it here, this is more as a future reference type thingy. :)

The same thing, in nice ruby syntax hightlighted form is available at "Rails to Django" pastie.


#!/usr/local/bin/ruby

def tablize(word)
  a = word.split(/_/).map {|l| l.capitalize}.join("")
  a[-1].chr[/s/i] ? a[0..-2] : a
end

def args_mapper(args)
  @float = nil
  hash = args.split(/,\s+/).inject({}) do |hsh, cur|
    key, value = cur.split(" => ")
    key.strip!
    key = key[/^:/] ? key[1..-1] : key
    value = value.capitalize if ["true", "false"].include?(value)
    @float = true if key.eql?("default") and value[/^\d+\.\d+$/] and @float.nil?
    case key
      when "limit"
        hsh["maxlength"] = value
      else
        hsh[key] = value unless value.empty?
    end
    hsh
  end
  if @float
    hash["max_digits"] = hash.delete("maxlength")
    hash["decimal_places"] = 2
  end
  hash
end

def column_mapper(column)
  case column
    when "string"
      column = "Char"
    when "datetime"
      column = "DateTime"
    else
      column = tablize(column)
  end
  column + "Field"
end

def mapper(line)
  line.scan(/t.column\s+"(\w+)".*?:(\w+),?(.*)/) do |column, column_type, args|
    if fk = column[/(\w+)_id/, 1]
      return [fk, "ForeignKey", "'%s'" % tablize(fk)]
    end
    return [column, column_mapper(column_type), args_mapper(args)]
  end
end

schema = IO.read("schema.rb")
django = ["from django.db import models", "import datetime"]
schema.scan(/create_table\s(.*?)end/m).flatten.each do |chunk|
  chunk.scan(/(\w+)",\s:force\s=>\strue\sdo\s\|t\|\n(.*)$/m).each do |table, data|
    django << "class %s(models.Model):" % tablize(table)
    data.chomp.split("\n").each do |line|
      column, column_type, args = mapper(line)
      args["maxlength"] = 255 if column_type.eql?("CharField") and args["maxlength"].nil?
      unless column.nil? or column_type.nil? or args.nil?
        @first = column if @first.nil? and not column_type.eql?("ForeignKey")
        args = args.is_a?(Hash) ? args.map {|k, v| "%s=%s" % [k, v]}.join(", ") : args
        django << "  %s = models.%s(%s)" % [column, column_type, args]
      end
    end
    django << "  class Meta:"
    django << "    db_table = '%s'" % table
    django << "  class Admin:"
    django << "    pass"
    unless @first.nil?
      django << "  def __str__(self):"
      django << "    return self.%s" % @first
    end
  end
  django << "\n\n"
  @first = nil
end

open("django.txt", "w+") do |file|
  file.write(django.join("\n"))
end

Jumping off of Rails (for now)

2006-11-01T20:01:00.000-08:00

I think it doesn't make business sense for meto use Rails for my site right now. PHP has more off the shelf parts available while every rails job seems to be custom job and rails developers are so much in demand that no one wants to charge less than 150 bucks an hour yup!! and that is if they deem you worthy enough to talk to you.

Basically, the mom and pop outfits are either supposed to roll their own or go bankrupt (OR, use PHP off the shelf scripts if they are fortunate enough to be entering familiar terrain).

So, I think I have made up my mind that Forums, Classifieds, business Directory and some kind of a social bookmarking digg like functionality Would be done via PHP for tingoo.com

I only need to figure out how I am going to make the transition and how exactly I am going to get a proper look and feel designed for the site. Currently it has my design fu, and I gotta admit, IT SUCKS :-) hehe...

But one thing is for sure, I need to focus on the business end and stop bullshitting on the latest chrome coming out of the Rails shop because most of that is too magicky for me to use properly (for now). Hopefully, when I get more time, I'll get back into converting the site into Rails, but right now it is a bit much for me.

Hoping this approach works out from a business perspective.

Installing YAWS

2006-10-30T19:53:00.000-08:00

So, I'm trying to play around with the ErlyWeb framework written by Yariv using the Erl programming language.

For OSX Tiger there are a few things you have to install.

I tried doing a full install from source for YAWS 1.65 but it crapped out at the last stage, so then I tried the darwinports method and it sseems to have finished without error.

This is what you have to do to setup YAWS to launch automagically via launchd during startup.

###########################################################
# A startup item has been generated that will aid in
# starting yaws with launchd. It is disabled
# by default. Execute the following command to start it,
# and to cause it to launch at startup:
#
# sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.darwinports.yaws.plist
###########################################################

Cats and Subcats

2006-10-25T19:53:00.000-07:00

Problems:

Categories, Subcategories and each subcat has ads posted under it. The vanilla app side code supplied is too shoddy to use in a production app. Rails makes 100 SELECTs every frikking time the page gets loaded. EVERY TIME. Then, after getting all those objects, it puts it into a list and does an array.size ... OMFG!!!

anyhoo, this is what I did, put the sql in a script and have it run every 15 minutes or so. Why? because it is a general sense that the users need. Not an exact number.

