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Today I ordered the book Agile Web Development with Rails, a book that explains how to use the Ruby on Rails (aka RoR) web development system based around the Ruby programming language. I’ve been keeping an eye on it for the past few months as its been getting more and more media coverage (ok, geek media coverage) and this past week I finally started looking at it. What I saw struck me as pretty awesome. The whole premise of Ruby on Rails (RoR) is to make web application development easy especially the initial stages of creating a basic set of pages to insert & update your database, and from there it expands quite gracefully.

One of the really neat things about RoR is that it forces you to adhere to good programming standards, to do everything in a clean MVC structure, which will ultimately make it easier to manage long term. One of the reasons I’m getting into it is the simple fact that learning it will help me learn object oriented programming, something I’ve had a hard time grasping so far - RoR builds the framework using OOP methodologies so I can see where verything goes as I’m building something, thus start to see how things should be done.

RoR is a very new technology that was launched only about a year ago and in fact has not fully reached the wonderful “version 1.0″ point (should be any day now), so this book which was published in July will only take me so far, once I learn the knowledge it has I’ll be able to branch out to the latest updates and continue from there. If you’re interested in taking a look yourself there’s lots of good stuff on the main RoR site including a 15 minute introductory video that shows in the 15 minutes how to build a basic database driven website, itself an awesome feat!

Norway has announced that they will be making 20,000 video clips and twelve radio stations available online. The only problem is that it is tied to Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Edition software which must be installed on your PC before you can view any of it. This rules out anyone who either doesn’t have the money to buy this special edition of Windows, who doesn’t have the expertise to install it, or who doesn’t use or want to use Windows in the first place e.g. Mac or Linux users. Note that all of this content is paid for by taxpayers, just like the media in many other countries including Ireland.

A British author and rights activist, Cory Doctorow, wrote a nice article explaining why this was a bad decision for Norway to make, with many excellent points brought up for discussion. Not to let someone else have the last word, a Microsoft employee wrote a defensive article calling Doctorow a communist and a liar, completely avoided answering the key points raised and instead lies himself. In defense to the accusations Doctorow has written a rebuttal to Microsoft’s tirade.

Gotta love what happens when you call shenanegans on a large company.

Lately I’ve been looking for a program to backup our computer’s data with using the lovely DLT7000 drive we got recently. Along the way I’ve tried a whole bunch of different programs of varying abilities, some better than others, some that at first glance that have everything under the sun only to discover major problems later on (Genie Backup Manager), and some that seem very simple but work well.

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Sometimes when you’re removing something from your computer, say you’re putting in a new video card and don’t need the old drivers anymore, the old files aren’t always removed properly. Luckily for us someone else noticed this too only he wrote a program to fix the problem - tell it what drivers you had before and it’ll make sure all of the remnants are promptly given marching orders, and its completely free.

• http://www.drivercleaner.net/

Another backup program for you to try. Genie Games Backup is the little sibling of a range of much more powerful backup software but is completely free. Despite being free Genie Games Backup gives you a pretty wide range of options to work with, from zip file encryption to script generation for automatically backing up the important files for specific programs. Despite the name Genie Games Backup is able to backup any file you wish, the key difference between it and its bigger siblings is that it can’t back up to removable media (CDs, DVDs, tape, etc), instead only to another directory or a zip file. Honestly, though, its features should be enough for most people, and once you do a backup you can always save it out to CD or DVD manually. Go give it a spin!

After last night’s fun we picked up a new power supply for our computer. Its a beefy 500Watt thing by the company Antec and had some discounts this week at CompUSA to make it easier to swallow. Anyway, twenty minutes of fiddling later and I’ve got everything where it should be - the video card is working again and the DLT drive isn’t making the system freak out. The DLT drive is actually recognized now, which it wasn’t last night for the five minutes before the video card decided to take its ball and go home, and I’ve been able to erase a tape as a test. Next off is a complete backup - the drive will store up to 35gig of data uncompressed and can go to about 70gig if the files are compressible. I’ll let you know how it goes, but so far I’m pretty darn happy - we can finally do proper backups!!

After finally getting a backup tape drive to replace our previous one which decided to not work right, I’ve managed to a) probably blow another video card, and b) have finally realized that the power supply in our computer just isn’t strong enough for what I want/need to do. Because I consider backups to be pretty darn important we’ll be picking up new power supply to get it all working, and hopefully tomorrow night actually be able to start making backups! Fingers crossed!