New toy

Well, such a deal! For my birthday, my lovely wife got me an iPod. Black, 30G, the new one that does video. It's really cool! Yeah, I know I'm pretty late to this particular party, but I've invested a lot into some good stereo gear over the years, so I tend to listen to music at home and in the car, not *everywhere* that I go. Oh sure, I've wished I'd had something I could listen to while mowing the lawn and stuff, but not so often that I've ever actually gone out and purchased something.

I've been watching the iPod Phenomenon, as I'm sure all geeks have, and I've been really amazed at the speed and depth of its penetration. I get the occasional overpriviliged Yuppie catalog, and they're all loaded with iPod accessories -- FM transmitters to play your tunes in the car, docks and speakers and holsters and armbands and cases and lanyards and on and on. I usually don't glance much at these, but yesterday I saw that Klipsch makes an iPod dock, and now I want one. It's too expensive, but it looks like a nice rig, and if it really is made to Klipsch standards, then it could be pretty sweet.

Oddly enough, this is really our second iPod. I actually got one (a pink Mini) for my wife the last time we were going on vacation, but she opined that she wouldn't use it that much, and that we could do something better with the money. Yesterday, after playing with mine, she admitted that she kind of regrets sending it back. Her birthday's coming up in a month or so, I wonder...

Ruby on Rails: Um, yeah, maybe

Well, I was going to plunk down some hard-earned study time to finally get my hands dirty and learn about Spring when I got sidetracked. A lot of the Java news sites were carrying stories about this new technology Ruby on Rails. I remember looking at Ruby a few years ago and thinking it looked like a neat language, but I never really spent any time with it. Now it's got this new Active Record concept and people are claiming impressive productivity gains, so I thought I'd bite and check it out in earnest.

So. I get my box all set up (build & install Ruby 1.8.3, build & install PostgreSQL 8.0.4 [in 2m15s!], download RubyGems so I can download Rails, download Rails). Now to find a quick tutorial that will get me up and running....

Well, given that I'm on a Solaris box now, there's no Quicktime for me, so the on-line "learn Ruby in 15 min" video is out. I got a copy of the Ruby LRM, which is pretty good, but it's not the quick tutorial I was looking for. And as far as I can tell, there isn't one. What I had in mind was something like the Struts sample: copy it to the Tomcat webapp directory, let it deploy, then browse it and its source code. I can't even find an example of a web page with Ruby embedded in it! Maybe I just don't know where to look, but it shouldn't be that hard. Oh, and mod_ruby refuses to build for me (something about "gcc: unknows flag -Xa, unknown language idlfull", something like that). I'm building for Apache 2, so maybe that build wasn't tested. I only tried the latest version, so maybe I should drop back one or two (I was using something like 1.2.4, which just came out, it didn't look like much had changed in the last couple of versions). When I find the time, yeah, maybe....