-- set the total ads per "SUBCATEGORY" in the categories table

begin transaction;

update categories set ads_count=(select count(*) from ads a where a.category_id = categories.id);

commit;

-- Get totals of the ad counts for each main category ("topdogs")
select name, ads_count , (select sum(ads_count) from categories b where b.parent_id = a.id) as totcounts from categories a where a.parent_id is null;

-- Now set the total values for the main cats by summing the ad counts for all of their
-- subcategories.

begin transaction;

update categories
set ads_count=(select sum(ads_count) from categories b where b.parent_id = categories.id)
where categories.parent_id is NULL;

commit;

just put it in a rake task and have cron run it periodically, and comment out all that 100 select per page nonsense which is not necessary.

adios!

RMagick Part Deux - R-Men in Tights

2006-10-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

Well, after much frikkin consternation, I was able to install RMagick by following this. I believe one of the problems was that I set gcc version to 4.0 !!! :(

So, I set it back to 3.3 and found a little bit more information (It is really SICK how frighteningly complicated and assinine the install if ImageMagick is! .. then again, I'm complaining on just installing.. think about the good people who develop it.. so.. enough bitching)

here is what you have to do on OSX Tiger I think:

Follow Hive Logic tutorial, put it in a shell script whatever. EXCEPT!!!... (see below)
After downloading the versions of Imagemagick source, do the following to configure:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local CPPFLAGS='-I/opt/local/include' LDFLAGS='-L/opt/local/lib'
make
sudo make install (you will see some warnings, I think it is okay to ignore them)
gem install rmagick

NOTE: make sure you are downloading the latest versions of all the libs, HiveLogic's versions are lagging behind a bit, but it seems to have done the thing for me to the point where I was able to install the gem.

Biggest Joke EVER!

2006-10-19T19:24:00.000-07:00

RMagick on OSX is the biggest DAMN JOKE on the face of the earth!!!!!

I just wanted to say that. Thanks.

Tingoo is an awesome Desi site

2006-10-17T09:22:00.000-07:00

Shameless plug: Tingoo.Com is an awesome classifieds and Desi Forums site catering to all desis (or is it desi's, or maybe desis' ??) NRI's, people of the subcontinent, South Asia or whatever.

Anyways, enough fawning over such a great site. I really liked it (maybe because I helped develop it). because it caters to all desis and not just indians or pakistanis or bangla people etc. Its aim is to help desi people all over the world find things that they are looking for. simple things like the best dosa restaurant in the neighbourhood etc. (okay maybe the Desi Business dir (biz dir) part is not done yet, but it will be soon).

So there, I'll post more updates when we have added more thingies to it. Until then, enjoy the free classifieds and the forums (all ruby on rails baby!)

Installing RMagick on OSX Tiger

2006-10-11T19:08:00.000-07:00

I ended up downloading the railsday2006 bundle from one of the sites (it is in the comments in the Railsday2006 blog article).

Now, Rails is great and all, and it makes the developers do some really nice test driven development, but one thing that escapes me is: Why don't Rails developers document their fucking applications? I am going through each of the submissions and there are about 150+ of them. Out of 20 so far, there have been maybe TWO (yes two) which bothered to put a README_FOR_APP in the doc directory. But almost 17 of those twenty had unit/integration tests written.

How is it that a developer writes up 8 files and hundreds of lines of test code, but can't do the eventual user of his/her code the courtesy of including a simple readme file?

Something is really whacked here, and I'm talking general attitudes and philosophy here.

Anyhoo, back to the topic. So I was playing around with the WeRateStuff app by the http://WeBreakStuff crowd, and one of the things is to install various gems. One of them is RMagick. Long story short, HiveLogic has an excellent writeup on their blog.

Anyhoo, Make sure you install Imagemagic 6.0 or later installed. The version in the HiveLogic article is a from the time it was written up (a bit old). My Tiger install had a 5.5.7 version already installed.

NOTE: You may have to use the following command to set the gcc to version 4.0

sudo gcc_select 4.0

UPDATE #2: Hmm.. it may not be the gcc version, and I may have to revert it back. The "make" is failing on fontconfig.h not being found. So I googled the error message and found something that indicated I may have to do a 'locate fontconfig.h' and then use the full path. There were 2 versions, one in my X11 dir and the other on /opt/local (I think Darwin ports uses that). so I used the /opt/local one because it was newer.Still not go, this time the link failed. So I did a sudo make clean and then make and lets hope this works.

This brings me to RANT NO. 2. Why can't we just have these libs built for different versions? I think it would be good, but that maybe more trouble than its worth. So prolly doing it this way is safer. Anyhoo, GCC continues.

I may have to rever to version 3.3. Lets see. It would be nice if the ./configure part figured this shit out for you. or at least aborted if the right version hadn't ben 'gcc selected'

UPDATE 3: Okay, I GIVE THE F&(K up!!! It uses RMagick, and it just won't install and the loader craps out. I guess i got to update lots of stuff.. so, this way, I guess I'll jsut stop it and not check up weratestuff

This brings me to my gripe: Why can't we turn things off in Rails apps? why can't I just say, I don't care about the images for now, just show me the site. FFS! this is so annoying.

No docs,
No configuration,
But its got tests! and fonts, if you can get the thing to work
Oh and if you want to run more than two apps? well, do two rails installs.

