Why I’m using ruby
I’ve used PERL and I have always been amazed at both the flexibility of the cod as well as the speed. The downside of PERL is it takes an extra step to get back into older code. Some of the code I wrote previously was very clever. But now that I look back, I’m not sure what I did.

Now I am examining Ruby. The language seems cleaner and more ‘readable.’ Even better, I have been able to interpret the code without having to look for a reference guide.

The Install Process
Ruby was very easy to install on windows. I went out to the rubyforge.org website and downloaded the single click installer. In this case I chose the binary since I don’t have the time nor the urge to try and compile it myself (at least one windows). The only thing I will have to look for is a library file for TK to make uses of some front end input.

My Goal with Ruby
What I want to do with Ruby is take a set of files within a directory, parse the contents, and write on a report. The files are the profiles for several SAP systems that I want to compare to ensure that all of the systems within a landscape have matching parameters or parameters that are proportional to one another.

So far all that I have done is installed ruby and opening up a file. Nothing has been accomplished so far but I will update this blog with any thoughts from the process. Who knows, maybe I will become a full Ruby hacker in the same way that I used to be a PERL hacker.

I love those stories about UFO’s and aliens. Supposedly they hang around peoples houses and look in the windows or they come down to abduct people. What a bunch of silly bunk from people that need to spend time in a sanitarium.

If aliens do come down (that is if they manage to change the laws of relativity and make it here across all those light years of distance) they are not going to bother with a bunch of daft organisms that inhabit the place. They are more likely going to be looking for something more valuable such as minerals or essentials like water.

The likeliest places for them to hangout would be in the mountains where minerals have been pushed up from deep within the Earth or way down in the ocean where they have come up along the rifts in the floor. Other likely places would include rural dumps where we have been tossing all sorts of valuable items for the last hundred years or so and scrap yards in larger cities (like that pile of old railroad scrap on the South side of Chicago).

So, no aliens are not likely to sneak around trailer parks at night looking in windows. Really, why waste the energy to look in on creatures that do hardly anything except for sit in recliners staring at a bright screens?

I can’t imagine that we are particularly tasty to them either. We eat all sorts of manufactured foods rife with preservatives which would likely leave a metallic like aftertaste (like those water fountains in old schools). Come to think of it, aliens would probably find California hippies tastier than trailer park dwellers (pickled by years of eating Walmart foods). So looking in those communes near SanFran might be a good place to start a search.

And why would they bother to hide themselves? If they can get here across huge interstellar distances do you really think they would have trouble getting away from us? All they would need to do is get back into their saucers and head back home. If they did not want to be seen it would more likely to be that they don’t want to disturb us in our primitive ecosystem. Quite frankly, I’d think they would be embarrassed for us. “Oh. Just look how they’ve trashed the place” they’d say in the same way we do when we see a dog that pooped in it’s own doggie bed.

PHP Project Goes on Hold
My project to bring up an internal PHP site based on the Zend framework has been put on hold. In its place is a new project for a client on the South side of town.

To say that this client needs help is an understatement. Without revealing too much, I can say that they are unable to run through a few days without having one of their production SAP systems go down (for reasons that they seem to be unable to explain).

SAP Applications on Microsoft Clusters Running within Virtual Machines
At root of the client’s problems are clustered systems that fail to fail-over correctly. So my current off hours project is to install a demo cluster system to use as a learning exercise for helping to correct the clients issues and as a baseline for what correctly installed clusters should look like (upon review, we found that none of the clusters had been installed correctly).

So far, I have managed to setup two separate instances of Microsoft servers (using a 90 day demo disk I pulled from a Microsoft training manual) using VMWare Workstation. The only problem was I could not create a working shared directory, which is required for installing a demo instance of SAP.

Since that did not work, I have since switched to Microsofts own virtualization software called Virtual PC which is available here -> Virtual PC. So far that install has gone smoothly and I been able to setup the first instance of Windows Server 2003.

