Twin Valley Tech

Adobe Student & Teacher Editions

2010-10-17T08:33:00.000-04:00

Came across this, thought I'd pass it along as I'd never seen it offered before. Adobe Student & Teacher Editions at a pretty decent discount over retail. While there are excellent free alternatives to many of the programs in CS5, they don't offer the integration that CS does, and CS is what is used in the workplace.

Ubuntu, VMWare, and playing around with OS'es

2010-10-02T16:59:00.001-04:00

Links:

2008-06-23T20:52:00.005-04:00

New stuff for today. I made this post on the Ruby forum to get some answers to basic questions.

Wanted to create a link with an image. For now, I'm stuck with this:

<%= link_to image_tag(image_path('icons/page_add.png'), :border => '0'), new_recipe_path %>

which will suit my immediate needs.

Also, to create alternating row colors in tables, there's a simple "cycle" method:

<%=h cycle('trOn','trOff') %>

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

Getting started with Ruby on Rails

2008-06-22T18:22:00.003-04:00

I decided to teach myself Ruby on Rails so that I can teach it in my Web Programming class. I've got a project that I can use to get started, namely redoing http://www.icartilage.com/ for my brother-in-law.

Rails makes a lot of sense for teaching because it follows good OO practices and gets students to think about how to build their application, rather than how to write code for their application. First steps to get rolling with Rails:

Get a decent editor. Aptana is an excellent choice (it's free) and it comes with a Rails plug-in, RadRails.
Follow these instructions to get Ruby, Gems, and Rails installed. I also recommend installing MySQL 5.
Open Aptana, select File > New > Project > Rails > Rails Project, then follow the bouncing ball.
Rails and Aptana will create all of your project files for you.
In the bottom of your editor window, click the "Servers" tab. You will see a server instance for your Rails project. Right-click on that entry, select "Start" to get the server running, then right-click again and select "Launch Browser"
Click on the "About your application's environment" link to view the info; if everything is working fine, you will see the Ruby, Gems, Rails, etc. version. If things aren't so good, you will see the debug stack trace. It's actually got some good info in there, almost as much as ColdFusion gives you. In my case, I had a database error because I needed to create a database schema and user and update the database.yml file:
Open /config/database.yml in Aptana
Look at the "development" section; make sure you have a database schema with that name (or edit the file to the name you'll be using), and update the username and password information. Make sure the assigned user has appropriate rights to the database table. Save the file, restart the server in the "Servers" tab, and refresh the Aptana RadRails window...the error should be resolved.

I'm using the SitePoint book "Simply Rails 2" by Patrick Lenz. It's very readable, but I have yet to code from it, so the jury is still out.

Useful Links - Software, Standards, and More.

2007-08-20T15:56:00.000-04:00

Here are some useful links.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

http://www.gotapi.com/html - GotAPI.com - very useful site for HTML, JavaScript, and more. Add it to your bookmarks.
http://www.w3.org/ - World Wide Web Consortium - governing body for Internet standards.
http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp - W3 Schools - Excellent reference and learning resource

Software:

http://www.aptana.com/ - Excellent HTML, CSS, JS editor
http://www.getpaint.net/ - Paint.NET - Excellent image manipulation application; not a replacement for PhotoShop, but it gets the job done. Windows.
http://www.gimp.org/ - GIMP - Open-Source image manipulation application. Not as intuitive as Paint.NET, but it gets the job done. Windows/Mac/Linux.
http://www.eclipse.org/ - Eclipse - Flexible, Java-based integrated development environment. Windows/Mac/Linux.
http://www.htmlkit.com/ - HTML Kit - HTML/Text editor. Windows.
http://www.nvu.com/index.php - NVu - HTML/Text editor. Windows/Mac/Linux.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/express/aa974185.aspx - Microsoft Visual Studio Express. Windows.
http://www.jcreator.com/ - JCreator - Java development environment. Windows.

Other Stuff:

http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/ - Free icons. Very useful.