I don't really know why this doesn't get old with people? There is truckloads of Repitition, but no one seems to care.

What gives? Am I the crazy one? Why isn't Rails a bit more like Camping or Django?

Caveat Emptor. And thanks to Hive logic for an excellent writeup FWIW.. :)

ciao!

James Britt Learns his lesson

2006-10-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

B&N strikes agin! James Britt pre-ordered a book from B&N, only to see it first on the shelves, and only to be disappointed by an email from BN telling him he won't be getting it for some time. I don't blame him for sounding a bit ticked.

Way to go. I'm guessing they've shipped all their copies to their stores, so they have none left for anyone foolish enough to actually use their Web site.

This is why I NEVER EVER order chicken Teriyaki in an Italian restaurant, and Beef Yakisoba in an Indian restaurant. (Although there is one exception to it: The Butler's Pantry)

B&N in the states and its evil equivalent here in Canuckland (chindigo store monopoly) have given me enough trouble on their "online" side that I totally stopped using it. Now I use the "professionals" erm.. amazon.ca or that store in quebec. I find that amazon.ca is ALWAY.. and I mean ALWAYS on time, and gives me a better break %age wise when it comes to discounts. Also, Amazon doesn't push books in your face which seem to satisfy the political agenda's of its owners (unlike some other "bookstores" I know)

I have been ordering from amazon.ca store and I even get free shipping for orders greater than 40 bucks. For someone who spends more on books than on clothes and shoes and things of that nature, this comes in real handy. (plus you don't have to wear the book to figure out if it fits.. hehe)

Thanks Britt for reminding us yet again ... and hopefully you'll get the book soon enough. TEH WOZ has been pushing it like mad lately. which is good because I like to listen to the guy. He seems to have the energy of an excited high school nerd :)

(I mean it in a good way)

Litespeed is actually kinda cool

2006-08-26T18:52:00.000-07:00

I just read a post by George Wang from litespeedtech.com here, went over to their wiki over there..

downloaded the lsapi-ruby gem
wget the lsws zip
installed litespeed

30 minutes later, my stupid rForum is running off of litespeed (at lightspeed might I add?)

And the 2.2 comes pre-configured with a Rails tab. How FKCING cool is that?

Meanwhile, I've bee pissing around with the stupid comatose plugin sodomizing rForum's namespaces, and I'd be damned if can get ANY one to frikking throw me a frikkin bone here.

Ever wonder why the really cool and awesome stuff has really pleasant people like George Wang or Xin Li and really shitty stuff like all these little web 2.0 turds floating around has just awful meanies sitting around just jabbin at people and basically not helping..

GREED IS NOT GOOD PEOPLE! don't you get it?Its not the 80's anymore.

gawd I'm so pissed right now.

"Personal DNA" whatever that is

2006-08-21T13:37:00.000-07:00

Benevolent Inventor

Architecture rev. 1

2006-08-21T12:56:00.000-07:00

Google File System and autre chose

2006-08-18T14:31:00.000-07:00

I'm reading (just for the heck of it) about the technology and architecture behind Google.

Thanks to Luc Carlson whose entry on starfish (Luc's implementation of Map-Reduce in Ruby) sent me off to the google paper on map-reduce and from there the rest of the papers.

I don't want to soudn like a fanboy here, but sometimes I'm truly very happy to have found Ruby (via Rails ofcourse). I did look at it a few years back but it was rails which got me re-interested. So thanks to DHH. FWIW.

Blogger Dashboard Widget

2006-08-16T17:43:00.000-07:00

The Google blogger widget is actually kind of nice. If I have some useless comment to post to my blog, it is nice to know that it is only an F11 keypress away...

wurd!

PSP Suckage

2006-08-10T15:35:00.000-07:00

My iPod is dead, may it rest in pieces (literally). I ended up opening my 1G ipod (circa 2002) to "fix" it and though I figured out what was wrong, my solder-fu is just not as strong as it used to be. So I ended up severely mucking up the very fine points where were obviously done by a robot soldering entity.

so, to listen to the podcasts, I had to brush the dust off of my Sony PSP which I happen to have a half gig (460mb usable) Memory Stick Pro Duo for (who the F**K names this stuff?)

Anyhoo. Say what you will about apple being the new evil empire, but you got to give them the superior design points.

Sony, despite being a consumer electronics company, has not really developed the interface well. Or maybe I'm just being too harsh on them because the primary purpose of the PSP is to play games not listen to mp3s? However, if I remember correctly, the Sony marketing bigwhigs were really pushing the PSP as a multimedia machine.

whatever.

GRIPE
I wish the SDK was open so I could extend the most annoying mp3 player which comes with the 2.x system. You can't really fast forward through an mp3. So if you are listening to a 40 meg podcast, good luck getting to the middle of the podcast in case you skipped back to the beginning (very easy to do because the left button controls that).

I have messed up my listening position so many times that I am seriously thinking of hastening my purchase of a new ipod. I wish apple would hurry up and send to market the latest iPod+iPhone combo that all the rumour sites have been talking about (right!)

