Andrew Beacock's Blog

Tonight was June's AgileNorth meetup and the topic was Ruby on Rails . It was hosted by David Draper who did an excellent job of introducing Rails in an easy to digest way even though he has very little Rails experience himself. Just shows what a good trainer can do! He demo'ed a shortened version of Curt Hibbs's Recipe Cookbook tutorial using the RadRails plugin for Eclipse as his IDE. David started by creating the database in mysql (note: just the database - no tables) and then used RadRails to create the initial 'cookbook' application environment. He used the ' migration ' feature of rails to create the database tables which were auto-generated by ruby code - this was one feature of rails that I was not aware of and was particularly impressive (for me at least!). He used the scaffolding tools of rails to auto-generate the recipe & category models, the cookbook and category controllers and all the associated views. All of this was done in lit...

After using Ubuntu desktop for a while I decided that a backup of my files would be a good idea and so went about attempting to mount and copy a whole host of files. I attempted to mount the SAMBA drive running on my Windows fileserver as myself: smbmount //backups/andrew.beacock shares/backups -o username=andrew.beacock,password=******** but was told that I didn't have permission to, only root can mount to SAMBA drives. So I popped the word 'sudo' in front of the command and tried again. This time it connected successfully and I was able to browse around the shared directories. I then attempted to use rsync to back up my important folders but ran into problems again. It complained that I didn't have permission to delete files off my share, so again I popped the sudo command in front of the rsync command and thought it was me being stupid. I then ran into a really strange problem where even though I was running as root and the files on the server were owned by root ...