Ran across this neat little online Ruby tutorial. What makes it a little different is that it’s actually an inline Ruby compiler in the page, and the tutorial walks you through the process of entering actual code and seeing what it outputs. Pretty cool. It doesn’t get into anything too fancy, but it is a nice simple little introduction to get you going with the Ruby syntax.

I have decided on my first Rails application to write. I have a need for a simple time tracking utility to keep track of time spent on different projects, so I thought this would be a perfect first app. Yes, there are about a bazillion “time tracking utility” programs out there–but what better excuse to learn Ruby and Rails! And it will actually be useful, and not just a throw-away demo (for me at least). After that, maybe it will be on to IdeaLounge if I’m feeling confident…

I’ve been using Firefox religiously since it came out, but have been steadily having more and more issues with it over the past month or two. It would steadily consume more and more memory, and every now and then it would bring my system to a crawl—not good when I’m using it as one of my primary development tools!

Then today, for the first time, Firefox simply refused to start at all. After double-clicking the icon, the window border would appear, but the window itself would not even render. While it sat there, the CPU pegged at 100% while memory (and CPU temperature) slowly climbed. Each time I tried to launch it, I ended up having to kill the FF process. I finally tried reinstalling it from scratch, but this did not help.

I finally resorted to my old friend Google, and quickly found this post that recommended deleting the FF user data directory. My symptoms were not exactly the same, but they were close, so it was worth a shot. This also explains why reinstallation did not help—if an extension had become corrupted, it would still be in that folder even after uninstalling FF since the uninstall process does not delete user-specific data.

Sure enough, I simply renamed “C:\Documents and Settings\Brian Moeskau\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox” to “Firefox-BAK” and launched FF again—everything worked great. Of course, I lost all themes, extensions, browser history, passwords, etc. Not a huge deal for me, but if it was a huge deal, I would probably spend some time taking out each extension one by one until I found the culprit.

Of course, I just read that Firefox 2.0 is now officially in Alpha. I hope that it uses less memory then 1.5!

Seems easy enough, right? The .NET DateTime format specifiers have been well-documented on MSDN for years now, and the hour formats are clear as day:

• h: 12-hour format, no leading zero
• hh: 12-hour format, with leading zero
• H: 24-hour format, no leading zero
• HH: 24-hour format, with leading zero

Right. So I was adding the option to switch between 12- and 24-hour formats on a little calendar I’m working on, and I was trying this:

myDateTime.ToString(”h”);

This was throwing the following error:

System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format.

Strange. It did work correctly if I tried this:

myDateTime.ToString(”hh”);

…but, of course, that printed leading zeroes, which I did not want. After about 20 minutes of switching back and forth, trying other random letter combinations and generally scratching my head, I was preparing to start writing code to manually chop off the leading zeroes and be done with it. In one last desperate Google, I finally came up with the answer on a random page of sample code from the ASP.NET Developer’s Cookbook. Excerpted:

Response.Write(”h, hour: ” + System.DateTime.Now.ToString(” h”) + “
“); // can’t use just “h”
Response.Write(”H, hour, 24-hr ” + System.DateTime.Now.ToString(” H”) + “
“); // can’t use just “H”

Note the space before the h and H. No other explanation was given, but I got what I needed. Add a leading space, now it works like a charm. Gotta love those kinds of issues. What would I do without good ol’ Google? Thought I would share this “tip” for anyone having a similar issue.

It appears that 2006 is going to be the year of the Calendar. In case you haven’t been paying attention, there are a number of companies that have recently rolled out, or are in the process of rolling out, numerous web-based calendars right now with various Web 2.0 spins on them. Some good, some so-so considering the hype. Just to name a few (in no particular order): eventful, spongecell, Trumba, airset, Fircle, HipCal, and of course, 30 boxes, which is getting a lot of press right now about their pending beta.

