Work Locations: Virginia and Morgantown, WV (see my wife's travel log).
Sporadically starting in June 2006 began playing with Ruby on Rails.
Created a simple application to:
Tried a variety ways of getting and installing Ruby and Rails. Finally settling on DarwinPorts (now MacPorts). I'm using MacPorts to get and install most tools, except for MySQL.
Got the Mate editor. Very nice editor. Does a nice job of colorizing Ruby and Rails files. I still drop back into my all time favorite editor, Emacs, quite often.
Had a great time playing with MySQL 5.x. I love stored procedures and triggers! I have played around with MySQL before, but always became disenchanted when I wanted to access the database from some application other than the original one.
Without stored procedures and triggers it was necessary to duplicate much of the "model" in the new application/language. With stored procedures and triggers, it is relatively easy to put must more of the "model" in the database itself, instead of just raw, naked data.
My current tactic is to develop the model in Ruby/Rails, then move critical portions of it to stored procedures and triggers in MySQL 5.x
Lots of ideas on how to use GPS coordinates of locations to do some automated route planning.