I recently implemented a separate print style sheet, so that you will get nicely formatted pages when printing anything off of infused.org. When printing, the fonts will be a bit bigger, and there will be no sidebar, headers, footers, ads, or other extra stuff to gum up your print outs.

I’ve tested it pretty well on the blog, blog archives, photography, and genealogy pages. The wiki pages still won’t style well for printing now. I’ll fix that later. Test it out and if you notice anything that doesn’t look right let me know.

A couple of weeks ago, I hosted a 2.5 hour interactive presentation on Ruby and Ruby on Rails. The purpose of the presentation was to show the various ways in which Rails can improve our ability to build complex applications with small agile teams rather than large hierarchical teams.

There are 30 slides in the presentation, which I interspersed with live demonstrations in which we drilled down into some of the technologies and methodologies. The first section of slides is a quick intro to Ruby, which I borrowed heavily/outright copied from the Get to the Point! slides by Ryan Platt and John W. Long.

The slides are available in two flavors:

• Rails Slides (PDF)
• Rails Slides (Keynote 2)

Went to see Ozomatli and State Radio at the Roseland with a bunch of friends last night. I like a couple of Ozomatli songs, and have one of their albums, but despite their energy I just couldn’t get into the groove. Not my thing I guess. On the other hand, I really liked State Radio and am going to buy a couple of the CD from their site.

I’m pretty disappointed that 37signals has shut down comments on the Signal vs. Noise blog. I find reading other people’s reactions one of the best parts of reading the blog, but I can understand the reason for shutting them down temporarily.

In the long term, I think a better idea is to limit the number of comments on any one post so that the comments don’t get a chance to go off topic or turn drastically negative. I rarely read past 30-50 comments myself, and I really doubt that many other people do either. My suggestion is to set a limit of 30 comments and see how that goes.

UPDATE: _Why just reminded us that if you are using Mousehole, you can leave comments via Hoodwink.d.

Yeah, I know. But hey, sometimes you gotta live on the edge.

If you don’t already have ODBC talking to MS SQL Server on your Mac, you’ll need to get that set up and tested first.

We need a couple of extra pieces of software to let Rails talk to the server via ODBC.

Ruby-ODBC:

cd /tmp
wget http://www.ch-werner.de/rubyodbc/ruby-odbc-0.996.tar.gz
tar vxzf ruby-odbc-0.996.tar.gz
cd ruby-odbc-0.996
ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install

Ruby DBI ODBC driver:

cd /tmp
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/655/ruby-dbi-all-0.0.23.tar.gz
tar vxzf ruby-dbi-all-0.0.23.tar.gz
cd ruby-dbi-all
ruby setup.rb config --with=dbi,dbd_odbc
ruby setup.rb setup
sudo ruby setup.rb install

The format of the database.yml will be slightly different than the norm:

development:
  adapter: sqlserver
  mode: odbc
  dsn:  the_dsn_you_created_and_tested_in_iodbc_administrator
  username: username
  password: password

There is currently a bug in script/console that will throw a BUS error when trying to access the database, but everything works outside of the console.

You should also be aware that SQL Server isn’t currently supported very well in Rails. I ran into a couple of bugs today and submitted patches for them:

• [PATCH] Add support for SQL Server uniqueidentifier columns
• [PATCH] Fix for db_schema_dump when table names are the same as SQL
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