P.S. did I mention that the google blogger widget RRRROCKS!!! ?? did I ? did I ??
/GRIPE

Posting From Google Blogger Widget

2006-08-06T07:10:00.000-07:00

I had stopped using widgets because they became such huge pains in the azzes, but I guess I'll start using it again.. I mean they're really handy, except that they are such hogs..

so in any case, I was looking for a timer widget and I found this MeditationTimer , but before I knew it, I had the Blogger widget, the DailyGrind Widget and the DashMail widget.

Even though I'm a little skeptical about the DashMail widget. I mean, how do you know its a harvestor for email ids (or worse!!!) really, how do you know?

Composite Keys for Rails (ActiveRecord)

2006-07-23T12:11:00.000-07:00

Dr. Nic Williams is working on a composite key plugin for Rails ActiveRecord. yay!

Tutorials Galore

2006-07-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

Alrighty. I got the list of 'top thirty' Ruby on Rails tutorials off of a python blogger so I'll post their entries as well.

First, the RoR tutorials.

Helpful Ruby on Rails tutorials.

AJAX powered chat in 3 hours on Ruby on Rails : Tutorial on creating simple Web chatroom
Ajax on Rails : at ONLamp
Beginner’s Guide to Rails, part 1 : series of tutorials at GodBit
Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger : at HiveLogic
Create a To Do List with Ruby on Rails - Beginner’s Tutorial : at thehua
Distributing Rails Applications - A Tutorial : by Erik Veenstra
Fast-track your Web apps with Ruby on Rails : at IBM
Four Days on Rails : Tutorial in PDF at HomeLinux
Getting Your Feet Wet With Ruby on Rails : at Webmonkey
Installing Ruby on Rails with Lighttpd and MySQL on Fedora Core 4 : at DigitalMediaMinute
Instant Rails : preconfigured Rails software
Introduction to Ruby : for Perl programmers at SixBit
Introduction to Ruby for Mac OS X : at IO
Learning Ruby : by Daniel Carrera
Many to Many Tutorial for Rails (PDF) : at JRHicks
ObjectiveView Ruby on Rails Introduction (PDF) : at Ratio
Really Getting Started in Rails : at Slash7
Rolling with Ruby on Rails (Part1) : at ONLamp
Rolling with Ruby on Rails, Part 2 : at ONLamp
Ruby on Rails : at RegDeveloper.co.uk
Ruby on Rails on Oracle: A Simple Tutorial : at Oracle
Ruby on Rails Screencasts : at RubyOnRails
Try Ruby : Try Ruby in the browser at Hobix
Tutorial : a basic tutorial at RubyOnRails
Really Getting Started in Rails : Despite being written back all the way back in January 2005, Amy Hoy’s short and sweet intro still manages to be relevant
Rails for Designers : by Kevin Clark
Ruby QuickRef : quick reference guide.
Ruby Tutorials : at Tutorialized.com
Using Ruby on Rails for Dev on Mac OSX : at Apple
How to Build a Ruby on Rails Engine: In-depth Start-to-Finish Tutorial : at AlterLabs

And then, the Django tutorials gotten from the same site:

Helpful dJango tutorials.

Are you generic?
Sending E-Mails via Templates
Django admin for your PHP app?
Hacking FreeComment
the difference between ‘blank’ and ‘null’
Using Django’s TemplateTags
A Django website that took (a lot) more than 20 minutes
Forms With Multiple Inline Objects
Extending Generic Views
Template context processors
Custom SQL In Django
How Django processes a request
Write better template tags
Extending the User model
Django’s Undocumented contenttype app
Django, gzip and WSGI
Django for non-programmers
Django Templates: The Power of Inheritance
Django Templates: An Introduction
Setting up Django on Dreamhost
Django on Windows HOWTO
Django Admin Hack - Fields varying with user permissions
Some django gotchas
Django Templates are not limited
Develop for the Web with Django and Python
An AJAX ComboBox Widget for Django
Using Django’s Free Comments
MochiKit and Django
RSS made stupidly simple
Installing Django on OSX

Enterprise ain't so bad

2006-07-18T07:47:00.000-07:00

Martin Fowler has an excellent article on why it maybe good for Ruby if RoR community at large were to support the concerns of the enterprise.

I really don't see how DHH can stick to his guns re: Rails and called compound keys 'evil' or something when the fact is that most of the business world runs on this and there are a lot of people being attracted to Rails who come from that background.

If Rails and or DHH is really that committed to just being the platform for NEW ASS-2.0 applications (I can't use @eb2.0 because Douches@Oreilly patented it or some such) then fine, but don't use their numbers to claim how big rails is getting.

As a matter of fact, I think I'm seeing the rails phenomenon contract. One thing that was telling was that most of the keynotes at railsconf did not engage in BDFL worship. Which I appreciate anyways, but it was something which sort of told me that things maybe moving too fast.

One year from now, the web-framework maybe markedly different. We'll have to wait and see.

In any case, M.Fowler makes an excellent point, and his article on Enterprise Rails is worth a read.

"Good News Everyone!!"

2006-07-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

No the war in lebanon didn't stop, Not enouch innocnets are dead yet.

But on a slightly selfish front, I was able to fix my stupid old ibook g3 dual usb. I ended up dismantling too much of it.

