What Happens When Your Computer Doesn’t Work With You (Week 5)

What the title says…Now, I’m not talking about when I get errors because I forgot to close the code or put () instead of {}. No, this is when the computer itself does not work for some unknown reason. I think this is what has been every time I sat down to do any sort of work with Ruby on Rails.

In order for me to upgrade to Rails 3, I had to use sudo commands – which worked, but brought along tons of problems with it. Right now, my main concern is with nokogirl – for some reason, I can’t seem to bundle install it, and that’s preventing me to go to use RSpec (Chapter 3 in Rails Tutorials Book). The sad thing? I’ve already done this step before – easily, as a matter of fact – on Windows. It’s not just this gem though – every time I do bundle install, something comes up as an error in terms of other gems, so I have to manually do gem install (name that gem didn’t work with me) before I can proceed. It’s not the end of the world obviously, but definitely a step that I wish I didn’t have to do – and I didn’t back in Windows.

Slightly changing the angle from what the computer didn’t work with me, I have experimented with the layers with my iPad – which is really, a tablet computer (I’ll still throw the word “computer” here). Layers are one of the key aspects of Photoshop, so while there are a lot of things I have to learn, this week was a good way to get started on the layers and play with gradient on the background. Of course, the usual photo editing features that I utilize were present, but instead of just relying on them, these two photos are influenced by layers.

Going back to programming but not with RoR, one of things I’ve been doing is planning out my learning goals. Right now, I started to review HTML and CSS – which have always been rather the opposite of RoR. For one thing, HTML/CSS are pretty straightforward. Like a lot of people who started on blogging before programming, I have picked up most of basic HTML (minus tables and forms, etc…) and know how to tweak CSS in rudimentary level. Of course, I’m not in the level of writing CSS from scratch, and that’s why I’m “reviewing” HTML/CSS.

But, unlike RoR, there isn’t as much gratifying feel of learning/reviewing HTML/CSS. It could be because they are not really “programming” – I sometimes call them a part of web design, which is slightly different from programming in strict sense (and that’s how I differentiate what goes under web design and web development). Also, the concerns have been in what to learn AFTER HTML/CSS review.

There are really three usual options:

1. Javascript: It makes websites interactive. It’s in high demand (very high as a matter of fact), and being able to use libraries like jQuery will be an useful skill.

2. PHP: I first came across PHP back when I was working on phpBB boards several years ago, and along with mySQL (or SQL in general), PHP is an extremely powerful language on the server side. Javascript CAN have server side role through Node.js, but its usage is clearly limited compared to full server side language like PHP.

3. Python: I’ve been there, and it’s definitely one of my to-visit list. Python is also one of three official languages of Google (or so I have read), with other two being Java and C languages (I don’t remember which C it was – C, C#, or C++). I don’t plan to go back to Java just yet, and certainly not C unless I have mastered Java. Python is therefore a good skill to have, but the only thing is that it’s not as web-related as other two are.

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