Lone Gunman

Since I started my new job, I had to learn Ruby On Rails in a real quick pace. My employer wanted to step up to the next level with the web applications the company developed. For that, they chose for Ruby On Rails, so offcourse, like I was the new kid in the house, I had to start learning it.

Ruby is a very nice language to code in. It is totaly OO and the application structure and implemented patterns like ActiveRecord and MVC are just to die for. Not that I stop working in PHP (on the contrary, when I start developing in Rails, I simultaniously started learning the PHP Symfony framework).

During my learning proces in Rails, I came in touch with Active Scaffold. A quick way to develop a CRUD interface that adapts itself to your DB schema. So whenever you add an attribute later on to your table, You’re CRUD interface will automatically change.

At the beginning I have to say, I was a bit scepticle. I was still learning Rails (and still am) and the whole Active Scaffold thing was just overwhelming. I found it hard to get things done the way I wanted, just out of ignorence.
But after working with Active Scaffold for 2 months, I have learned its true power. Active Scaffold is just configurable in every way you want.

We have a project running at the moment that is totaly build upon Active Scaffold. Every CRUD functionality is based on Active Scaffold, and believe me, we have done some wacky things with it.

So living with Active Scaffold has been a real treat. I couldn’t work without it anymore. You save a lot of time creating a nice interface (you can easaly edit the CRUD to fit your needs in any way you want). I would suggest it to any Rails developer out there.

Anyone of you ever used Active Scaffold? If not, do it right away and let me know if you like it . Even you readers who have used it and probably still do, share your experiance with me, maybe you know some tricks I have not yet hear about.

Yes, this is the end. Yesterday I watched the last double episode of The X-Files. It was a nice episode but it ended too soon. Like a lot of people who have seen the end and followed the serie, the ending is great. But it is too open. I know this was the intention the writers, but still I can’t figure out why they stopped after 9 season. Their are still plenty of details that could be explored and built on.

Ok, they know the date when the alien invasion will start, so what? They can still try and stop it and expose the shadow government. Luckily, I can always restart watching the show, but everything is still fresh in my memory, so it will take a few years before I will.

Another downside is that I have nothing interesting to watch anymore. The TV shows that are on at this moment are very weak. Maybe I’ll start wathing Prison Break or Lost again. But I still remember what happend so that won’t be so interesting.

Well, I still can watch Heroes season 2. It will be aired soon, perhaps in a week or two. So I’ll allways have one evening of good tv entertainment.

Any of you readers perhaps know a good show that I good purchase on DVD? Maybe an old show I might have loved and forgot about? Maybe I’ll buy a good anime, like Rurouni Kenshin

A few days ago, I had to finish up a new website. Nothing fancy and all that, just a basic, simple layout website. As usual, I developed the thing only viewing it in Firefox.  I thought it wouldn’t matter that mutch to other browsers since it was pritty basic. So after some nice work, I uploaded everything and let the client know his site was online.

After he must have viewed it, he let me know I forgot to post some pages. I didn’t understand what he was talking about, since I knew thos pages were available. So I mailed him back with some directions how to navigate too that page. He replyed he didn’t know what I was talking about.

And then it struck me. I realized I forgot to view the site first in IE6 en IE7. So I fired up IE6, and found no problem. That was pritty strange, since normally, it is allways IE6 that is b*tching the most with CSS layouts. So then I started IE7. And yes, their it was. I navigationbar has disapeared. For some reason, the navigation block was hidden underneath the the page content.

So I started reviewing my CSS code. Seemed like I have to enlarge my header and use less padding for the navigation bar. A small problem, that’s for sure, but it still took me almost 30minutes to figure out that was the problem.

I know that numeroes forum threads and other blogposts flame about the problem of css incompatibility between browsers. Well, I won’t becouse I don’t see any problem…
95 % of all CSS designs work alike under all none-IE browsers. The only browser that works his own way is IE, so it should be very simple for all internet users. Just kick IE out to the curb. Not only for the sake of those poor webdevelopers, but also to protect you from harm of mallware and virusses.

So do yourself a favor and download a browser like Firefox or Safari. This would make the internet a better place

I’m one of those guys that loves to switch between platform. One time, I just feel the need to use Linux, the other, I just run back to Windows. During those switches, I have experienced both sides through the development process of software and websites. But still I’m not so sure what platform fits my needs.

On Windows, everything is easy to install and configure. Click a few times and you are ready to go. I use some fairly popular developing tools. For PHP developing, I use Zend Studio. To testrun my PHP webapplications, I run WampServer. For Ruby On Rails, I chose Netbeans 6 with InstantRails to run them on. So thing run pritty smoothley.

On Linux on the other hand, you can run into a few problems if you run into missing dependencies. But still, that is easaly solved through yum on Fedora boxes. On linux I pritty mutch use Eclipse PDT for PHP developing and Netbeans for RoR. All those applications are run through a native install of Apache, PHP, MySQL, Mongrel, and RoR.

So it takes more time to get set under Linux. The thing I haven’t thought off is what the system performance is between the two. Windows XP is pritty fast, and with the comming of SP3, performance will increase. Linux is also pritty fast after some finetuning of the kernel. Probably even faster then XP when you finish up configuring your whole box.

So what platform is better? I just can’t choose, and I realy would love to finally stay with one system. There is even a third possiblity. I’m playing with the idea to buy a MacBook Pro. I never worked with a Mac before, but what I have hear of, it is pritty neat. The only thing I’m not sure of is if all the software I need is available on Mac. I like to use free software. I know that Zend isn’t free, but I need it for work, since we develop our webapplication online directly through FTP. And that is something that Eclipse and other development tools miss.

So maybe some of you readers can tell me your experience of the development platform you use, and all the pros and cons.
So don’t hesitate, and please do tell me

Since I re-develoment my website, I started to think about search engine rankings and google pagerank. So during the development, I made sure that I had clean HTML, and made proper use of meta tags.

I’m still “developing” as we speak, since I need some strong texts to put on the site, but I can allready see more incoming visitors through Google Analytics. But the thing that is bothering me is the pagerank.

My frontpage has a pagerank of 3, but when I go to other pages, I get a pagerank n/a (not available). Now, having a pagerank 0 would make sence to me, but a n/a is just to weird.

I have read a lot these past days about SEO and pageranks, and I know it is calculated through the number of high quality backlinks, but still that doesn’t explain the n/a status. I rather would expect a 0.

The next thing I would like to achieve is to rank higher in google. Since I have some tuff keywords like webdesign, webapplications and hosting, I know it will be hard to do well, but I can’t seem to find myself in google now when I search on these words.

So rewriting my texts will be the first thing to do, but if anyone of you readers out there know other ways to score better, please do let me know. I’ll be very greatfull.

I just bought Burnout: Paradise City, since I have some free time at hand. So once getting back from the store, I fired up my PS3 and wanted to try out the game. But when I started the game, I got a message I needed to update to version 1.1. I was like: “WTF…” .

Luckaly, it didn’t take to long to download and install, but it had me thinking. Since the next generation consoles came out, games and firmware can be easaly updated. And don’t get me wrong, it is a good thing if you ask me, but still, only one week after a game comes out, blam, an update. That’s just a bit off in my opinion. I don’t know what the update is about, but I think it will be bug solver. Good thing you can update right . Well yes and no. Yes, otherwise you would be stuck with a buggy game and no for the fact that thanks to the easy update facilities of the next gen consoles, games get rushed from the developers to the store shelves.

That with the chanse of half finished games that still contain minor (or maybe in the future) big bugs in them. Hopefully, it won’t happen to mutch in the future.