For future reference: If you're just trying to fix the screen going blank because Apple did shitty enginerring and the pathway between the base and the lcd is too constricted, then there is NO NEED to dismantle the bottom of the ibook. Just take the 4 side screws off from the screen. flip it out. then unscrew the hinge as mentioned in the ibook pdf manual over here, take the wires out take the sheath off and if the wire is broken just solder it and put a heat wrap on it and just put the screen back together.

While you're at it, you can put your company logo right over where that back apple logo and and thusly modifie ye ibooke!

long story short, I ended up soldering the wire and put everything back together. I have 1 extra screw left over from the whole adventure and though I know exactly where it goes, I just didn't have the patience to take the bottom apart again just to put this one screw in. So, it sits in my toolbox quietly.

i got Dapper Drake on it now, and also some aunatuhorized web framework installed. hsssss... hssssss hsss...

We got Snakes on the mothaf**king plane!

This ain't gonna be purty!

2006-07-03T21:10:00.000-07:00

I got my G3 dual usb ibook all spreadout on the coffee table... I was having problems with the backlight. whenever the lid was opened beyond 30 or so degrees, the light would go off..

This, apparently is an issue that apple hasn't really every recognized (and therefore no recalls as I understand). Being the "different thinking" awesome cool-ass dudes that they are (NOT!) they have basically deleted all posts on apple customer forums relating to this issue.

That's right, just don't acknowledge that the problem exists. Anyhoo, so I found a couple non-apple pages on the web, and got to work dismantling the unfortunate notebook. Right now, I think I found the problem, its a broken wire. So I'll have to solder it back together and just make sure I don't close the ibook too often anymore.

I was going to take some pictures, but then I forgot to start from the beginning. I'll put links to the couple of articles that I used. Also, to be fair, I did use the apple ibook pdf manual, and I guess at least its helpful in the sense that it guides you through dismantling the thing..

there are so many little screws that its easy to sort of lose track of them. I liked the idea of drawing diagrams of the machine and then taping the screws to the drawings on a blank page.. this way you get a clue as to where all the screws ought to go..

anyhow, lets see if I can put this thing back together. I'm also thinking of taking the 512 module from the G4 ibook and swapping it with the 256mb module from the old book. Hopefully the memory speeds are the same. This way the G4 will have 1.25 gigs and the old ibook will have 640mb of ram. EGGZELENT smitthers!

Oh Canada

2006-07-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

Happy Canada Day. etc. etc.

Streamlined - Stop Banging Rocks together

2006-06-24T18:50:00.000-07:00

"Stop banging rocks together and build something." HAHAHA I love that tagline!
Streamlined
sounds interesting.. can't wait till it becomes availble (ie, the next OSCON)

Railsconf talks Linky Love

2006-06-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

Kevin Clarke of glu.ttono.us has been kindly blogging RailsConf and I'm posting these links here for future reference. Many thanks to Kevin, whom I cannot thank in blog-person as the comments are off :)

so here goes:

A call for better data integration for rails.

2006-06-24T18:15:00.000-07:00

Dave Thomas hit the nail on the head on this one:

Data Integration

Better use of schema - use schema constraints

Validation based on the schema (staying DRY)

Work with database foreign keys

It will help with enterprise integration

Make it easy to define in migrations

Add belongs_to if FK detected

Generally make folks feel we care

Primary keys

Better support for non-integer keys

Particularly in migrations

Add support for composite primary keys

Support distributed transactions

Standardized attribute-based finders

Non-database models (including JMS/MQ)

The rest via Kevin Clarke's glu.ttono.us

HyperCard reborn?

2006-06-10T15:08:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've always thought that Smalltalk is an awesome environment, especially Squeak. Only if the Squeak project could get some UI people to make the interface more useable and cleaner looking you'd have had a killer product on yer hands, but no suck luck so far.

But certain folks valiantly fight on!

In any case, back to the matter at hand (no pun originally intended) and that is HandsOn based on Peter Howell's excellent and thought provoking thesis . And that is an environment which I think could kick ass in a major way.

Peter summarises this as follows:

This project is about refining blogs and wikis and bulletin boards. Its about coming up with more forms of network communication. Its about answering the question: "How do you have a conversation amongst a hundred thousand people?" Or even a hundred people. Its a tool to build communication tools. Its about getting the tools out of the hands of the engineers and into the hands of the artists. Its about letting the users build their own tools. Its a visual programming language geared towards building collaborative web applications. It aims to support a new class of designers--community designers: those who are more interested in fostering and nurturing a productive enjoyable community than in any specifics of HTML or databases.

Amen brother!

Now, only if we could have something like this in Ruby. I was day dreaming about an equivalent application cobbled together with a YAML file in lieu of the snazzy squeak front end that you see in the demos (here and here) , and a static processor type thingy which would spit out a camping.rb app file based on this configuration. A visual equivalent would be nice, but that seems to be beyond my own capabilities right now.

So it would go something like this:

[YAML description of a site] --> HandsOFF --> [auto generated Camping app]

dreams are free I suppose eh?

"When in doubt, use brute force."

2006-06-10T15:04:00.000-07:00

also,

"We have persistent objects, they're called files."

Ken Thompson is da man! more gems here.

The Trouble with the World

2006-05-20T18:27:00.000-07:00

How true!

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

--Bertrand Russell

Respect Life? Do a Startup!

