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)
that has no internet connection at all. Setting things up on
