Nice - this is the kind of thing that almost brings me to tears when it comes to sweet dynamic languages.

Take the red pill: http://www.nobugs.org/developer/ruby/method_finder.html

• 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.

My google calendar was lacking one major feature: SMS messages. My work cell is Verizon and is was not listed under the availble options.

Workaround: Use TMobile as the option.

BAM!! SMS notification heaven.

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)

FYI: If you’re running Oracle ‘oci’ adapter for Rails and you just upgraded to Rails 1.1 (ActiveRecord 1.14.0) listen up!

Are you getting messages like:

wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)

RAILS_ROOT: script/../config/..

There’s a patch in to fix it

see: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/59811#54488

One of the best things about my current position is all the time I’m getting to spend with Ruby and Rails. After having written 3 different web frameworks myself for internal projects, Rails is *so* freaking cool.

I just saw this on diggdot.us: Rails 1.1 updates!

One of the many things that I’m excited to play with is RJS. The default AJAX stuff was nice, but no easy to customize without having to drill into the javascript. With RJS, life just keeps getting better.

Thanks David.

I’m back - the blog is back up and now I’m coming to you live from Arizona.

My new job is with the Apollo Group (#38 in Computerworld’s Top 100 IT workplaces in the USA) doing release automation, systems admin and other sundry things.

One of the most exciting things I’ll be doing in diving head first into Ruby and Rails. I’m working on porting all our deployment scripts to Ruby (Capistrano?) and build a nice web interface using Rails. Peachy!

… 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.)

I’m a fan of great tech ideas and startups. This week’s great idea comes from FON.

It’s idea is this: You share free WiFi with others at home/office and they share it with you when you’re on the road.

That idea is cool - in and of itself - but there more “cool” to be found. All the technology is built into a Linksys WRT54G-type router.

Ah yes, the great WRT54G. One of the best examples of the rising importance of the “Make” culture. As soon as FON reaches the tipping point hardware hacking will really lead some to the $.