2006-05-14T11:18:00.000-07:00

Paul Graham has an interesting new essay out which talks about "The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn".

A summary:

Release early.
Keep pumping out features.
Make users happy.
Fear the right things.
Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
There is always room (for one more startup?)
Don't Get Your Hopes Up.
Speed, not Money

But for me the most intriguing part is the last couple of paragraphs in the "Speed, not Money" section:

We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly miraculous. It is also palpably short. You're given this marvellous thing, and then poof, it's taken away. You can see why people invent gods to explain it. But even to people who don't believe in gods, life commands respect. There are times in most of our lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost everyone has a sense, when this happens, of wasting something precious. As Ben Franklin said, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is what life is made of.

Right On!

Colbert = Cojones!

2006-05-03T18:35:00.000-07:00

I don't care what the "media" says. This needed to be said and Colbert said it! Sort it out.

It was sad and funny and ballsy all at the same time. Someone had to say it and its sad that its the fake journalist who had to do it. Not the lapdogs who stayed obedient throughout the act.
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
The silence of the so trumpeted "Liberal Leftwing Media" is deafening! My guess is they're all stunned! But this will reverberate throughout history. This was a seminal moment as far as I am concerned!

So, good on Colbert for speaking truth to power and it took major cojones to say what he said. So it wasn't funny at times. Is the situation around all of us funny anymore?

Its not funny anymore!

Finally!!!

2006-01-31T20:54:00.000-08:00

Finally I was able to get the new box from LayeredTech. I pretty much spent most of the last 3 days configuring the box. Finally got the DNS working and the name resolution for tingoo.com seem to be working fine.

Next stop Haaarlem! I'm thinking I should put a web 2.0ish signup here with pastel colors and beveled corner image thingies up there.. just to assure people how cool its gonna be when it hits the world

or maybe I could put a static site or at least an 'about' site. Right now its just a vanilla rails page on port 3000.

oh well.. 1 step at a time. I'm pleased with the progress I've made in the last 3-4 days..

I wish

2006-01-27T19:17:00.000-08:00

I could sue these nicotine gum companies.

Seriously. They show people smoking cigarettes on TV with impunity. You CANNOT show people smoking, except of course in anti-smoking ads.

I sometimes wonder if Nicorette is owned by a cigarette company. I smoked for 14 years. Quit for 2.5, started again, and been smoke free for a couple months again.

Every time I see these stupid "helpful" commercial, I get cravings. Not too bad, but the trigger of watching someone smoking can be very strong.

I wish I could sue these bastards.

look ma! no hair!

2006-01-27T11:55:00.000-08:00

Those who would sacrifice liberty for security...

2006-01-25T15:58:00.000-08:00

From Insomnia - Journal of Mark Kraft

Alberto Gonzales spoke before law students at Georgetown today, justifying illegal, unauthorized surveilance of US citizens, but during the course of his speech the students in class did something pretty ballsy and brave. They got up from their seats and turned their backs to him.
To make matters worse for Gonzales, additional students came into the room, wearing black cowls and carrying a simple banner, written on a sheet.

Enough Said.

2006-01-25T07:35:00.000-08:00

"God Bless Canada!"

-- Stephen Harper, Primer Minister in Waiting Jan 2006

Camping, A "Micro" Framework

2006-01-18T13:39:00.000-08:00

Why has released his MicroFramework called "Camping". This was enough for me to download and play around with almost all day. I just think its really awesome what Why has been doing with webpage and markaby and now camping. cool cool shit!

I this could be real helpful in prototyping web applications. I'm amazed that he has a whole blogging engine written in around 200 lines of code complete with authentication and whatnot.

Very Very interesting indeed! I love the "architecture diagram". Lightweight, and hilarious to boot! Talk about agility and joy going hand in hand!

Aww fer cryin' out loud. Now he's gotta picture of a dead lady under the funny picture... shitzz.. I don't get why sometimes.. Why? Why?

Macbook "Pro" and the real coup!

2006-01-17T08:13:00.000-08:00

Apple's release of intel based mac book pro is the latest news all over. Varying opinions on whether its a good thing or a bad thing. Would these notebooks be any better than the PPC based ones? Is it really worth all the fuss and marketing hype created at the moment?

I'm not sure. Apple needed faster cpu's for their notebooks. Great!

I think the real coup is going to be the fact that now x86 based OSX is poised to compete directly with the Windows Long horn. Bulk of the work has been done to port the OSX to intel. With the next release of OS X (post Tiger) Apple and M$ maybe going head to head (especially if there are native emulators for windows apps provided with the upcoming OS X release.)

Markaby Baby!

2006-01-16T17:48:00.000-08:00

Somehow I really liked the simplicity of the prototype webpage.rb thing in Why's tryruby.hobix.com tutorial. Then Why came out with the webpage, son of web page , and now, we have a plugin which allows you to represent html markup in Ruby.

This is awesome!! AFAIC. because I think most of the time it will be me writing the stuff and the ruby syntax makes it way easier than the ERB stuff which I find a bit busy and hard on the ole eyes.

