world gone mad

With palm's recent announcement that it will have a Linux-based Treo by year end and all the hoopla around the upcoming apple OS X palmtop, this seems like a really good time to be in the FOSS world.

I haven't seen the specs of either OS yet, of course. But I can guess at the hardware that they will both debut on, and I'm fairly confident that both devices will be more powerful than the first Linux box I ever worked on. I'm hoping that the end result will be a full enough set of posix libraries to move the LAMP stack with little trouble. "Little trouble" being a relative term, of course.

I've heard a lot about Ruby on Rails, and finally had occasion to try to use it. This tutorial was very well laid out, and entirely true - maybe a half dozen commands and a couple dozen lines of code later, there was a nice set of "scaffolds" for browsing & editing my data model.

It didn't "guess" my data model, but I prefer to tell a framework how to handle relationships. Telling rails was as simple as adding a handfull of commands like "has_one :parent", "belongs_to :category". And then you get drop-downs for foreign key values and column sorting virtually free.