Robby on Rails

Okay, as I haven’t quite figured out how to change the background colors of the osx terminal and I was attempting to use the syntax highlighting file that I posted earlier (some of the text in .rb files was not showing as the colors matched the background).

So, what I did was edit the ruby syntax file and add a few changes (color and new configurations). I decided to use the emacs rb highlighting as a base for what I wanted the joe highlighting to look like.

In the end, here is a side-by-side comparison of emacs and joe on my development server.

(click to view larger version)

If anybody wants my ruby syntax file, email me and I will send it over. I will probably continue to make some changes to it until I get the ideal color schema and will post a link to the file later on.

Now that I am spending more time outside of the office and away from my local development network, I find myself struggling with working remotely and continuing to be efficient. I have been trying to work with TextMate, but it’s really not doing it for me as an efficient editor. I prefer KDevelop to it by a long shot (integrated CVS, Subversion, debugging, documentation, etc). However, for small tasks I still end up doing a lot of work in joe. Yes, joe, that silly wordstar-like editor. It has syntax highlighting (as of last year) and I think that my liking of it started when a previous employer showed it to me and got me out of my vim-hell. I can work my way around vim… but when it comes down to it, I just don’t care for modes. Emacs is a nice editor, but I just haven’t taken the time to learn all the commands and when I am working remotely, I don’t have the time to look up the shortcuts. (in due time). Joe doesn’t have cvs or svn integration but I have it on all my servers… but it hasn’t had ruby syntax highlighting!

Well, I just stumbled across this. I will be adding this to all my servers now. :-)

In other news, I am hoping to announce some good news in the coming days… but need to wait for the official approval to make an announcement.

Eventually, I need to learn to use emacs more as it does have cvs integration.

Apparently /. didn’t want to approve this post because it is off-topic (shrug)... so I am reposting it here.

With all the buzz around Ruby on Rails lately, the Rails community is putting this 10x productivity claim to the test. On June 4th, several groups in the Ruby on Rails community will creating teams of up to 3 people each and competing for prizes worth over $2000 (at last count). For more information, checkout the rules and prizes.

Rails Day will be judged by David Heinemeier Hansson (leader of the Ruby on Rails Project), Dave Thomas (author of Programming Ruby), Lucas Carlson (author of S5 Presents), and Jesse James Garrett (the guy who coined the term Ajax). The competition will last for 24 hours and the goal is to generate a lot of code for people to use as examples for future development and to show just how much can be done with Ruby on Rails in a short period of time. You have a month and a half to roll up your sleeves, read the Pick Axe, and put together a team.

Ruby on Rails has been cloned in PHP, Perl, Python, Java, and .NET already and seems to be growing in popularity very quickly.

With a month and a half left until Rails Day 2005, the sponsorship is piling up, the judges are being announced, and the site now has a blog.

Perhaps I should work on putting together a team. Could be a good excuse to convince a few friends to give Rails a try.

Rails Day is scheduled for June 4th, 2005.

The typo programmers have started working on an admin interface (which was bound to happen…).

I haven’t tried it yet, but the new blog hosting customers that have signed up with PLANET ARGON as of April 20th have got this feature. (I need to upgrade this Typo install..maybe later today)

It also appears that there is a logo being worked on for Typo. :-)

Some bugs were found and ironed out quickly by the community. Perhaps this is a sign that more people (including me) need to be testing with the development branch more often prior to a new incremental release. :-)

I think that I will start doing this from now on.. at least with some of my ongoing development efforts that will probably utilize future features.

gem update away.