So, thanks to Why and Tim for bringing us: Markaby!

some example code:

html do
  head do
    title action_name
    stylesheet_link_tag 'scaffold'
  end

  body do
    p flash[:notice], :style => "color: green"
    self << @content_for_layout
  end

end

Personally, I like it better like this:

html {
  head {
    title action_name
    stylesheet_link_tag 'scaffold'
  }

  body {
    p flash[:notice], :style => "color: green"
    self << @content_for_layout
  }
}

Simply brilliant!

Head First thingies

2006-01-09T18:26:00.000-08:00

I got a chance to check out the "Head First" series of books. I was tempted to get the Head First Patterns book, but then I decided to hold off. Same for the Head First XHTML, CSS etc. etc. Book.

Actually its quite good and quite different from the other such books out there. Especially good for the beginner like moi! The CSS section seemed to be excellent. This would make and excellent book to learn the ropes of HTML design and to dunk yourself in the CSS waters. I also happen to have Eric Meyer's "~ on CSS", but that is more for experts.

<SOAPBOX>
Speaking of tech books, I think more and more, we need to have 3 types of books for the same subject:

Extremely short intro and tutorial to get you going
Reference
In depth, explanation

or a combination there of. I'm just starting to get a little ansy [sp] looking at all these 900 page books. And what bothers me more is taht these books are pumped out in astonishingly short time fames.

Again, I go back to K&R. I was able to do C just fine and write a simple compiler Minix drivers and whatnots during my college C days (seems like ages ago) armed with just that knowledge. That only tells me that a concetrated and NO-BULLSHIT dose of information is much better than pages and pages of rambling garbage just make the boo fatter.

</SOAPBOX>

Again, I shouldn't be mixing my critique of crappy books with my impressions re: the Head First XHTML and CSS book. That one, actually, I learned something. I think it would have been money well spent if I had bought it, but I think I'll try to get it from either amazon or from another chain rather than enriching Indigo.

Anyhoo, Just flipping through the pages, I was able to pick up a couple of things about CSS (me being new to the whole web design by CSS thingy on account of me being an architecture/infrastructure guy and not necessarily a web progr'mr)

TextMate

2006-01-08T19:34:00.000-08:00

I think I'm starting to understand the excitement which DHH and the others have been expressing regarding TextMate.

For onething, its just super easy to use. I like vi, but I don't have anything against ease of use. So I think I might just shell out for this. Even though for a while I thought JEdit could do it for me, but it has a tendency to crap out after a while.

After playing around with the snippets and commands capabilities, I'm starting to find that I can make it do things. I've added some more snippets for the ruby side of the house (flash[..] isn't on the .rb side so I couldn't do it if I wanted to use the f thing in a controller.rb file for example).

I don't think there is a hot market of various bundles out there because its easy enough that people can create their own quick macros on the fly. Even though I think that it would be great.

Man, this would make life soooo much easier. Its not even funny.

The Mighty Lighty

2006-01-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

Okay, so finally I got around to installing lighty and mysql bindings on my iBook.

here are some links:

Rails wiki page which helps with the mysql problems I was having (gem install crapping out).
Lighttpd install on osx (article by NubyOnRails)

Both these items are fine but there is some tweaking which needs to be done. For (1), I had to do the following to install the mysql gem:

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

For Lighty, I followed the method described by NubyOnRails (topfunky)

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install fcgi
sudo port install lighttpd
sudo gem install fcgi

But there still was a problem with the last command. Again, I had to tell rubygems where the fcgi include files etc were:

sudo gem install fcgi -- --with-fcgi-include=/opt/local/include --with-fcgi-lib=/opt/local/lib

And script/server seems to start lighty just fine now.

Dream of Al-Andalus

2006-01-07T19:45:00.000-08:00

Chris Lydon over at radioopensource.org has an excellent episode on Al-Andalus about a multicultrual, multi-faith society in the heart of Spain, an era when Maimonides wrote his Guide for the perplexed.

This is why it is offensive to see the comical caricaturing that goes on in the "media" these days. Good on Chris Lydon for being one of the very few voices of reason in a cacaphony of same-old same-old.

Backpackit Widget

2006-01-05T21:07:00.000-08:00

A really cool widget which brings your backpackit lists to your OSX desktop.. Excellent!

Meanwhile, the django team has released the videos of Snakes Love Rubies conference. Interesting stuff.

You started it in your Garage? Really?

2006-01-05T07:07:00.000-08:00

I think the whole "We started our startup in a garage/apartment/homeless-shelter" thing is getting a LITT-TTUL old! Every time I turn around , one of the thousands of so called bare-bones startups is claiming how they used to walk 60 miles in the 20 feet snow to their primary schools fighting dragons etc.

Even though the number of such claimants is increasing as the total number of startups grows, what I find dissappointing is that most of them _DO_ have funding, most of them Do have hundred of thousands in the kitties and they still like to project this image that they're just a bunch of joe-six-packs (the uber-smart ones nonetheless) who got this neat idea one day and now its just taken a life of its own and they're just riding the wave etc. etc.

