Still physically run-down and also not sleeping well, but at least made it to the gym Tuesday and Wednesday. Trying more to just stay on top of admin stuff this week, rather than really push it with work. Did put out a beta, and the production version (likely unchanged) will probably go out shortly. Next week hopefully spend a bit of time with T2.
Been working my way through the Rails book, after having played with it on and off the last few months. As with all the Pragmatic Programmers books, its really well written. Rails itself I like. Like you'd expect from an extracted framework, it has the feel of "and we got to here, and then I pulled this other trick out of my back pocket", which makes for a not insignificant learning curve. But its the kind of tricks everyone does themselves when they're writing these kind of apps. We'll see if its like Cocoa where after a little bit you know where to look for things, what they're likely to be called, etc. The Rails style strikes me as being perhaps a bit too clever at times, but that may be some of Ruby's Perl heritage peeking out. Overall though, the approach is nice, and certainly more reasonable than the over-engineered Java approaches.
The big thing though is really the eco-system. On any number of technical areas, Ruby and Rails are less mature than many other solutions (performance, packaging, docs, etc.), and the warts are certainly there. But there's the momentum behind it, and a crush of bandwagon jumpers, so you have confidence that a lot of these things are just a matter of time. Technical people often try to discount that, but that's a mistake.
