I still have a CP/M machine down at my folks place. It's in a homemade wooden case and it has 8" Floppy drives. I wonder if it would even start up at this point.

There was a creepy transitional moment a few years or so back when the storage media that we can take for granted in the first world is *smaller* than the storage media we see in sci-fi, and even recent sci fi. I mean, there's no point putting anything smaller than a micro SD card in your big flashy tech movie, because you can't see the freaking thing. Probably more impressive to make it translucent and glowy like Stargate's inscrutable tech components.

I mean, dude, the handheld Trek stuff from just about any iteration? Bigger than my phone, and much of it less powerful.

There was a creepy transitional moment a year or so back when the storage media that we can take for granted in the first world is *smaller* than the storage media we see in sci-fi, and even recent sci fi.

Crossthready, but one of the main reasons the Shadowrun RPG had to release a forth edition within the last year or so is because real world technology had completely surpassed their imagined future tech.

I mean, dude, the handheld Trek stuff from just about any iteration? Bigger than my phone, and much of it less powerful.

It was amusing to upgrade my OS:Trek flip communicator (RAZR flip phone) for a better, smaller, more powerful Next Gen PADD (iPhone).

We had a big argument about that playing Shadowrun a few years ago. MM was the GM and he had to admit the rules were kinda messed up with the pricing and size structure when I pulled a miniSD card out of my cell phone that was the size of a fingernail and cost less than $50. The game was supposed to be so advanced and the authors just never even guess that things would get so tiny so quickly.

Shadowrun x-post. BWAH!

To be fair to Shadowrun, in the 4th edition they also said "Storage, for game purposes, is pretty much fuckin' free. It's cheap, it's small...just don't worry about it."

I suspect there was an unspoken plea of "...and stop e-mailing us Circuit City ads for flash drives and miniSD cards. We get it. Stop!"

Sorry for the long delay. I've been busy with a coup d'etat at work, putting down the reactionaries and writing a new constitution.

In my last job, I worked on the web front end for [link] I also have a video sharing app under development as a side project, and did an online version of a board game, also as a side project.

The best thing about Ruby on Rails is Ruby. It's an elegant, object oriented language that has become my favorite for just about any programming task. In particular, I like that it is object-oriented throughout and has closures.

Rails is pretty good too, though. It used the Model/View/Controller pattern to good effect, and it imposes a pleasing organization to a web application by default. And it has a choice of two really good testing frameworks, Test::Unit and Rspec. These sorts of testing frameworks are great aids to maintenance.

The object-relation mapping package in Rails, Active Record, is really easy to use. You can write statements like Dog.find_by_name_and_breed("Nutmeg", "Boston Terrier") and it will generate the correct SQL for you and then map the results into objects of class Dog. You can also tell it about the relationships between tables (has_many, belongs_to, that sort of thing) and it will write the joins for you.

As for performance, it's not the fastest web application environment around, but it does use a share-nothing architecture so that it's easy to add hardware to scale up to the point where your application servers aren't the bottleneck anymore.

Thanks, Rob. Teaser.I do love MVC, and faking that is a big part of what I want to do in the b.org code reorg.

I think I'll have to install RoR on one of the boxes at home and play.

Well, you can look around more at [link] I haven't put up much content yet, but you can get the idea.