I don't know. Its getting harder and harder to distinguish betwee the real bare-bones startups from a crowd whose members increasingly profess to be "garage-startup-Steve-Wozniak-clones"

Chronicles of Narnia

2005-12-31T08:29:00.000-08:00

Saw CoN last night. I wasn't very impressed. I know everyone and their uncle (on IMDB and rotten tomatoes) seems to love it, but it just didn't click with me. You can't have the epic sweep of LOTR without breaking it into more films (and LOTR crew barely managed to do it without butchering the original story too much)

i somehow distrust movies extolling the virtues of violence to under 14 year olds. Not to mention santacalause (or Narnian equivalent) giving them instruments of violence and egging them on to "fight for lasting peace"...

I think most hollywood movies these days seem to have at least a few scenes in them which can be taken out of the movie and still serve as marine recruiting videos. But everyone seems to love it.. which is scary to say the least!

DabbleDB.com

2005-12-23T16:03:00.000-08:00

dabbledb.com
Two words: Holy Shite!

hint: watch the screencast videos!

Stallman Travels to Venezuela

2005-12-19T06:24:00.000-08:00

Stallman visits Caracas and Merida. Apparently the Venezuelano State Oil company is switching to opensource software. That's pretty good.

First stage was "free" software. Next stage would be "indigenous" software. I think pretty soon we'll start seeing opensource "hardware". How about an open-source car? Anyone can make a steam-engine these days. No-one will invade your country for stealing _that_ technology ;)

I tend to think that in the final analysis, anything can be open-sourced-ed

Some interesting tid bits:

"I gave two speeches in Caracas. One was mainly for government people, organized by Sergeant-Major Torres, who converted the Venezuelan Army's servers to GNU/Linux. People from the Ministry of Science and Technology attended, and I hope this will encourage them to support free software more in the future."

Its interesting that the army is one of the early adopters.

"There was a bookstore downstairs in the same building; I went there and found an interesting book to buy, and at that point I learned something shocking and disappointing about Venezuelan law. Every purchase--even food--requires the purchaser to present his national ID card, and his ID number is recorded to report it to the government. The bookseller was very angry about it, and I share his feelings. It is like my worst nightmares about surveillance, come true. Supposedly the purpose is for tax collection, but no one was able to give me a clear story of how it would solve a problem or why it was necessary. Other countries have been able to collect taxes in other ways. "

This is interesting and disturbing, because I was in Caracas in summer of 2004, and we did not encounter any such restrictions. This must be new. Actually, the going government rate for Bolivars was 1700 B. to each USD. But the street rate was 3200 B. to each USD (almost double). We were able to easily convert our money via a kind chinese restaurant owner in the Alhambra (Cordoba) (I think that's the name) district. No one ever asked us for ID even though we were doing groceries and purchasing things and eating.

Maybe the secret service was following Stallman around and the shopkeepers realized this and asked to see the ID. This is really very odd, but things may have changed in the mean time.

I also noted that his blog is running plone. Ah, sweet memories of plone . I only got to play with it on a part-time basis. Seems like its still going strong. I would like to use it, but Zope gives me nightmares. My encounter with Zope and Squishdot turned me off. Plone, IMO was a valiant attempt by runyaga, limi et. al. but the foundation (Zope) is too crooked to built something common-sensical on top of it. Still they've managed to tame the hideous beast that is CMF. So Kudos to the plone team.

But I digress. Then I abruptly end the post. Ciao!

"No one starts with a masterpiece"

2005-12-18T19:21:00.000-08:00

RyanC has a "Small Biz 101" series of excellent articles about starting out on a wing and a prayer. I like this no non-sense way of looking at the world of startups. Incidentally, it reminds me of Paul Graham's essays. I wish I had read these things in the mid 90's. I also wish I wasn't broke out of my wits for most of the 90's (at least till mid 90's):

In anycase, here are the links for future reference:

And just to top things off, here is Paul Graham's essay on "How to Start a Startup"

The coming web 2.0 glut

2005-12-17T21:00:00.000-08:00

I just had this ominous feeling that pretty soon, when all these little web 2.0 egglings hatch, we'll have so many cute little applications to keep track of that we won't care what they offer.

On the one hand, I like the idea of "do one thing and do it well". But when everyone and their third cousin is coming up with cool apps that want your attention, I think we're getting back into the "Worditis" syndrome. Too many things to keep track of.

So what will happen next?

A web 2.0 app to keep track of all the web 2.0 apps? Kind of like a web 2.0 applet dashboard?
A web 2.0 protocol which lets all these little apps talk to each other?

I wonder what would that be?

All this got triggerd by the latest post on Signal Vs Noise regarding their "super secret upcoming application" which Jason F. calls "Campfire"

Its interesting to see everyone try to figure out what exactly it is. We consumers are so trained. We will knock the doors off of any store that has the tickle-me-elmo equivalent for this shopping season. The must have gadget. The one thingh which will fill that gaping void that is so carefully nurtured by everyone who wishes to sell us things which they will claim will fill that void.

Time for some meta-programming?

Welcome & About this blog

2005-12-14T18:25:00.000-08:00

This is my second venture into the blog land, The first one being the one that shall remain un-named and hidden as far as possible ;-) . This blog will be mostly about my adventures in the big bad world of self.propulsion() . I tend to take roads less travelled by, So I identify with the sentiment, and as the very first post, I shall post this timeless poem by Robert Frost as my offering to the fortune cookie monster. Bring it on! :)

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.