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So, I decided to get more familiar with Rails and went ahead and ordered a couple of books. The first one really is a must - Agile Web Development with Rails (second edition) is co-authored by David Heinemeier Hansson the creator of Rails (and a fellow dane I might add!). The second book I got is entitled Rails Recipes and is also part of “The Pragmatic Programmers” series.

I will probably write some more on these books when I finish reading them. For the moment, however, I have a lot of litterature to go through in relation to my bachelor thesis on Lean Software Development (which is an agile toolkit much like eXtreme Programming, DSDM etc., which focuses on adopting the Lean philosophies from the Toyota production system). I will definately write more on this subject in the future, so stay tuned

Just a stray thought.. at my old job in an IT department we had maybe about 20 servers running 24/7. Every-so-often a SCSI drive in one of the servers would malfunction. Luckily ofcourse these all ran RAID-5 arrays so no harm done, just call HP support and have a new one delivered. However, I seem to remember that these malfunctions happen quite often, like once every second week. Maybe thats not a lot when you consider 20 server with approximately 5 drives each (100 drives total), but I can’t help wondering why. So I did a little math in my head to calculate the wear on an ordinary 15,000 RPM SCSI harddrive. So here goes..

First of all the 15,000 RPM adds up to 900,000 revolutions per hour which becomes 21,600,000 revelutions per day. In a year with 365 days this becomes 7,884,000,000 revolutions per year. Wow, thats a big number. Just imagine the wear on bearing, motor etc.

If you take the outer most point at the harddrive platter this would be about 1.5″ from the center. This means that the circumference of the circle that this point will describe during a revolution will be 2*Pi*1.5″ which is about 9.42″ or 0.785 feet. Multiplying this with the revolutions per year it means that this point on the harddrive platter will travel 6,188,940,000 feet or 1,172,147.73 miles (1,886,388.91 kilometers).

The distance to the moon is about 238,854 miles, which means that a single SCSI drive could travel back and forth about 4.9 times in a year!

“Ok, that self-containing Locomotive thingy-mo-bob is pretty nice”, “Wow, that was fast..”, “Then when do I create my tables in MySql.. ah wait.. oh! Thats pretty cool.. *typing*… so all I have to do is rake db:migrate?!.. It works on multiple RDBMS and even has a versioning system?!”, “What?! No XML? Why is RDBMS favoured so much, won’t I be able to do some XML?! *google ‘ruby on rails xml’*… ‘Builder’?.. examples.. Wow, that’s even easier to use than ChilkatXML”, “But certainly there won’t be any good reporting facilities, pdf writers etc. for such a new and small framework third party libraries are probably very limited.. I wonder.. *google ‘ruby on rails pdf’*.. I was wrong.. I can even use JasperReports…”, “of course.. AJAX is as easy as pie”.

The above is pretty much the thought that ran through my head while trying out Ruby on Rails for the first time. I’ve ordered the Agile Web Development with Rails book along with the Rails Recipes book. They should arrive next week, so I am looking forward to getting more into depth with Rails.

I am also excited to see how many third party libraries will appear in the Ruby community now that Rails is becoming so popular. It would be nice to see some more native components instead of using Java library like JasperReports.

Vacationing at my parents for a few days I ofcourse brougth along my MacBook. Saw this as an opportunity to try out some more stuff on the OS X. Wanting to download lots of different things I soon began to miss my 100mbit connection at home. Here I am stuck at a 512kbit connection

To make it even worse I found out that the Xcode 2.4.1 package is almost one gigabyte! My god it’s going to take forever to get this thing down. To make it even worse I found out it’s actually on the Mac OS X cd’s that were delivered with the MacBook, which I ofcourse left at home *DOH*.

Truly, life is too short for low bandwidth…

Still very pleased with my MacBook and gradually getting more and more comfortable with the Mac OS X I decided it was time to get down to business and try some different developer tools. First of I installed a trail-version of the TextMate editor, which I have heard so much about. The fuzz is not for nothing, it actually has alot of nice features (and by alot I really mean ALOT!). The supported environments are abundant and features everything from C to Ruby-on-Rails and LaTeX. The user interface is not very user friendly though and it is evident that it is a tool for the developer and not-so-much the ordinary LaTeX report writing student (whom I might try convincing to use it) . But after a little while you get ahold of it and then all the nice features easily makes up for the steeper learning curve.

