Esoteric Ruby Blog

It has been about ten days since we first started writing the AsiaQuake realtime relief database system. Two programmers using Rails (and learning all the 1.0 features) managed to accomplish this much functionality:

• a login system with four levels of permissions: read, write, manage, and admin
• a missing person database
• a phone number database
• a volunteer database
• variously sorted table listings for all of the above
• search boxes in all tables
• export of all to data XML and CSV
• approximate matching and soundex search

Our next items are

• a table for infectious disease outbreaks like measles
• a table to track supply requests, shipments, fulfilment, and use
• a hospital table
• email alerts based on status changes for persons or supplies

So far, we’ve been very pleased at the level of functionality we have achieved in this short timeframe, and we think it validates Ruby and Rails promises to be many times faster than the older CGI approaches.

If you’d like to find out more, check out our application at:

http://www.asiaquake.org/

Anybody can get an account without an email address now so feel free to poke around. Feedback will be much appreciated.

To read the first part in this series, please see http://cilibrar.com/~cilibrar/erblog.cgi/Tsunami/TsunamiReliefRails.txl

Ever since the incredibly powerful earthquake and subsequent Tsunami hit Asia, there has been a terribly critical logistics problem that we are only beginning to solve. Millions of people need food, water, and shelter, and infrastructure is wiped out in many places. In an effort to assist relief work, I have created a simple Rails application to follow several areas of relief related information including:

a) Phone numbers of governments, relief organizations, volunteers, etc. b) Missing / Living / Dead person listing c) Supply tracking

I have created an Instiki Wiki for the cause at

http://wiki.asiaquake.org/

And there I give a rough layout of the goals.

I have also begun work on a database and so far part a, the phonelist, is working and populated at:

http://rails.asiaquake.org/

This is a perfect opportunity to put Ruby and Rails to the test: does it really deliver in a very-short-timeframe development cycle? We will have to wait and see how this application turns out in a few days. I have been at it just a few days so far and must say it has been quite a learning experience, but so far we are liking the architecture, especially the excellent improvements in Rails 0.9, which seems a lot better than 0.7. I’m still not familiar enough with rails to be confident with it, however I find I am easily picking up what I need to know from the straightforward organization most of the time, which is quite a bit more than I can say for most other frameworks I have tried.

Are you moved to do something to help the Tsunami victims, and do you know Rails? If so, send me an email at cilibrar@ofb.net or a Yahoo instant message to cilibrar and tell me your interest and skills. I have already set up a dedicated server and control all aspects.

I have made a software packagae, complearn-0.6.2.tar.gz , that uses autoconf and automake to manage system configuration. One of the standard options is:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/wherever/placetoinstall

In many autoconf or automake enabled software packages written in C (such as GNU / FSF utilities) this creates subdirectories like

$HOME/wherever/placetoinstall/bin for executables $HOME/wherever/placetoinstall/lib for libraries $HOME/wherever/placetoinstall/man for manual_pages

and so on for many common naming conventions.

Unfortunately I cannot understand how to correctly pass this option on to ruby mkmf:

ruby extconf.rb make

I have seen that there is an option to make using a DESTDIR variable such as:

make DESTDIR=$HOME/wherever/placetoinstall

but then this creates deep directory structure

$HOME/wherever/placetoinstall/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/CompLearnLib

and to me it seems that the /usr/local portion of the above path structure is redundant. Is there a way to remove it in the ruby mkmf extconf.rb structure? The best I can come up with so far is to use an mv and then an rm command to correct things, and this seems somewhat complicated and error-prone.

Is there a better solution to this problem?