On one hand, it’s somewhat depressing to see all this activity. Why? Because we’ve been trying to go down the web-based calendar route now since 2004. We’re going as fast as possible, but for two guys working part-time, you can only get so much done. It sucks seeing these other groups come in with larger teams and a lot more money (actually we have no money (nor do we want any)) and implement a lot of the stuff that we have been talking about for so long.

On the other hand, it is somewhat satisfying to see that we made a good choice to go down this path. It actually took a fair amount of conversation to even agree and decide to pursue this as our big application. I mean, everyone has Outlook right? And if they don’t, they probably use Hotmail or Yahoo and get a calendar for free, so why should we build one and hope to make money from it? Looks like others have come to the same conclusion we did.

If anything, all of the publicity about calendars is just inspiring us to work harder and make ours better. Of course, better is relative. We can’t implement iCal and sharing and tagging and drag & drop over night, but we are continuing to improve and add new features. And with Brian’s pending departure from his current day job, we should be able to move a little faster.

By the way, the comments at the very end of the 30 boxes review are what inspires us to continue. It’s nice to see that there are other people who are a little tired of the Web 2.0 buzz. Hopefully the world is big enough for all of us.

So, you’ve heard about Ruby on Rails, right? And how it’s going to write your entire application for you in half the time it took for you just to register the domain name? If you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet, you’re probably feeling stuck back in 2005—behind the times and downright non-buzzword-compliant.

Here at ThinkFirst, we are not really interested in changing technologies every 6 months just for the sake of being invited to eat lunch at the cool kids’ table. What we are interested in is making great software, and using the right tools to do it. However, developers as a breed tend to get stuck in technology ruts sometimes. Let’s face it, our job is difficult, and it’s hard enough to master one language running on one platform. Most of us tend to learn a few things well and stick with them.

However, when a promising technology shows up and offers the types of advantages that Rails claims to offer, it is at least worth some consideration. In fact, we have decided that it’s promising enough to try out our next project using Rails. Mind you, our intention is not to build a toy or demo project—it will be an educational process, yes, but the end result will be our company’s next product, so we’re hoping that it goes well.

Why is this interesting? Because at this very moment, we don’t know much about Rails. Yes, we have read most of the bible (and we highly recommend it). And this book is sitting ready on our desk, just waiting for some action. And we’ve gone through the wiki and followed most of these links. So we’re ready to get started, but we’re going to be learning as we go as we haven’t yet applied our new knowledge to a real world product. This is intended to be the first in a long-running series of articles documenting that learning process and what it takes for us to start with nothing but expertise in a different platform (in our case .NET and, less recently, J2EE), and end up with (hopefully) a fully-developed and deployed, real-world application. We plan on documenting the time it takes us to hit major milestones, the things we learn that are different or unexpected based on our existing .NET expertise, issues that we encounter and our general impressions of Rails and our experience working with it. It’s seeming a bit ambitious at the moment, but hopefully it will be something that, once we are wildly successful will provide valuable insights for others embarking on a similar journey.

We here at ThinkFirst have been hard at work on our flagship product for a while now, and it’s been going well. Although that’s keeping us plenty busy, we thought we’d throw a little tickler out here about our newly-planned vaporware product. It will be completely different, and really cool. There’s not much to say about it right now, since we haven’t even gotten started on it beyond the initial concept, but we have accomplished step 1: Secure the domain name.

There’s not much there at the moment, but if you’re so inclined, swing by IdeaLounge.org sometime. We should have a lot more to say about it once it gets beyond the idea phase (no pun intended).

Community Server 2.0 Beta 3 was just released a little while ago.

Here is list the covers the majority of the checkins during the Beta 3 milestone….

3,769 files changed or were added from Beta 2 to Beta 3 (12/16 - 1/23)

We are using Community Server for the main site pages, blog and forums for MyHomePoint. The only bad thing about this release is that I just spent 10-15 hours last week to get the site up and customized on Beta 2. Now I’ve got some rework to do! Oh well, shouldn’t be too bad as I already had a plan on how to tackle it.

Go download it and give it a spin.