hostingrails, an excellent choice

The guys at hostingrails.com are great. If you are looking for an excellent price/quality ratio, give yourself an account on hostingrails. I tell you, you won’t be dissappointed.

I am fairly new to linux, it had been years since i worked on the old PDP 11′s so my linux skills are a bit rusty. Still I managed to get everything rolling, installing MySQL and all.

Mind you, it would not have been possible without William, the guy at support@hostingrails.com. The speed with which he.she answers is unbelievable. I suspect there is not just one William, but he has 8 brothers or so…

This is what you need when you make your first moves in this rails deployment world.

Microsoft is dead, then alive, now dead again

I don’t get this ‘microsoft live’ thing. I admit I haven’t spend 1 sec to understand it, but I did click on the www.live.com, and it still wasn’t clear for me. Another zillion marketing dollars down the drain. When I come to think of it, it’s the name that enoys me. Live, what live, why is it live now? Live for me is like Eric Clapton, live on mtv, but live software?? So and when it is live now, what about all those things we have used before? Was this <dead> as opposed to now <live>. What does that make me when I don’t use Windows Live, a software necrophile?

Ok, let’s consider it is live now. I tell you it will not be for long. The dead smell is all around it. The visual studio and .net towers begin to be so heavy they will be crashing down soon. This is because we have passed a critical boundary. If fools like me with a few hours to spare per day, can build, deploy and maintain applications using open source, and get paid for it, there will be numerous other far brighter than me that are building software by the meter.

Some nurses that work with old people have told me, they can smell when somebody is dying. The moment they enter the room, they ‘know’ someone is near the end. With Microsoft it is a very similar thing. Mind you, it will never actually die. My god, i still work with customers who are migrating software to their good old vaxes. So I’m guessing there will be NT4 systems until 2034. But while Bill is gradually loosening his grip on the company, the ‘ego’s take over. Each department, each C*O, each god damn developer will want to have his/her say. I tell you, the thing will come to a grinding stop.

You don’t have to believe me, just look at what dvorak said…

The RadRails erlebnis

YES, YES, YES !!! This is thE best thing I have seen on top of ruby/rails. RadRails is just it. For us, poor visual studio adepts, we need this IDE thing to feel at home. My god what a tool, what wonderfull guys to put this together. And man, i’ve seen them all: RDE was so basic, you could feel the silicon when you touch it. Scite was my preference for a few weeks. I had to download a desktop manager tool called Virtual Dimension (wonderfull little tool by the way) to manage all the scite instances. With an explorer window on the site to manage all the activations. Until I painfully realized that clicking the same file multiple times in the explorer window would of course create a new instance (see how stupid i am). So the last window overwrites the … (laughter arises from the masses). So I kicked out scite unless it was for editing ruby files of maximum 15 lines.

I had seen some references to eclipse, drooled over the wonderfull stuff they promised. So I installed the beast, but everytime I try to fire it up, it came bothering me about java machines being out of date, I upgraded/downgraded my JVM’s like a rollercoaster, helaas to no avail…. This java thing is soo huge, you can easily fit 12 .NET worlds in it.

So I came across RadRails (why did it take me soooo long?), very promising webcast, yes that is what I need. After installing, I had the same JVM misery. Of course, Radrails sits on top of eclipse, so that should not have surprised me. (again laughter from the masses).

Google to the rescue! Why didn’t I do that before? Yes, there it was: ORACLE!! Because of my other life where I am involved with corporate big bucks off the shelf bloatware, I need this oracle. Mind you, not the database, just some thing to be able to speak to an oracle db on our server. Why you would need an extra bit of software besides the gigabytes of .net to speak to oracle, and why this thing is in Java is for smarter people than me to explain. This thing apparently insists on a specific java lib, which it had put nicely in my path. What a rotten smell!

Then I had it: “RadRails”, from the little splash window I knew it: I am going to like this tool. It even took me a few days before I realized I could now fire up this eclipse thing. Phew, quickly closed it again. Smelled to much java. I must say, there are a few java words still left in the RadRails help, but I forgive them. My god, these RadRails people are my new heros, I worship them every day. If only I could have intellisense and step by step debugging…no no forget it, i will read the book and code without errors instead.

What wonderfull productivity I have gained since I have radrails, I could stop thinking about the editing, and concentrate on the language instead.
Thank you thank you…