RadRails and Aptana

This post is just a little P.D.A. (public display of affection) for a couple tools I’ve recently discovered and have fallen in love with. I guess that makes me a bigamist. Anyways, props to the RadRails and Aptana teams. Even in pre one-point-zeo states, you both make my life lots easier.

If you could get media your way…

An aspiring media entrepeneur (by name, me) wants to know:

Given: An online store that legally sells downloads of DVD ISO images that

• You could burn to disk and play on your set top player or convert for watching on your PC or portable video player (basically DRM free):
• Would be identical in content from what you’d buy in a brick and mortar

I’d like to know the following things regarding you techy folks, and your initial reaction to such a proposal.

1. How much would you pay for such a download?
2. How long would you be willing to wait for such a download to complete?
3. What kind of features would you expect / need from an online store that provided such a service?

Fire away.

Rails vs Django Part 2

In my last post, I blithely assumed that once I’d get Django up and running, I’d be able to whip out that application in no time.

I couldn’t get Django up and running.

I didn’t spend much more than two nights with it, but I’ve already got rails up and running and I don’t see any reason to mess with getting another web-dev framework installed.  Instead, I’m going to concentrate on learning Ruby/Rails and implementing my own Blog/Forum/Site/Gallery/whatever, instead of trying to hack on Typo.  So far so good.  I’m picking up lots, and the #rubyonrails channel on freenode has been really helpful.

One of the things I’m really getting to like about rails, is its built in testing capabilities.  I can write a bunch of code, and write tests for it to make sure it works without actually having to implement the front end of the website.  This is great because it helps me get all the back-end functionality ironed out, and do all the front end design separately.  Ruby/Rails stuff in one phase, and HTML/CSS in another, instead of all at once in a nasty code jumlbe.