I’ve been trying for some time to get a Debian machine configured with Ruby and Rails. I always had problems with ruby-zlib! I tried building from source… finding a package… doing this and that, standing on my head, whatever .. and finally I found this blog that gave step by step instructions on installing Rails on Debian.
First of all, thanks to some howtos at http://wiki.ubuntu.com I was able to get my video drivers setup. Now I’m basking in 1680×1050 glory. I can have windows side by side — almost… i usually shrink the window a bit. Very nice. People have asked me about my laptop, I got it from PowerNotebooks, this model. At the recent group meetings I’ve been at, people go “Wow .. thats some laptop!”. In fact on the train ride to the perl meeting, Josh McAdams whips out his cute little 12 inch mac, brian d foy his mid sized mac.. and here I am with my honking thing! I said look: daddy bear, momma bear and baby bear! hehe.. it was funny.
Last friday night and saturday I was at the Cit-Con testing conference. It was great, they had a variety of topics and although some weren’t really in my line of work I found them interesting. I got to talk to Jason Huggings, author of Selenium and Andy Lester, owner of the perl package WWW::Mechanize. They did a “Battle of the web testing packages” of some sort. Andy talked about Mech, and the advantages over Selenium…then Josh defended himself and talked about the pros of Selenium.
While I was there, Pete helped me with my laptop. I couldn’t install Perl modules and I wasn’t sure why. He looked at it and said I needed cc or gcc. So along with more help from Andy (I’m sure they were tired of me by end of day) I was able to get it installed..and off I go. I’ve installed Mechanize and tried it out, pretty nifty.
The following Tuesday, I went to the UniForm Chicago SIG Perl Meeting where Josh McAdams gave an extremely interesting talk on Perl::Critic, which will check your code for standards suggested in the Perl Best Practices book (very good read, even for PHP programmers). Very handy, I’m sure I will be using it alot. We had some fun and ran it on brian d foy and Andy Lesters code. heehehe.. they did ok 
Now that I’ve been able to install Perl modules, I’ve been playing around with Andy Lesters How We Doin’ module. Kinda nice.. can’t get GNU Plot thing to work, I’ll keep trying
About dang time! … geez, didn’t know it would take so long to get all my crap installed and life in order again with a new computer. Loving the new computer, its very fast. 2ghz centrino processor, 1 gig of ram .. wide screen. Built in bluetooth (phone and PDA are also blue) and network card.
I dual booted Windoze XP Pro and Ubuntu Dapper Drake. Have problems with getting X Windows to run, I posted at Ubuntu Forums – got any ideas? I tried installing linux drivers for my card ATI X700 … I had to convert from rpm to deb… still doesn’t work… very sad about that.
Wrote an article about VIM over at CodeSnipers, still loving it.
Working with Drupal … love that also. Took me awhile to get the hang of it, but its coming. It makes me happy. Anything to make my life easier. Its Nifty. I also found some Drupal Podcasts which are very cool.
Also been having a little stress in the family side of life. My dad had prostate cancer sugery, all is well and they were able to remove all the cancer. Praise God.. then less than a week later, my youngest sister, 17, got into a car accident, rolled the car the long ways and landing on 4 wheels was able to get out unharmed except for some bruses. Poor thing was scared to death. Needless to say, the car is totalled. It used to be my car. I went to go see the old Loyal Blue 93 Saturn and paid my respects last night. If she hadn’t of been wearing her seatbelt, she would of been killed. Hopefully thats all the action going on in my family for awhile…
I had lunch the other day with Peter Harkins, a fellow PHP and Python programmer. I showed him my ruby app and I mad the comment that on my new host Rails Playround the code in vi is syntax highlighted and it wasn’t on my OLD host. I don’t understand this terminal stuff. He said oh, just do “:syn on” and whoa, I was in color! Sweet. I don’t know how all that works, but it did. I use putty for my ssh client. Then later in email, I don’t remember how this came up, but I said I really get mad when I’m in vi and I (out of habbit) hit ctrl-s and my terminal seems to “lock up” and I have to shut down and go back in. It REALLY makes me mad when I do that!! He said this:
It’s a relic from the “terminals are a printer or dumb hunk of glass” days. CTRL-s stops flow-control (so you can read stuff before it scrolls away), CTRL-q restarts it. If you never ever want this (most don’t), do ’stty -ixon -xioff’ to kill those keys (you can put this in your .bashrc).
Ahhhh… so I turned it off and then set about to figure out how to remap my ^S to :w .. here’s what I did
map! ^S ^[:w^M
in your .exrc file:
here’s how, type
map!
space
ctrl-v
ctrl-s
space
ctrl-v
press esc
:w
ctrl-v
ctrl-m
you have to use map! so it will work when you are in insert mode.
It works.
I’m l33t today
BTW, Peter started a new blog on a wickedly cool domain name push.cx … if the name is not familiar to you, read his first blog post!