Learning Resources - Reposting a Link Dump

Very Ruby on Rails specific, but valuable nonetheless.

https://github.com/bf4/learning

http://railsapps.github.com/best-recommended-learning-rails-books-resources.html

http://everydayrails.com/2010/08/04/more-free-ruby-rails-books.html

http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available-programming-books

Program like a game developer

I really liked this article. Both because it is something I need to work on and it espouses the philosophies I believe in for how to work and make work fun.

Program like a Game Developer

Want to know Rails? Break it. Break it to pieces. Delete all of application.rb and see what happens. Create controllers that pull data from files instead of databases. Create views that initialize variables and contain huge swaths of business logic. Create models that contruct HTML and JavaScript. Tie it all together with duct tape and CoffeeScript. Test nothing, test everything. Build models that only contain one field. Build a model that houses every piece of data your application could possibly need.

This is an awesome quote. Break stuff. Don't overanalyze. Don't fuss about naming conventions and folder structure.

 

Doing more set up with my new MacBook Air (Yay!), and simultaneously my vmware instance.

Here are some of the links I have used:
http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-First-Time-Git-Setup
http://eveningsamurai.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/changingamending-the-author-of-a-git-commit/
http://qugstart.com/blog/ruby-and-rails/create-a-new-git-remote-repository-from-some-local-files-or-local-git-repository/
http://railsapps.github.com/rails-git.html

I can't believe how old hat deploying to Heroku has become for me now as well. It's really great for getting small applications off the ground.

Setting up a new Mac OS Machine for Ruby Dev

Since I'm getting a new Mac OSX machine.... Just leaving this here. Other than using RubyEnv, I pretty much agree with it:

[Reposted from http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2998-setting-up-a-new-machine-for-ruby-development]

Setting up a new machine for Ruby development David Sep 06 2011

33 comments Latest by Tony Huynh

It used to be a jarring experience to set up a new machine for development, but progress has paved the dirt road into a silky smooth autobahn. These are the tools we use today:

1. Homebrew: Remember how painful it used to be to get imagemagick installed? Now it takes about a minute. “brew install imagemagick”. Same story for git and other Linux dependencies.
2. rbenv/ruby-build: We have some apps running on Ruby 1.8.7, some on 1.9.2, and some on 1.9.3. ruby-build makes it easy to compile all three, rbenv makes it easy to switch between them on a per-project basis. We run rbenv in production as well, so all you need to do to change the Ruby version there is alter .rbenv-version—development and production is always on the same page.
3. Bundler: Not everyone at 37signals loved Bundler at first, but now that it’s stable, they’ve been won over. I now curse whenever I have to use an old application that hasn’t been setup with Bundler. Manually tracing down dependencies?! How prehistoric!
4. rake setup: All our apps has a rake setup task that’ll run bundler, create the databases, import seeds, and install any auxiliary software (little these days) or do any other setup. So when you git clone a new app, you know that “rake setup” will take care of you.
5. Pow: No more messing with Apache or nginx for local development. All it takes for Pow to add another app is a symlink. All the apps are always configured and available at basecamp.dev, highrise.dev, etc without messing with the hosts file either.

Arch Linux VM Fun

Messed around with another VM this morning. Awaiting my new 11 inch MacBook Air, I keep watching my tracking number with anticipation! I have an old serviceable machine at home that has been upgraded motherboard and all over the years, but it's nearing end of life. It's currently running Windows 7 and has 8 GB Ram. Nothing fancy, but it works.

The VM I was working with early this morning was ArchLinux, I haven't used it before but got caught in some permissions matrix that I will have to sort out later. I spent enough time on it that I will have to move on. Old me would have gutted it out and stayed up all day, but I'm learning better habits. I'll try and make a post another day and fix the Arch Linux upgrade path. No promises, though. Pictures from the nightmare below, and some links. I should note this is all with pacman package manager, and its permissions and desires.

Summary of what I tried:
= Updating pacman "pacman -S pacman"
= Updating the entire core "pacman -Syu" and clearing the cache "pacman -Sc"
= Trying a forced update with no confirmations: "pacman -Syuf --noconfirm" (probably a bad idea!)
= Adding SigLevel = Optional TrustAll to the /etc/pacman.conf
= Above all this, doing a "pacman-key --init" to update the pgp keys
= Trying to force the update further with "pacman -S filesystem --force"

Links:
Pacman "error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)" (Page 1) / Pacman & Package Upgrade Issues / Arch Linux Forums

[SOLVED] "signature from is unknown trust."

During all of this, took mental breaks and cleaned around the house, and played with HTML/CSS.

Setting up Virtual Box Ubuntu on Win 7

Got up this morning to set up a new Virtual Box VM for Win 7. I used the following links:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ubuntu_as_Guest_OS
• http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-gui-on-ubuntu-11-04-natty-server.html

Gave up waiting for root device error
The only issue I ran into was that the directions had my VDI (virtual disk image) set up as SATA instead of SCSI. I went into the Virtual Box settings for the Ubuntu VM under Storage, removed the offending SATA Controller, added the SCSI controller in its' place with the VDI I had setup.

I used this link to figure out how to solve the issue: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1870942

I installed gnome IDE (this took quite a while) and then got started with a "startx" command.

