My favorite development language/framework for the last nine months or so has been Ruby on Rails. At lunch today with my Dad and one of his buddies, the topic came up and I started thinking about how to get people up and running with Ruby on Rails. Here are my thoughts:

Getting it Installed

For OS X and various Linux flavors, I recommend getting Ruby on Rails from the main Ruby on Rails site.

Rails development on Windows is a little more of a challenge, but you can get a reasonable start (at least enough to try things out) with InstantRails.

Editors

You can edit Ruby code with any text editor. I prefer TextMate on Mac OS X, but Komodo and JEdit are reasonable and work on Windows and Linux.

Online Tutorials

This is a little tough at the moment, because Rails 2.1 hasn’t had as many “getting started” tutorials written as the 1.2x versions of Rails had.

There is a long tutorial at Tutorials Point which looks like a good start.

The main Rails site has a page of tutorials and documentation links.

Screencasts

Screencasts are a fantastic way to learn Rails. There is a huge wealth of information here.

Railscasts are a series of over 100 screencasts about Rails.

Peepcode has a number of great quality screencasts for $9 each.

Books

The two books that I recommend most are:

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt, and The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez.

These two books are a great learning and reference combination for Ruby on Rails development.

What are you waiting for? Get learning!

Anyone else planning to go to BarCamp San Antonio?

Virginia puts kids first.

Interesting article here about leaving on a real vacation right after getting laid off. Most of my life, I haven’t been in the financial position to do this and thankfully I’ve only been laid off once.

I love the idea - shows how much I need a vacation - but I wonder if I’d have the guts to do it.

To celebrate the release of my latest project at work, I suggested that our team take a trip out to the Landa Park Golf Course. I suggested this despite not having played golf in at least three to four years and I wasn’t quite sure where my golf clubs actually were.

First things first: the search for the golf clubs. I looked around my ex’s garage fruitlessly for a while. After giving up, my daughter Gabriela said she thought she knew where they were. She pointed at the bottom of a pile of boxes, paint supplies, trash, bike parts, etc. Sure enough there they were - out of plain site.

Playing the game was fun - if by fun you mean laughing at how shockingly badly we were. I just managed to keep from driving Becky and I into the Comal river on a couple of occasions. The highlight of the day was watching Nick hurtle towards the front of my cart. I was racing at top speed towards the cart he was riding in when unexpectedly (to Nick), Jim swerved to avoid a head-on collision with me. The image of Nick briefly airborne while I ran him down will be with me for a long time.

Later, while digging around in my golf bag I found the subject of this post: my first pocket knife. I thought it had been lost long ago. My parents gave it to me when we lived in Panama sometime in the late 70’s. It needs some tender loving care, but I’m glad to have it back.

For a number of work and personal life reasons, I haven’t worked on a new short film of my own for over a year. I’ve been playing with a few ideas in my head and I have a couple of partial scripts in various states of incompletion. I have the advantage of no deadlines and no one waiting on me, so I can play pretty freely with ideas for as long as I want to. Without giving away too much, the main ideas are:

• YAHM - Yet Another Horror Movie. Vampire flavor. This one is my most complete script and I think it’s the best I’ve written.
• A story of a man attempting to redeem an act of violence when only the perpetrator holds himself responsible.
• A commercial for a fine product that doesn’t yet exist.
• A compendium of some of the more stupendously bad dates me or my friends have been on.
• A pure action piece
• YAHM - Part Two. The Guadalupe River Monster

Gentle readers, what do you think? What would you like me to work on first?

Once I have the first idea locked down, script written and a moderate amount of pre-production done, I will reward myself with a Canon HV30, Letus35Mini, and a few Canon FD lenses.

I brought this post over from my dusty old MySpace blog.

Here we go…

• The Shining
• Evil Dead 2
• Alien/Aliens
• Silence of the Lambs
• The Thing (1982)
• Night of the Living Dead
• Jaws
• The Devil’s Backbone
• Pan’s Labyrinth
• The Exorcist
• Night of the Hunter
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street
• Phantasm
• Poltergeist
• Rear Window
• The Ring (2002)
• Serpent and the Rainbow
• The Believers
• Signs
• The Sixth Sense
• Them!

If it can’t make me a sandwich, then it isn’t a real robot.

I moved into my new house this weekend. Whew. I really hate to move, but I’m really going to love living here. I’m two blocks away from downtown New Braunfels. Pictures are coming soon.

I’m glad I spent the money on movers this time and I’m extraordinarily grateful for the help of my friends Anton and Edmo.

I’m renting this house from my parents. It’s actually the first house I lived in. The only challenge is finding places to put all of my stuff. For now, I’ve gotten a storage unit, but I’m going to try and go the Lifehacker and Unclutterer route and try to reduce the amount of stuff that I’ve accumulated. It’s a bit of a tough decision on what stays and what goes because of a couple of reasons. First, I’m by nature a bit of a pack rat (and come from a family of pack rats) and second, as a practical matter, occasionally “junk” that I’ve kept has been handy when making short films, photography, or other art projects.

I’m also going to be visiting the Container Store, Ikea (in Round Rock) and actually the Lowes here in town is MUCH nicer than the one close to my old apartment. Lowes had a few options that would work for a pantry.

Come join me at Tonic Bar on Saturday January 12 from 10pm - 1:30am for the Dog Men Poets show.

Tonic is at Babcock and Eckhert - here’s a map.

At midnight I’ll be celebrating my birthday! Don’t bring anything but yourself!