matt.griffith

Installing SQLite 3 on Windows is pretty easy, once you figure out what you need to do. But when I started using Ruby on Rails I struggled to figure out what I needed to do. Here's a short screencast that demonstrates how you can install SQLite 3 on Windows so you can use it in your Ruby on Rails applications.

A flash version will eventually be available here.

Steve Pavlina is talking about a unique problem he has. He is wondering what he should do with the extra money he has.

What’s the best way for me to think about money now that I’ve achieved my original goal? What should I do with the excess cash each month? Do I invest it? Do I funnel the cash into expansion? Do I pay off my mortgage? Do I donate it to charity? Do I form a non-profit? Do I ignore the problem for now and just stockpile cash until I figure out what to do with it? Do I try to increase my income even more? If so, what sort of paradigm would motivate me to do that?

I've spent some time thinking about this over the last couple of years. Unfortunately I am not in the position that Steve is in, yet. But I plan to be eventually.

I would not start a non-profit. Hiring employees is too inefficient. I'd look for ways to amplify the money that I had available. I would lean towards investing in other small companies that are congruent with my goals of doing more good than harm in the world.

You could start by finding another couple who are in the position that you and your wife were in just a few years ago. A couple who has an idea for changing the world but hasn't taken the leap yet because they lack the financial freedom that you have achieved. You could fund their startup. Help them bootstrap in exchange for an equity position in their venture. Think Pay It Forward but with a happier ending ;-). If their venture succeeds then you'll have another stream of income that you can then use to do it all over again. If it fails you probably won't be out any more than you would have been if you had donated the money to a traditional inefficient charity.

I would probably lean towards investing in companies that have a good chance of becoming profitable so they could turn around and reinvest the same way. But I would not rule out becoming an Angel funder of non-profit ventures that have a good chance of becoming quickly self-sufficient given enough money to get off the ground.

Another possibility is funding an X Prize. Look for a problem that you are interested in seeing solved and then try to think of a way to offer a prize that would encourage companies to invest money doing the research and development to solve the problem. This presentation on IT Conversations explains how offering 10 million dollars as a prize ended up generating 100 million dollars in research and development by companies trying to win the prize. It also kick-started an industry that would have take years to get going on it's own.

At RailsConf 2006 David Heinemeier Hansson talked about the new REST features coming to Rails. If you want to play with this stuff you'll need to know where it lives.

There are two pieces you need. ActiveResource is the piece that let's you consume REST services as if they were ActiveRecord database backed models. ActiveResource is part of Rails 1.1.4. But ActiveResource has nothing to do with exposing your application's resources in a RESTful way.

To expose your application's resources you need the simply_restful plugin. David did mention simply_restful during his keynote, but if you're like me, you didn't pick up on that the first time through ;-)

I'm not sure what versions support what features. I'm using Edge Rails right now. You may have everything you need in Rails 1.1.4 + simply_restful. But you may need to bleed on the Edge to keep up with any changes that happen on the way to Rails 1.2 release.

As of this morning I've officially lost 100 pounds in 8 1/2 months.

But another PhysicsDiet.com beat me to the 100 pound mark by several months. jm3000 lost 100 pounds in about 4 1/2 months.

I don't have a final goal weight in mind so I'm not sure what my next major weight milestone will be. I will probably drop below 200 pounds before I'm done. But for now I'm focused on getting my Body Fat below 15%. Once I do that I'll reevaluate where I am then I'll decide if I want to shoot for 10% Body Fat.

Lately I haven't been tracking the calories I'm consuming or the calories I'm burning from exercise. I've been using a combination of portion counting and weighing some foods. But I don't track the details anymore.

I spent several months doing different experiments trying to figure out whether I could optimize my diet by eating different ratios of macronutrients or varying the types of foods I ate. But in the end I found that it mostly doesn't matter what I eat as long as prefer healthier foods over non-healthy foods and control my calorie balance.

The key factors for me are:

• Eat 5-6 small meals a day
  This is a critical component of my success. At first I didn't think it mattered. But when I experimented with some of the ideas from Body for Life I learned that eating 6 small meals a day is the best way to control my appetite and my emotions. I'm much more even tempered now. And I'm never hungry now as long as I eat at least 1500 calories per day. I usually eat around 2000 calories per day though.
• Regular vigorous exercise
  For a long time I thought eating 6 small meals a day was the key to my improved mood. But recently I went about 2 weeks without doing much exercise. I've been under a lot of stress recently and I got a bit depressed. After one particularly bad weekend I jumped on my stationary bike for an hour. That's when I realized that I have to exercise to be happy. Without exercise I get much more stressed and I let little things bother me much more than they should. Exercise is the best way for me to deal with stress and relax. Exercise also helps me lose weight, but not as much as you'd think. Controlling your calorie intake is much more important if your goal is to lose weight. But exercise is critical to your health. You can't be healthy without exercise even if you control your weight. And now I know that I can't be happy without exercise.

If you're curious you can read more about my journey over on my PhysicsDiet.com Blog.

Well it took longer than a few minutes, but DHH's keynote is now online.

