Dev-Picayune

So here it is the first day of OSCON and today I’m chillin’ with the Ruby tutorials. And while I will reserve judgement (for now) on Ruby and Rails, I’d like to point out one pretty cool thing that happened today.

So the background info here is that I had loaded my work laptop with Ubuntu (dapper) because afterall, I do use Ubuntu a lot and since it seems like the OSCON thing to do. So there I am sitting in class and after finally battling through the initial wireless problems, I manage to download and install Ruby during the Ruby class and I was able to type along with some of the examples. That was pretty cool. Then now here in the Rails class, I was able to download and install Rails and MySQL (and Apache2 but I didn’t need it). And it downloaded so quickly that I had time to at least keep up with the first part of the coding section (eventually I couldn’t keep up) but the point is it was a very hi-tech moment for me and it was also major kudos to Ubuntu because even under Windows, I would not have been able to get all those things installed that quickly. Here it’s a real tribute to the Synaptic Package manager and the maintainers. The wirelessly connected transition from a generic Ubuntu laptop to creating and running a simple Rails app was really pretty darn cool.

As a side note, then, I am amazed at how “cool” it’s considered to run a Mac. And it’s even considered cool to actually buy software (e.g. TextMate). It’s just amazing since since running Linux would have to be the true Open Source thing to do. I really fail to see how Mac OSX is any more cool than Windows. Afterall, OSX is really more closed than Windows in the sense that it’s essentially restricted to a single set of hardware. Yes, it has a way cool interface but why wouldn’t running Vista be cool? Unlike Apple’s OSX, I could run Vista on both my Dell laptop as well as on an Intel-based Mac. Ultimately, though, I am convinced that the Mac popularity thing is based purely based on eye-candy (the UI) and popular culture and here by contrast (like the recent commercials) it’s not a Windows PC.

I am sure more observations will come.

Technorati Tags: OSCON, OSCON2006, Ruby, Rails, Ubuntu