From: Nguyen Duy Tho <nguyenduytho@...>
Date: 2007-03-15T15:29:09+09:00
Subject: Re: IDEA: Ruby "offline" CD / DVD

Hi all,

I like the idea to create a CD/DVD to help people use Ruby.
My idea is to customize Knoppix CD/DVD and include Ruby-related packages
+ gems, also
add Windows, Mac Ruby packages.
With this kind of Live CD + USB flash disk, user can develop on Linux
environment and also use as
 a source for software installer on Windows, Mac.

Just my thought.

Regards.
Tho Nguyen

Stian Haklev wrote:
> Hi all. I hope this is the appropriate place to post my idea. I have
> been using Ruby on and off for two years now, but especially lately as I
> have been implementing some personal projects, and modifying some Rails
> apps for our intranet, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.
>
> Currently I am working for an NGO in Indonesia (I'm Norwegian, studying
> in Canada), and although we have a decent internet connection in the
> office, I do most of my coding at home in the evenings - without
> internet. And I have come to realize how much we depend on being
> online... not for the actual coding, but for all that surrounds it,
> whether it's looking up a library reference, downloading a new gem,
> googling an error message, downloading some source code to see how
> somebody else solved this problem. Often I come to a block, and I have
> to wait till the next morning before I can move on. I've partly solved
> this by pre-downloading a number of good resources, whether PDFs or even
> wgetting small sites that I might want to refer to.
>
> Internet is very expensive and slow in Indonesia, and almost nobody have
> it at home. I've met a bunch of CS students at the local Linux
> usergroup, and I was saddened to see how little they knew of basic stuff
> (whether Linux or programming, but at least they came, which is a great
> start). I never did CS, but I've been playing around with computers
> since I was 10. I firmly believe that having access to your own
> computer, and being able to sit up all night trying stuff out is the
> only real way of learning - all kinds of courses can help, but they are
> never enough.
>
> So I started thinking about producing some kind of a "Ruby ++" CD that
> could be sold really cheaply or handed out for free here and in other
> places. It would obviously contain some kind of installer/distribution
> of Ruby for most platforms (Win/Linux/Mac), but in addition some of the
> following:
>
> - a huge collection of gems - how big are all the gems together? enough
> for a DVD? or only the most useful ones
> - a bunch of big Ruby and RoR apps from Rubyforge etc
> - Rubybooks (like in the rubydoc bundle)
> - Functional and searchable webdumps of things like: the 10-20 most
> prolific Ruby bloggers, the Ruby-lang mailing list, Ruby quiz, etc
>
> (I'd personally also like to sneak in a pdf book about svn and maybe a
> few other tools as well).
>
> Previously I experimented a lot with getting offline access to Wikipedia
> dumps that are zipped without unzipping them first. I made a simple
> Ruby+webrick server that unzips and serves files on demand. It turned
> out to be way too slow for huge Wikipedia files (not Ruby but calling
> 7zip through the backtick), so someone from Spanish Wikipedia wrote an
> integrated server/7zip that only opens the 7z file once, and caches the
> index. Yesterday I wrote a first mockup of a Ruby script that accepts a
> URL, runs wget following all links in subdirectories, then scans all
> HTML/txt etc files with Ferret, and zips it all up to a format that is
> instantly usable. This way we could put a lot of documentation on the CD
> and have instantly useable - and searchable!
>
> Anyway, I'm throwing this out there, and wondering if it's a good idea,
> if you have any inputs etc. It might be hard to imagine how it is to be
> learning Ruby with no or almost no access to the network, but I can tell
> you that I would certainly pick up such a CD/DVD in a heartbeat, and I
> think it would be really useful. I'd love nothing more than having a
> generation of young creative minds in Indonesia (and other places)
> growing up churning out beautiful Ruby code! (This idea could obviously
> be extended to covering other programming languages etc, but I'm a Ruby
> guy). Also distribution has to be thought of, but there are lots of user
> groups for Ruby/Ubuntu/Linux etc in Indonesia. And we could put it up as
> an ISO, so other user groups in other countries could distribute it as
> they saw fit.
>
> Stian
> (ps please cc to my email since I might not be able to check this list
> often)
>
>