A new Rails LiveCD just came out. It’s got:

• Ruby 1.8.4
• Rails 1.1.2
• Capistrano 1.1.0
• Mongrel 0.3.13
• Rake 0.7.1
• Subversion
• MySQL 4.1.12
• MySQL Administrator
• RadRails
• KDevelop
• Kate

If only it were built using Ubuntu or Knoppix and not Mandriva

Everyone’s (me included) fav distro has been pushed nearer to perfection once again with the release of Dapper Drake. Set phasers to download! Some other Ubuntu highlights (that make ubuntu so easy to love) include:

1. apt-get install vmware-player Oh freaking yes.
2. Support for SPARC and the new Sun Fire models
3. Xubuntu is now in main. BTW: nice startup logo

Where’s a rich dying uncle when you need one?

Ubicon is slated for August 18th and 19th in Mountain View, CA at Google’s Headquarters. It’s even free! I just need a few plane tickets and I’ll be set.

From Ruby on Rails’ weblog:

Have you ever wanted to write Rails routes using a URL’s subdomain? What about routing based on whether a request was HTTP vs HTTPS? Well, now you can. Recently Dan Webb released his Request Routing Plugin for public use. This plugin lets you create routing rules that use a whole slew of new properties: domain, subdomain, method, port, remote_ip, content_type, accepts, request_uri, and protocol.

You can obtain the plugin from Dan’s subversion repository:

ruby script/plugin install \
http://svn.vivabit.net/external/rubylibs/request_routing/


• I was SO close to closing the deal on my MythTV box. I had one more piece to purchase - the TV tuner card. I bought a WinFast 2000 XP RM at Fry’s Electronics (And really - Fry’s is one of the reasons why I moved to Phoenix) for a whopping $37. It was a good deal, but after fiddling with it for a few hours I realized that my poor little Celeron wasn’t up to snuff for software encoding. I need either a beefier CPU or a hardware encoding TV Tuner. I’m pulling for PVR-150 that I can find on sale. MythTV - you will be mine, oh yes - you will be mine.
• Phoenix is a cool place to live. We actually have good sports teams here. Suns anyone? pulling it out in double overtime against the Clippers was awesome! I’m not even a huge basketball fan, but man the Suns really get you going. I can hardly say that about the Utah Jazz. Plus the D-Backs aren’t half bad this year. Go AZ!
• Mmmm… Dapper Drake. Ubuntu’s latest kick-butt offering is almost on us. I’ve been running the pre-release since Flight 2 and it’s SO lovely. Stable has heck too.

For you Ubuntu fans out there:

Dapper +1 is now know as “Edgy Eft”

I’m a big fan of the concept for this release: Bleeding Edge.

I can’t wait to order a load of Dapper CDs and give em out to the world.

I’ve learned several life lessons recently. I’ll share:

1. The tech scene down here in the valley rocks. I attended the Phoenix Linux Users Group last week and heard a sweet presentation by Vince from Google about Linux on the Enterprise Desktop. Nice work - especially about the specifics with Linux (Unix) user scalability issues. Two other cool things happened. I sat by someone taking notes with an Apple Newton (go figure) and more importantly I won the big prize in the raffle swag give-away - a Google Lava-lamp! That sweet baby is going on my desk right next to my well-worn Ruby pickaxe book. BAM!

2. We got to see the Mesa Arizona LDS Temple Easter Paegent. It was a great show and the weather was awesome (as usual). Bailey even managed to stay awake through the whole thing, though she fell asleep soon after hitting the carseat.

3. Rails generally blows on Oracle. Besides the v1.1 issue I found in Active Record, it seems that the whole concept of Rapid Application Development is lost on most Oracle DBA. (Why do you want 3 sepearate users? Why would you automatically blow away your test environment? Blah, blah, blah.) Do what I did - Even if you don’t have root - install mysql and be done with it. (It really isn’t that hard - I even did it on Solaris 8 without gcc)

… the WRT54G. I’m starting work on a Rails site for the WRT54G admin web-interface. It’ll be fun, AJAX-y and Web 2.0 it all it’s goodness. Why not?

It turns out the hardest part is getting rails and all it’s dependancies on the box!

I started with: http://handhelds.org/feeds/ruby/

After loading the ruby-large package, I’ll try to get GEM going.

[Hmm.. do people use CPAN when working with perl compiled for ARM? Should I screw GEMs and package up the rails code itself? Find out on the next episode!]

Instead of MySQL, I’ll throw in SQLite for the backend, thought it looks like I’ll have to compile the ruby-sqlite bindings for ARM myself if they are written in C (and I don’t have GEMs available.)

Things that really excite me this year so far:

• Ubuntu
• KnoppMyth (Sweet action MythTV!)
• Ruby On Rails
• Asterisk (just bought a Sipura 3000)
• RAGI
• SwitchTower
• Ruby

I had the great opportunity to meet with Jared Smith, Asterisk Guru and author. He was up doing some VOIP consulting for my company. What a cool guy! I had him up to talk to the LUG a few months ago and was impressed with his knowledge and it was good to see him again. He recently switched to ful-time consulting and gets to have all kinds of fun going to uber-geek conventions and the like. I truly am jealous. The good thing is he gave me a copy of his book and even signed it for me.

He spoke of his fun at The O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference. He hob-nobbed with some alpha geeks. We spoke about scripting language integration and I mentioned my Ruby affection. He told me about a talk given at the conference about some sweet ruby Asterisk intergration (ala RAGI) and some real cool news about Rails / Asterisk intergration. Dang fine!

After some Googling it turns out my hero for this week is Joe Heitzeburg. His talks is entitled “Ruby on Rails with Asterisk.”

Sweet article here.