Steve Workman

If you didn’t know already, Microsoft officially released Windows Vista yesterday. I’ve been running Vista for 2 months now, and in that time it I’ve seen some major performance improvements, mostly thanks to new drivers.

Yesterday, I knew it was launch day because windows update tagged 9 new downloads for me. 6 patches for Vista (including one that wasn’t optional), a texas hold’em poker game for Vista Ultimate users (which isn’t too bad once you get used to it, textures are a bit off though) and Visual Studio 2005 SP1 for pro and express (I have express installed for XNA studio). Overall improvement to Vista: minimal. Most of the speed boosts will come from drivers, just have a look what a good video card driver can do in this ATI/nVidia test: link

In other news, I’ve started up Uni-Sport development again, this time on rails. Struggling with this new language reminds me of my first forray into PHP almost 2 and a half years ago. In two days I have created a small application that reads RSS feeds, sorts them by date and displays them. Two days, for that! It seems that this agile framework isn’t so agile really, or is it just that I spent most of my day assuming that rails wrote accessors and mutators for me.

Anyway, this small section is rather flexible and will become part of the portal site which will eventually reside at http://shef.uni-sport.org. This will aggregate news/events/results from around the network. It’ll do it all in a funky AJAX-enabled way too with flashy prototype effects. Depending upon how bored i get in the next few days I’ll be debuting it very soon.

Finally, I’m off to Designertopia today, courtesy of Microsoft, so I’ll give you an update of what I learned from that then. It should be good, I’m looking to pick up design tips from the best, and I’ll pass them on. It’s a service, I know. :-)

Steve

Currently Listening to: Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City (words cannot express how good this record is)
Currently Reading: Agile Web Dev with Rails 2nd Ed
Currently Watching: the world go by
Currently Eating: Lamb korma
Days until next interview: 5 (phone with Fujitsu services)

This is going to sound like a sales pitch for Rails, I’ll admit, but if I like something, I’ll shout about it from the rooftops. So, lets talk about my current phase. Welcome to Ruby on Rails…

I was introduced to Ruby on Rails at Genesys by Elliot. It all started when he wrote the 6 hour speed coding challenge in 20 minutes. Then I watched this video:

Amazing isn’t it.
So, I got cracking at it. It took me a while to get it set up on OS X but I followed this tutorial: http://developer.apple.com/tools/rubyonrails.html from apple and everything was set up. With textmate installed everything was organised, syntax highlighted and databases hooked up.
Ruby is a Model View Controller language. Everything you do is a method. Calling generate creates skeletons that are very simple to edit. It’s got templates built in to it, unit tests, it’s super fast and… just amazing. Sorry, it’s late. Zero brain power.

So, I pretty much want to try and develop USE v4 in Ruby. It’ll be a great test and it’ll probably make me a better programmer.

Enough of this. I’m off to bed

Steve

Currently Listening to: Muse - Black Holes and Revelations
Currently Watching: American Dad
Currently Eating: Jammy Dodgers
Currently Reading: Agile Web Development using Rails