Darwin: The Rat Race

Well the close of the race is upon me. I have the basics working and a simple HTML user interface able to display the samples collected from hosts specified on the network. Nothing too fancy. I am a complete Ruby novice, so this has been a bit of a challenge. I must say though, that I enjoy the language.

One of my gripes currently as I rush to have something workable for the race is the ability to package my source into, at a minimum, a windows executable. Alas, this may be quite difficult. The LAST thing I want judges to have to do is install some sort of InstantRuby or RubyStack to run my application. UGH!

That said, I’ve also been having problems getting some common libraries to install properly as it seems that versions are always in flux. Documentation is still there to help, but it really is a struggle. For example, I was happily working away in Ruby on Rails (again, complete novice) and decided to try upgrading to the latest version through NetBeans. Much to my disappointment I found my project broken. I know all of these projects are rapidly evolving, which is excellent, but the fact that I couldn’t generate a dynamic scaffolding so easily for the MVC ActiveRecord stuff as I had before drove me nuts for a brief while.

Also, as I write this I’m trying to calm myself by listening to Simon and Garfunkel.

Hopefully I won’t be working on this competitively come 3AM Wednesday morning. In the screenshot above I’m desperately trying to Install the RMagick gem so that I can generate some fancy schmancy graphs in my web application. Sorrow will most certainly follow for the next few hours…

Netbeans is still working well. I’ve only had it lock up on me once, and that was mostly my fault. It does a good job of getting out of your way when you want to code. File explorers and console output collapse speedily as you click to grind away in your scripts. The built in database navigator is quite nice for browsing and can attach to lots of standard RDBMS out of the box.

Report back soon,

Steve