Work has been insanely busy lately. We had to spend a week in Amsterdam with clients, we’ve managed to find our Ruby on Rails developer, we’ve just hired another designer, and I’ll be advertising another developer position tomorrow - PHP with some ASP.Net exposure this time.

Unfornately this means that the bike is taking a back seat. And to compound the problem I’ve had a chest infection the last few days, putting my Knysna race in doubt . I will however still be riding back from Knysna, hopefully that will get the system ticking again.

Where are you?!!

We’ve got a ton of work happening at the moment - literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of coding to be done, but we can’t find any RoR developers for love or money. The only interest we’ve had in some ads we’ve placed have been from people in the US and India. The guys in the US cost too much, and I’m a bit nervous about communication with India.

Does no-one in Cape Town want to learn Ruby on Rails??

Found a great affiliate program the other day, so I’ve created a site to see if we can make something of it. The site sells website templates - www.crystaltemplates.com. I need to do some search engine optimisation still, then hopefully we’ll get some traffic!

Got our first Rails app up and running. Its a simple task management system that we’re using internally to help manage things. It gives us enough info to do client billing too. We’ll improve it over the next few weeks/months and add client access and a few other useful features.

It was great fun to develop and the whole team likes the new app!

We made the decision at work to do some of our next projects using Ruby on Rails. I’ll spare you all the hype but basically its a web development framework that promises some rather appealing things.

So we bought some books and I’ve just finished working through Agile Web Development with Rails. Now I’m trying to knock together a little app to replace our office project management system (which is far too complex). Boy it is frustrating though. Like learning to write all over again. The simplest little things hold you up. Not because they’re hard, or complex, but just because its done differently to the way you’re used to.

The Rails forum is proving rather useful though.

I will keep you posted on my RoR progress!

I’m always on the lookout for good music to work to, and have tried most anything. The best is usually something that doesn’t have distracting words. For some reason though, I never considered working with classical music going, until I had some on yesterday and was working very happily while it was on.

So today I found some good classical music sites - www.pianosociety.com and www.classiccat.net. Been downloading some nice stuff. Solo piano seems to be particularly good.

Flash preloaders always seem to cause problems, especially with AS2 classes, and when using library items exported for actionscript.

This tutorial at senocular.com explains and solves ALL the common problems and has been a huge timesaver, putting all the relevant info in one page. Thanks Trevor!

Finally got WordPress up and running…

Hopefully keeping the site up-to-date will be a little easier now. Please excuse the layout - I still need to work on the style sheet a bit (ok, a lot!). Consider it a work in progress…