I have been lured into testing the waters with some Ruby development lately. I'm still feeling very much out of my depth and prowling the net for answers. If I can get a little bit more up to speed with it, maybe I can be of more use in hack days as they are often basing their projects on Ruby if not rails too.

My first real project with rails is meeting with a bit of an error right now. I've made a rather nice infinite loop that is killing the programme. If I can get it tweaked then given the lengths I've been having to go through to get a result, I can see a use for the resulting code.

I have a couple of jobs using the django framework on the go which is written in python; a language I haven't really used before. After a good bit of sifting through code and finding my feet I can't help but feel that it doesn't know what it really is.

Firstly it has some OOP but not fully; no static vars or access levels for vars or methods. Even php has this. Then there is fact that it compiles, sort of, but you can't just deploy the compiled files. It needs the source there too.

Some news I would have posted earlier if my site worked is that we are having a wee drink to get the hackitude peeps back together in the same room again. It's to reignite the enthusiasm that we had before Christmas on the project.

A chance for us to figure out where the next step for the project will take us. The foundation that has been laid is a simple yet highly flexible framework for any data that needs to store collections of location data. Hopefully we will be rolling it out to include time data to enable event capturing too.

For info on what we got up to and where things are going, please see the hackitude site. We had a great time and Mark Steadman was a proper trooper setting it up and getting us all together.

I think what we have at the end of it is quite an interesting foundation for future work. It's a way of storing things at places and displaying them on a map. Been done before? probably but the concept here is to aggregate data from various sources and provide easy access to it.

It seems that many of my recent posts have been very optimistic in terms of making something I am working on open source and releasing back to the community. For some reason or other this hasn't been possible. Quite often because the project becomes very bespoke.

Things are looking up though. There's a small item I will be working on the the next few days which should be coded with release in mind. Both from the client's perspective and my own. I think version 1 may have wording that will be tailored to the client's wishes but the functionality will be generic.