I have used VMWare for the last four years and have always been happy with the product. I have used it for setting up test systems for Linux (RedHat, Suse, etc.), windows server (for my own personal training), NetBSD, and OpenSolaris. I have always been amazed at the flexibility and efficiency of the VMWare Workstation (I am using version 5.5).

The MicroSoft Virtual PC software seems a bit slower. The install of Windows Server 2003 is taking longer (than VMWare) and as it works my system seems to hang quite a bit as the VM uses up CPU cycles.

Base Requirements and Next Steps
For requirements, I am just setting up a basic Windows Server 2003 instance with 20 Gig per system. I will come back later and add the other drives which will be setup as ’shared’ drives between two cluster instances.

For the next steps, I will need to setup the first system as a Domain Controller to get both Active Directory and a DNS server (which I am doing through the ‘Configure Your Server Wizard’). The I will continue on and setup the second system (also as a domain controller). After that, I will start adding the shared drives according to the SAP installation manual.

So, updates will be added as make my way through the install process.

Plurk is a cool site and the more I use it the more I realize that it has quite a few redeeming qualities. First is the flow. I can look and see conversations that were started over the last few hours. So being able to see what has developed over time is a neat idea.
But plurk begs for more. I would like to see more information included on the main screen. I would also like to see a karma rating for just that conversation (maybe next to the number of responses). And how about having the conversations with the highest karma rise to the top of the screen
(or is it already doing that?).

Even better would be getting away from the timeline layout. Like mentioned above, the conversations with the highest involvement (within a set period of time possibly) should rise to the top (and maybe head toward the center of the screen). That way one could immediately see where all of the action is. As discussions die down the could float back out to the sides where they could be once again picked up by other users. An interesting example of how this should work are those activity tags that appear on sites like del.icio.us but instead of words use something like a radar screen (one that could be zoomed in and out of).

Okay. That may be a bit much to ask for but wouldn’t that be so cool!

Things that are working in social networks:

• twitter conversations. This seems to work because there is no organization around discussions. One can view and join into a discussion as needed.
• including blog links. This lets me dig deeper into ideas people express in twitter. A good avenue for expanding discussions (that can begin in twitter) [which begs the question of whether we need a fatter twitter that is a mix of blogs, jaiku, and twitter].
• graphical front ends (plurk at least has this partly right). Twitter is cool, but would be cooler if conversations could be threaded and split off (include a mechanism that forms around informal groups).

Things that don’t seem to be working in social networks:

• locality updates. This is an okay idea, but most of the people I have discussions with are a world away? So why would they care if I am at the local mall picking up some shampoo?
• too much structure (more about that later)
• inability to import friends from any other service besides email address books.

People fighting to get in line at fuel pumps, I’ve seen it before. It has been a decade or two but the situation is the same. Big fat vehicles sidelined because they are too expensive to just putter around town in. Yeah. I’ve seen that one as well.

It happened once and the American culture changed for a while. Then, the big vehicle madness started with the Ford Explorer. Suddenly, it was in vogue to have a larger vehicle that could be taken off road. But why? Most people just drove them around town going to restaurants and dropping off kids. The only dirt the majority of these picked up were from having to park on the grass at a fair or a soccer tournament.

Fashion. American attitudes are all about fashion and very little about practicality. Even more important is the cost. American’s change their habits when it becomes prohibitively expensive to continue following them. Smoking is a good example. Over the last few years smoking has been made illegal in many public places. But what has had a profound effect on the number of people that do it is the expense. Want a pack of cigarettes, then cough up 5 bucks. Want a carton? How about coughing up 34 dollars? Ouch. When price becomes the pain-point for choice then you start to lose those that adopted the habit as a fashion accessory (and are pretty much left with the addicts).

Will America change it’s habits in light of the energy crisis? No. America will change it’s habits in light of the cost crisis. That is a very important distinction.

I read an article this morning about how Borders is trying to redefine its stores to better reflect recent changes in technology. They are starting to incorporate down loadable songs and books into kiosks thorughout the store. Which is a fine thing to add but it makes me wonder if they are still missing the point of recent collaboration sites that have come up on the web (in particular aggregating sites such as friendfeed).

