bphogan.com » Ruby on Rails

Las Vegas is a hellhole

Brian — Tue, 12 May 2009 05:39:21 +0000

First off, apologies to my cousin Kevin and his lovely wife. I’m sure there are lots of things to like about Las Vegas, but I just didn’t enjoy myself in the City of Really Expensive Everything. I went to Vegas for a conference, and luckily enough for me the conference kept me quite busy and mostly away from all of the wonderful distractions the strip has to offer the person who has too much money and time on his or her hands.

The time I did have consisted of me overpaying for everything. You want an idea of how expensive that place is? Buy a Coke. It’ll cost you $3.75. For a 20 ounce bottle. You can guess what beer costs.

Secondly, nobody was happy. I walked around several casinos, walked through several of the shopping centers, and down the main strip, and all I saw were people trying to do exactly what I was doing…

…trying to get the hell out of wherever they had found themselves.

You see, the whole strip is set up to keep you in a constant state of confusion. Casino floors are linked together by shopping malls with winding paths and linear hallways. Everything’s ridiculously huge and a week’s time is not nearly enough to get the lay of the land. To go to the “next casino” you need to be willing to put in some serious time. Like two hours.

Oh, and everything’s broken. The monorail was always down, the trams at the airport were broken, and for some reason I had water leaking into my bathroom from above.

If RailsConf is there next year, I’m gonna be pretty upset.

Going to RailsConf 2008

Brian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:41:54 +0000

I’ll be heading to Portland again this year to go to Railsconf 2008. I’ll be giving a talk there again this year too called “Design For Developers” where I’ll teach developers how to design a pretty-looking web page. Should be a blast.

My first book

Brian — Wed, 30 May 2007 19:11:28 +0000

If you’re looking to get started with Ruby on Rails and you’re a Windows user, this book will walk you through setting up some of the tools you’ll need, as well as show you how connect to Microsoft SQL Server and set up Capistrano. Of course, this is targeted at people who are new to Ruby on Rails and come from the Windows platform.

Curt Hibbs wrote the first chapter, where he showcases how to use RadRails and InstantRails to create a quick and easy setup.

The book covers

InstantRails and RadRails
Installation with the One Click Ruby Installer
Installing RMagick
Working with MySQL and SQL Server
Setting up a simple Subversion repository on Windows
Using SQLite and scaffold_resource to rapidly prototype a simple application
Using Capistrano
… and more.

So check it out, won’t you?

Going to Portland

Brian — Tue, 15 May 2007 19:16:22 +0000

I’m headed to Portland with Chris, Mike, Josh, and Carissa. We’re going to RailsConf2007 to learn some neat stuff from some awesome programmers. I’ll also be presenting on Sunday, and I’m just a tad bit nervous. Wish me luck.

Present from Microsoft

Brian — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:34:57 +0000

I just got a nice present from Microsoft for helping them along with a project. I can’t really say what it’s about because they want me to keep it somewhat quiet. They sent me a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional, which means I can go and install Ruby In Steel now. Who knows, maybe I’ll find another use for VS too.

O’Reilly Book – progress

Brian — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:32:11 +0000

Just sent another draft of my “Rails for Windows” book to my editor. This is what he had to say after reading 2/3 of it.

The writing is really good. I think you’re
saying what needs to be said, and I’m certainly looking forward to
expanding this into a book once we get the short cut done.

That feels pretty good.Now if I could just make progress on my other book, I’d be all set.

Rails Day

Brian — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 05:57:11 +0000

We made it through the contest! Mike, Adam, and I submitted our final change to our program after running into some nasty last minute problems. There’s always so much to fix.

I’m truly amazed at what this programming framework can do. We accomplished more in 24 hours than many people hope to accomplish in a month’s time. The three of us hammered out a fairly nice event and expense tracker. Adam and Mike would like to see it go somewhere. I think it could be a good project for them to continue.

It sounds like everyone who took part in the contest learned a lot. There are photos on Flickr of various contestants. The chat rooms were buzzing with everyone trying to get ready. It was great to be a part of such a big thing. I absolutely love the community and I am proud to be a part of it.

I’m also proud of Mike and Adam for stepping up and taking this challenge. I think they learned a lot from it and I hope they continue to tackle challenges like this.

Special thanks to Carissa for being so wonderful and putting up with us for 24 hours straight. She’s one of a kind!
Enough from me though… I need to get some sleep!

Rails Day update

Brian — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 21:32:13 +0000

We’re still going… although we’re getting slower. We’ve hit a lot of snags today because we want to implement a cool feature in our program that we really struggled with. Mike just managed to figure it out though so we’re going to hook it up.

Rails Day update

Brian — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 16:47:06 +0000

We’re kickin’ along with only about 2 hours of sleep. We just hit a snag when our power went out for some reason. Probably too much computer stuff going on in one room. We’re making some good progress after getting caught up earlier this morning.

Rails Day

Brian — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 07:17:28 +0000

We’re into our third hour of Rails Day. So far we’ve hit a few snags and had to write some things over, but we’re making decent progress. It’s a lot of fun. There’s a lot of excitement going on in the community right now. Everyone seems to be having a great time.

We also settled on a name…. ActionTracker.

Check our status out at http://spectate.railsday2006.com/changesets/teams/26/