I like Ruby, but I don’t like its performance, so I’m really anticipating Ruby 2.0. Meanwhile, I’ve been dabbling in Python. Learning a new language and comparing and contrasting them, really helps with determining each language’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, you can easily update all your Ruby gems. Unfortunately, python doesn’t have a direct way of doing this using easy_install. Very odd. I tried using the shell script method, but for whatever reason it just didn’t work as advertised. So I wrote a bash alias to take care of it.
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After many false starts, I decided that I really needed to wrap my head around unit testing when writing Rails applications. I more or less completed a Rails 1.2.3 application without any formal tests, and I would like to upgrade it to 2.0.2 and make it RESTful in the process. At the same time, I’ve moved from a Windows development environment to a *nix one after installing Xubuntu on my laptop (an old Compaq Presario). I’ve also switched from Cream to Emacs. Despite my Windows desktop being more than twice as fast as my laptop, I just could not stand not being in a true *nix environment. Too much of the Windows idiosyncrasies got on my nerves. And my switch from Cream to Emacs was because I just didn’t like the instability of the hacks required to make Vim less of a modal editor. If I tire of Emacs, I may try pure Vim instead, but I remember installing Cream simply because I didn’t like pure Vim to start with. So with these various changes going on with my Rails programming environment, I figured it was an ideal time to learn to formally test my applications. Of course the first part is setting up the testing environment so that it is easy to use, stays out of your way, and is informative.
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The last couple of weekends I tinkered with the gOS 2.0 beta. It definitely looks better than the previous iteration. The gianormous icons were just way too big for a resolution of 1024×768. This will definitely make a more appealing internet appliance for my guests than my previous box. To make it login automatically as a guest user took a bit of work, though, since this capability was not part of the initial install.
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My DeLi Linux computer’s main application is an internet access “kiosk” for guests who stay at my house. To this end I needed the machine to automatically login the guest user and launch Firefox.
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