I brought the SitePoint Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications book just over a week ago and i’m now around 120 pages into it. I have to say its a great read. I wanted to start learning Rails as soon as I read how easy it was to work with on a blog post at Carsonified.

After a day or so watching screencasts and reading up on what you can do with Rails, I set out and brought the Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications Sitepoint book from Waterstones (after searching in a few other book shops).

Getting into the book was relatively easy, but if you wish to start working on the sample application (Shovell - A Digg Clone) that you build while reading the book straight away you have a good 3-4 chapters to read first.

While I haven’t got into the bulk of the application coding I have to say I am very impressed and by the sounds of it, Ruby on Rails will look great on anyones CV and portfolio.

I would have gotten further into the book by now if I hadn’t gotten stuck on getting MySQL all set up and running on Leopard, I kept getting errors and after about 6 attempts it worked. Now I can start building the Shovell application, then once i’m happy with that I can start building my other projects that are in the works.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about Ruby on Rails, its a great introduction to Rails. I will no doubt be posting more posts about this book in the coming weeks when a few other of my projects start coming together.

Well firstly I hope you all are having/had a very Merry Christmas. On Saturday I traveled down to the Isle Of Wight to spend Christmas with my Dad. This meant I had a Mini Christmas with my Mom and family in Birmingham on Friday. That was great, another great thing was that I could have my presents early.

One of them was an EyeTV Hybrid, which I actually brought a few weeks back and my Mom was kind enough to let me open and use it there and then. Thanks Mom! The EyeTV Hybrid is a TV tuner for Macs, it recieves both analog and Freeview. It comes packaged with an antenna, remote, break-out cable, USB cable, EyeTV Software.

Once I had gotten it home and the software installed on it was just a case of plugging the USB stick into my iMac and plugging in the ever so small Antenna and placing it onto a suitable magnetic surface (very important!). Once that was all set up I made EyeTV (The Software) search for channels. I of course scanned Freeview and to my amazement it found 80+ channels (including radio, interactive, and teletext channels).

The scanning stopped and I flicked through the channels looking for any of them that were dropping out. Each channel was perfect. This amazed me as the Antenna is tiny, and I had set up Freeview boxes before using bigger Antennas and had never received that amount of channels. Signal quality was 100%, while Signal strength was 78%.

The break-out cable allows you to attach other TV devices, such as game consoles. This break-out cable allows you to use S-Video, Composite Video and Stereo Audio. Just a note about consoles, EyeTV doesn’t support Pal 60, which is required by some games. There are ways round it which I am going to try soon myself.

The recording features in EyeTV are great too, set up what you want to record using the integrated tvtv program guide and once the program is finished and recording stopped you can play it back in great quality. While watching or recording a program you can pause it, and rewind and watch it again or just watch the last minute if you left the room. You can of course also fast forward so the TV is live again.

Overall the EyeTV Hybrid is just awesome, I recommend it to anyone with a Mac, or anyone who wants to just watch what you want to watch on TV instead of what others want to watch, or anyone who just wants to watch TV in piece without buying a new TV. I think I covered all possible reasons.

To read more, and see images of just how small the product is (especially the antenna). Click Here.