Installing Ruby on Rails Framework

Turning the Job Into a Game

In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and - SNAP - the job's a game! - Mary Poppins

Updated the Look

Using the new templates, updated the look of my blog, also started a blog roll of tech blogs I read. List is far from complete, but it's a start.

Update

I *really* need to be more dilligent posting here, just got through reading Web Optimization, pretty decent book, although scan worthy. I had to skim over the details on click through rates and items I don't care about too much.

Also been playing with Gamebryo Lightspeed as well as Torque 3D. Without going into details I definitely preferred Torque 3D. I have also been digging through the Overlord's source code for some fixes.

Hoping my move is soon so that I can pull out my books from storage and start working on my studies. It will be nice to have bookshelves again!!!

Tons of Reading, Learning

This is just a quick update as the last few months have been so busy. I have rekindled my knowledge of C++ and working on relearning math that I don't use normally as well. Right now I'm concentrating on algebra, calculus, geometry, and bit manipulation.

Lots of job applications to be completed some are quite long - but each one teaches me new things I haven't seen in a while.

Setting up WAMP

Tonight I set up WAMP on my gaming PC, I have set up LAMP on my Ubuntu box which is no longer with me. My goal is to get my development environments set back up. I'm running PHP 5 and Apache 2.2 along with mySQL.

Goal Setting 2009

It's been a while since I posted here, but I think I'm finally getting the hang of everything. It's time to do my best work, organization and planning! This is a skeleton outline that I will flesh out later.

Technologies:
1) Scriptaculous
2) Prototype
3) Ruby
4) Lua

Project X:
1) Research
2) 3 month goals
3) Take three month goals and turn into month, weekly tasks.

A New Hope: Google Chrome

I'm truly excited about Chrome. It's not nearly perfect, but it's the direction and message it puts out. Had another one of the "big guys" undertook this project they would no doubt not go the open source route or be thinking as ambitiously as the Google team is - the browser does so much work these days it should benefit from OS principles. 

This will not change the face of the web tomorrow - but I bet it will in a few years. I personally cannot wait.

Inadvertent Customer Support in IRC

I have no idea what this user was saying, I assume it's another language, but I digress:

[20:25] mia erotisi?
[20:25] ?
[20:25] 2 malon
[20:26] I'm sorry I do not understand
[20:26] xereis opo call of duty?
[20:26] I'm sorry I don't speak your langage
[20:26] *language
[20:28] keycode for call of duty?
[20:28] I don't have one sorry
[20:29] ok thenks bb

/sigh. It's so hard getting the message of a site and getting it to the end user in a form they can understand. We aren't even on the same planet.

Events Mania

I'm wrapping up polish on the new events system. I need to work on styling/themes. There are small items I need to work on as well:

• permissions, and ensuring they are respected.
• view issues making sure things look neat and smooth.
• management vs guild theme styling.
  
• adding tooltips.
• add ajax.
• add in logging.
• review security.
• add an option to allow users to display upcoming events in some sort of upcoming events queue
  

End of an Era

Sent of the FI server today and turned over my admin rights to their mail account. Wish them the best of luck and I hope that the server reaches its destination safely.

My 11 Favorite Eponymous Laws

• Amara’s law — “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”.
• Brooks’ law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
• Conway’s Law : Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it
• Edwards’ law: “You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem.”
• Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
• Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
• Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle: States that one cannot measure values (with arbitrary precision) of certain conjugate quantities, which are pairs of observables of a single elementary particle. The most familiar of these pairs is the position and momentum.
• Keynes’ Law: Demand creates its own supply (The economists’ version of Gibson’s ‘the street has it’s own use for things’)
• Parkinson’s law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”
• Sturgeon’s Revelation — “90 percent of everything is crap.”
• Winer’s rule of alternatives: “One way to do something, no matter how flawed that way is, is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is.”Two is more than twice as bad (Note: Thanks Dave!I need to find a proper citation for this. Google wasn’t helpful)

Totally stealing this.

Hard Work on the Events System

I have been building a new Event system for gamerDNA.com in parallel with our existing one. It will be the "crawl" version, but the basis is there for future work and eventual DKP integration.
I wanted to do this one differently than our existing PHP code structure while at the same time learning more about current PHP and javascript. Launch will be this Monday and I hope to add more dynamic interation and Ajax next iteration. We use Prototype so I need to learn that as well.

I also need to learn CSS so I'll be doing that as well in the near future.

Links used:
Old but goody - RGB Color Picker

GamerDNA and FI

After moving to Massachusetts to work full time at GamerDNA, things have been crazy. As I wrote in my playtime blog, everything in my house is a mess. I'm slowly getting things in order though. This week I'm working on a revamp of the Events system at GamerDNA.

Things at FI are slowly getting in order as well. We have a new engine we are trying out and things are picking back up from the post GDC slump

Amazon Web Services

Tonight I set up our MMO on Amazon Web Services. I must say I really like the system. I know it's in beta, but so far what I'm seeing I like. I do not think it would work for a full population MMO, but the bandwidth is much better than my home machine. The AMI (Amazon Machine Image) is slower than our current beta server, but worth the trade. I'm sure you probably could cluster machine images or move processes to different images as well for performance increase.
There are also two larger base image options with increased memory and processors.

Either way our game is running at 45-60 FPS which is an improvement merely from bandwidth. I documented all of this on our private wiki, but there is too much private information to post that here. It's about three pages of information.

Here is my success picture from when I got the default AMI engine up and running.