The term bookstore is misleading. These days these stores should really be dubbed ‘media stores.’ Along with books they have periodicals, music and videos. What they are missing is a cross pollination of subjects across each of these. Want a video then you go to the video section. Want a jazz CD then off to another section you go. Why not put these together in similar subject areas? There have been many times that I would like to have an audio book but did not have time to go searching through the store.

Even more important is the cross pollination of subject matter (this will take some creativity). Should IT project management be together with general business management (something to think about)? How about putting the science books across the aisle from Science Fiction? Need an example? Go to a children’s museum and check out how they handle subject matter.

First thing that bookstores should do is throw out the subject classification schemes and let your (dedicated) customers define these and not the Library of Congress. Second thing, get away from the defining your catalogs solely on the basis of title popularity (If you are wondering why certain books are not selling then start to think ‘presentation’ instead of ‘audience’). On this last point, stop reacting to market changes and start creating them. The whole fiasco with the Glen Frey books showed how bookstores follow market trends instead of creating them (and, for god sakes get away from being such whorish followers of Oprah’s book club. It is the biggest road block to your becoming the creators of your own social phenomenons).

The whole point of this exercise is to point out that bookstores (i.e. media stores) have such an amazing potential to create new avenues of creativity. No other stores (maybe, outside of museums and libraries) have the potential to generate the same creative synergy that we now find in the best web mashups. Even more importantly, they have the potential to use common interests to break down the barriers of modern life.

I spoke a bit too soon when I mentioned that the tutorial for Zend Frameworks is incomplete. Last night I watched all of the video tutorials on the ZF site and have to say that this is a great way to introduce the flexibility of ZF’s MVC implementation. I was immediately able to grasp the concepts of the MVC layout by following the building of an application. Finally, they concluded the webinars with a ‘where to go next’ video that demonstrated how to look for information within the reference guide. Cool! That was my next step!

The written tutorial goes through the same steps as the video tutorials. However, I wasn’t able to immediately decipher the concepts as I did with the video (probably because there is quite a bit of information on the written tutorial). Which has me reconsidering how I should learn about new software products. When I need to learn the concepts behind the software I should look for a video and for more in depth ‘absorption’ I should go back to my old stand-by the printed book.

So, today my plan is to replace my local CakePHP install with the Zend Frameworks install and continue developing my Basis services analysis tool (the data for which I just siphoned from Access into MySQL 5.0). The first steps will be to create an authentication process which will verify user information against tables in MySQL.

I. What I’m doing these days

At work I am having to once again delve into PHP. This time it is to create online reports that we can use to analyze service data for potential clients. Currently, the application runs within MicroSoft Access. But that really is not a long term solution (for any kind of application, really) so I am converting it to a MySQL database which we will access via PHP apps.

Yesterday I went through some PHP frameworks to see which one would be the quickest to setup. I tried both CakePHP (which I have used before) and ZendFrameworks which was recommended by Twitter user njames (thanks Nigel!). The tutorial for Cake was pretty basic but demonstrated the power of MVC development quite well. To create something more substantial, I will have to spend more time going through the developer reference documentation.

The tutorial for Zend was not as complete as the one for Cake. But that might be deceiving since Zend has quite a bit of functionality and it appears that the developers have not had time to update the tutorial. Zend also has quite a large following and as mentioned in Nigel’s blog above (jump!), might include some integration with SAP at some point.

So this morning I will return to working on Zend to get a better idea of its capabilities. Now that I have refreshed myself on the benefits of MVC, the learning process should be shorter.

It appears that there are quite a few arguments going back and forth across the SAP Developers Network these days. One is about the suggestion to add a graphic to the front of the forums to show how much money has been raised to feed people based on the participation within the forums.

What is pathetic is some people are complaining. Good grief. Who cares?

Do people really need to split political hairs like this?

I realize that companies like SAP are not in the business of feeding people.