Album: Tokyo Police Club – A Lesson In Crime

Posted: January 12th, 2007 | Author: Carter Rabasa | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | Comments

I just downloaded A Lesson in Crime by the Tokyo Police Club. This is a perfect example of an album that you hear about, tell yourself you’re going to check out, and then promptly forget about. It doesn’t help that DC pretty much only has a single rock station (DC101) that wouldn’t touch an album like this (or most of the music I like) with a ten-foot pole.

Here’s a short review from The Fire Note:

Tokyo Police Club deliver a powerful punch of a debut EP with A Lesson In Crime. They hail from Canada (not Japan) and have taken the indie rock scene by storm. Besides having one of the coolest band names created in awhile and no law enforcement experience, Tokyo Police Club back up the hype with seven in your face tunes that range from straight up New York style rock to some post-punk feedback, mixed with a tad bit of Emo vibe. A Lesson In Crime’s sixteen minutes goes by quick but the EP is very rememberable because of the catchy songs and Dave Monks’s frontman swagger. His howling smooth vocals provides the perfect transition from track to track and leaves you wanting more. There is not a throwaway song on A Lesson In Crime, and it will definitely excite your interest for a full length in 07’.

Review: Ruby on Rails – Up and Running

Posted: November 19th, 2006 | Author: Carter Rabasa | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Comments
  • Ruby on Rails – Up and Running
  • Bruce A. Tate & Curt Hibbs
  • O’Reilly Media, 2006
  • This review has also been posted to RubyDC.org

I was recently provided with a PDF copy of Ruby on Rails – Up and Running by the Adams Morgan Ruby Users Group. As you can imagine, books on Ruby (and Rails) are about to flood the shelves as the publishing industry gets on the RoR bandwagon. I wanted to see how well a book could cover the fast-moving framework and in what ways it could improve my understanding of Rails.

The book is organized around creating a photo sharing web application step-by-step. Off the bat, I was puzzled to see “Installing Rails” as the last chapter in the book. Having a working runtime enhances the value of the book to the reader. On the flip side, I was pleased to see Mongrel mentioned as one of the web servers available for Rails development, a sign of the freshness of the content.

The authors develop the application from the ground up, tying general concepts (MVC, relational data, etc) into their Rails counterparts (ActiveRecord, etc). Explanations for certain design decisions (how ActiveRecord eschews mapping in favor of wrapping) are sprinkled through-out the book and provide an increasing sense of confidence in the framework.

Beyond the basic controllers, models and views, the authors provide details on enhancing their application with some judicious use of AJAX. They tie-up the development of the Photo Share application with an overview of the Rails testing framework, explaining the importance and ease of automated testing.

Overall, I give the book high marks. The book is excellent for anyone just getting into Rails development or looking for and end-to-end overview of the framework. The level of detail is limited, given the book’s 189 pages, so experienced developers may have less to gain. You will not read anything about RESTful Rails. It should also be noted that this book is focused on Rails, not Ruby, and contains little insight into the language.