Next off I tried installing Eclipse a highly customizable Java IDE that is very popular. On my Windows XP machine I have NetBeans installed with which I have been very pleased. Although neither NetBeans nor Eclipse are quite as productive to work with as Visual Studio (in my humble opinion ) I am quite surprised how effective these IDE’s actually are. Contrary to NetBeans, Eclipse also features the possibility to use plug-ins. This for example makes it possible to support additional languages such as C#. Ofcourse I had to try this, so I downloaded Improve’s C# plug-in and installed it. After playing around with it for about 15 mins my impression so far is that it still has a long way to come. Altought both syntax highligthing, code-completion (which I could not get to work) and indentation are supported, it still seems too be lacking to much for my taste. But on the other hand I’ve grown an absolute addict to Visual Studio’s code-completion.

Next off I am going to try out the Mono project. Also I might try out the CSharpPlugin for Xcode (Susan Mackay has written a very thorough article on the use of this plug-in in the respect of developing for Mono).

Not only did I get my blog up and running today, my new MacBook Pro also arrived

I’ve never been especially “religous” in my choice of operating system, development tools, programming language et cetera. I rather like to think “the proper tool for the given assignment”. Sometimes frameworks like Ruby on Rails can seem very interesting, other times PHP/ASP.NET might be a better approach. In my opinion there is also no reason to devote oneself to neither the open source nor the Microsoft camp. I feel perfectly fine mixing environments like Windows Server 2003 with ASP.NET / C#.NET and using a RDBMS like MySQL - which by the way actually runs pretty smooth on the Windows port, which is more than I can say from my experiences with PostgreSQL (unfortunately).

But, before I get sidetracked I better return to the original topic of this post

As said my Macbook Pro arrived after having placed an order for one at the 26th of this month. Actually I am quite surprised to have received it already - they actually assemble to order and ship these things from Shanghai, China !

The first thing that strikes you with the Mac is the packaging. Apple actually decided to design and built every last detail into their concept. This means that instead of the ordinary brown carboard box you get a nicely designed black case with a carrying handle. Even the protective foam is specially designed featuring the mandatory Apple logo.

This being the first time I have ever owned a Mac I was at first a bit confused about the OS. But almost everything seems very logical and intuitive so the learning curve is nowhere near as steep as I might have feared. Although I must say that the whole “change filename on enter” instead of opening the file is pretty confusing. I mean, whats up with that? How often do you actually have the need to rename a file that you would assign it that key-combination?

Other than that I am very pleased with the Macbook. Everything about it is just first-class - I mean you don’t get this kind of quality in a Dell, Zepto, HP or even an IBM. I think that if Apple were to ship these with two mouse buttons and a Win-key instead of the Command-key they could make a fortune from people wanting to run Vista on these things.

So that was this evenings stray thoughts. I’ll round of this post by attaching some pictures of the Macbook. These are taken with my cellphone (Samsung D600E) so the quality is far from world class (but by the way, bluetooth worked perfectly between the mac and the cell). The Macbook is a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM, 120GB HD and 15 inch widescreen.

So… I finally decided to jump on the blog-train and experience first hand why this kind of exhibitionism has become so popular. The title of this, my first ever blog post, of course also had to entail the standard cult phrase – it’s almost a cliché.

But what will this blog be about? Well, primarily about me and my adventures in life (or rather lack thereof ) This will probably mostly relate to development in C#, ASP.NET, SQLServer and other geeky stuff. You’ill probably get a good indication on what I am about if you check out the “About me” page.

Other than that, not much to say. Lets see how long I can keep this going. I am already amazed how people find the time to write in these things – I can’t help thinking, why waste time on what is essentially a diary, when I could be spending time on working on one of the numerous projects I have going? Maybe it’s the wrong approach to blogging, it’s probably supposed to be a somewhat relaxing and entertaining sideline activity maybe even with a potential for some insightful self-insight (that’s a weird sentence ).