A Decent Week

Had a pretty decent week. I was able to get several little things out of the way, despite having more meetings than I thought was possible. We had a problem with data from one of our labs. We have a couple of instruments that take readings from a sample and transmit the results out through a serial port. The way things were set up the data only went to one place, which was a database. We have another system that needs to use this data ASAP. We didn't really want to try to pull it out of the database because it would be hard to find, our schema's suck and this database will be going away in the near future. So, I put together a multiplexer script in Ruby. It is just a TCP Server that let's an unlimited number of application connect to receive the data. It took about 40 lines of code. It could be done in around 30 lines, but I put some comments in.

Bare with me while I evangalize Ruby a little more. I also found out that it comes with support for Oracle and ODBC. You can download dbd's for several different database types, but I didn't have a windows compiler and didn't want to deal with trying to build it. I didn't expect the built in support to work. I needed to connect to an Oracle DB to pull something out. After a little trial and error, it worked. I was surprised. I think that I have gotten the attention of our IT guys. They almost seem interested in scripting with Ruby/Perl, as opposed to VB.

I wanted to have some sort of a notebook application. Wiki's are really good for this, especially if you want to share. I found instiki. This is a wiki implemented in Ruby. It does not require an external database or a web server. It uses the Webrick web server (built in to Ruby). Just type the command 'ruby instiki.rb' and you are running a wiki. A decent Wiki to boot. Since it is Ruby, it will run on about any platform. If you need a wiki fast, give instiki a try, you will be surprised.

I would like to see us go to Linux for cost savings. I'm not sure what kind of cash it would save us in licensing fee's, but I have to believe that it would be significant. One big problem we would face in such a transition would be the number of applications that we have that are windows only. Some of these are internally developed access database type things, others are vendor supplied windows only applications. I just don't see how we could ever make a transition. If we had some sort of an access wrapper to put around MySQL and could implement VB for Linux, and use wine to run all of our vendor app's, it might be possible. But, it would still piss off the Excel hackers. We have several people that use Excel as a front end for all sorts of strange things, and if someone has to learn something new, they will resist.