I first started looking at Ruby on Rails more than a year ago. I even bought the first edition of Agile Web Development with Rails as soon as it was released. But I didn't do much with Rails until recently. I didn't want to struggle with setting up Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL. I've installed Apache and MySQL on Windows before and it wasn't much fun.

But now you don't have to worry about installing anything to try Rails. InstantRails includes everything you need to set up a fully working Ruby on Rails environment. Better yet, with InstantRails you don't have to install anything. You just unzip InstantRails to a folder and you have everything you need to try Ruby on Rails. If you decide you want to get rid of it just delete the InstantRails folder and your machine is back to normal.

I think this is such a big deal for Windows developers that I created a screencast showing how you can get a new Ruby on Rails application running on Windows in under 5 minutes.

5 minutes to Ruby on Rails nirvana

A flash version will eventually be available here.

I was in the Emigrant Montana area last year. I took a few pictures while I was there.

I stayed just a few miles from the Chico Hot Springs. That was the view I woke up to every morning. If you get a chance you should definitely attend the OffTheGrid campout.

Yahoo is supporting the development of Hadoop! Hadoop! is an open source project that is working to create a Distributed File System (think Google File System) and an implementation of MapReduce.

I find this effort by Yahoo! to be rather interesting given that platform pieces like GFS, BigTable, MapReduce and Sawzall give Google quite the edge in building mega-scale services and in Greg Linden's words are 'major force multipliers' that enable them to pump out new online services at a rapid pace. I'd expect Google's competitors to build similar systems and keep them close to their chest not give them away. I suspect that the reason Yahoo! is going this route is that they don't have enough folks to build this in-house and have thus collaborated with Hadoop project to get some help. This could potentially backfire since there is nothing stopping small or large competitors from reusing their efforts especially if it uses a traditional Open Source license. [Dare Obasanjo]

Dare is surprised that Yahoo! is working on open source versions of tools that could give them a competitive advantage. I can't tell if he thinks Yahoo! is making a mistake by doing this though. I suspect he does.

That is exactly why I don't trust Microsoft as a platform vendor. If one of Dare's ideas gives MSN a competitive advantage what do you think the odds are that we'll see that idea rolled in to the .NET Framework? I think the odds are close to 0.

There is nothing wrong with that. That doesn't make Dare a bad guy and it doesn't make Microsoft evil. But it does make Microsoft a poor choice as a platform vendor. I'm tired of waiting years to get access to Microsoft's second hand, second best ideas.

So why would Yahoo! do this? Why would they create open source versions of tools that could give them a short-term competitive advantage? I think Joel Spolsky said it best:

Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements. [Joel Spolsky]

Yahoo! is not in the business of selling software. They sell advertising. Software is one of their biggest complements. The best way to commoditize software is to open source it.

Google could probably gain some competitive advantage by developing their own operating system. But they don't. I wonder why.

Dave Thomas asked the Rails community to add "Enterprise" features during his RailsConf 2006 keynote.

I had been disheartened earlier in the day by Dave Thomas's talk (no offense, Dave!) Dave's a great guy and has been great to the Ruby community. And although I agreed with some of what Dave said, I couldn't have disagreed more with his view on changing Rails to play better in legacy environments. I sure was relieved to hear DHH's talk the following night. But I still recommend that you view his keynote, too: see what you think and let us know your thoughts. [Softies On Rails]

I agree with Jeff from Softies On Rails. I respect Dave Thomas a lot, but I did not care for the message he brought to RailsConf. At times his keynote was quite condescending. I don't think Dave meant it that way, but all his talk of "in the real world" probably wasn't received well by the RailsConf audience.

I work in the "real world" that Dave was talking about. It sucks! I can't wait to get out. Rails is a breath of fresh air precisely because it doesn't target the "enterprise". It was built by an agile team to create new agile web applications. If you need to create a new agile web application then Rails is a perfect match. But if you need to create yet another big upfront designed enterprise monstrosity, Rails is probably not going to work for you.

Dave also talked about improving the deployment of Rails applications. This is more applicable to the general Rails community. But I disagree with his idea that developers shouldn't be worried about how the application is going to run. That is a mistake. It sounds good in theory, but it ends up creating a situation where the developers make decisions that make the system almost impossible to maintain in production. For small teams you are much better off requiring the developers to own the entire system. If possible they should be responsible for testing, customer support, operations, design and development. As soon as you relieve them of responsibility in any of these areas you can guarantee they are going to make decisions that make it more difficult to support the application in that area.

I'm glad that the core team is focused on solving their problems not some enterprise's problems. Because their problems are my problems. It is strange to work with a platform that is built by people who actually use the platform to build real applications. I've spent so many years depending on platforms that Microsoft creates but doesn't actually use that I didn't realize how much I was missing.

Like Jeff said, watch Dave's keynote and let us know what you think. I am looking forward to seeing DHH's keynote.

I almost missed this. The Keynotes from RailsConf 2006 are being published on ScribeMedia's site. DHH's Keynote was scheduled for release today so it should be available any time now. In the mean time you can see Dave Thomas' and Martin Fowler's keynotes.