Circle of Confusion

Besides playing games, the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) is capable of:

- Photo jpeg images display
- Mp3 music playback
- Mpeg video playback
- Browse the web

It does much more than the iPod but it's big, heavey and fragile compare to the iPod. But why do people buy video iPod when the Sony PSP can also play video, in an much bigger screen? Putting you own DVD content is not very straight on the PSP as it should. Besides buying video from the iTune store, can the video iPod play DVD transfer contents?

This is my setup for on the road A/V system:



I am happy to note that contrary to what I read on the web, upgrading the ROM to 2.6 did not harm any video playback capability.

Using DVD Decrypter and PSP Video 9, I was able sent "An Ant's Life" into PSP and it play in wide screen. One person, sitting alone watching a movie. This is really bizzard. Something that's suppose to many poeple at a time now is playing to just one. Who's going to laugh with yout? That's why I don't buy UMD disc movie. DVD seems to be a better deal.

Everything sort of work but it is far from Steve Jobs Finishing.

In photo display, the PSP resolution is 480 x 272 (Good info to remember). To save disk space, it's really better to crop the image to the pixel size. It's not practical disk space wise to download 8mp image file. But this crop to PSP size is a manual step for each photo. I wish Sony's media manager software let you crop when the image is moved to Playstation. Miss: why not loop mode in slice show?

Mp3 player is nicely done, control is called up on screen and you have to move with the curson key to "land" on the right command and push X.

Video play back to most dispointing. Maybe this is because Sony wants to make it a miserable experience on purpose so you just buy UMD movies? I don't know. But Sony can't possibly have everything you want.

Web browser is really poor. Novigating around the page is done by "landing" on hyper line around the page. The analog stick move a pointer around but surprise! page does not scroll. It's only scroll around with you moving the current hyperlink using directional controll. And it's very slow. Surprise me because I thought the PSP is fast.

I've been trying to learn Ruby on Rails ever since this tutorial was posted in onlamp.com. Everytime I didn't get far because of one problem or another with setting up the enviroment under WinXP (Ruby, Gem, Rails, MySql). Then I saw the link to Rolling with Ruby on InstantRails. Ths solved the installation problem and I can finish the tutorial. But I don't like developement tools used in the tutorial. So I set out to find my ideal Rails development environment by doing this same tutorial several time using various setup. I determined the best is RadRails. So I try to do the tutorial from menory. Really, I haven't learn Ruby and I'm doing Rails. Seems a little backward. Then I run into this:



I have no clue what was happening. Since I did the tutorial so many times successfully, I know I was guilty of some mistakes. But what did I do wrong? Is this not like be your own psychics? After a long chase late night without success, I went to sleep at 2am because I was a zombie. Then this morning found the problem and it in here somewhere:

class RecipeController < ApplicationController
  scaffold :recipe

  def nrw
    recipe = Recipe.new
    @categories = Category.find_all
  end
  
  def create
     @recipe = Recipe.new(@params['recipe'])
     @recipe.date = Date.today
     if @recipe.save
      redirect_to :action => 'list'
     else
      render_action 'new'
     end
  end  
    
  def list
    @recipes = Recipe.find_all
  end
  
  def list_debug
    @recipes = Recipe.find_all
  end
  
  def edit
    @recipe = Recipe.find(@params["id"])
    @categories = Category.find_all
  end
end

Viola!


ah ha, I found the mistake and It's a typo: I mistyped new as nrw.

I'm begining to learn Rails after ten so many years doing Java. I've forgot C++, many assembly. Just mostly dry confused J2EE. I wonder if this old dog can learn a new trick?

I tried many configurations in my search for my ideal development environment (I use a WinXP laptop):

- VMWare under WinXP running Linux doing rails development there
- Cygwin as a Unix shell to run rails command lines, various editor to do editing. I tied jEdit, notepad, Cream. While setup Cygwin, I discover rails app cannot connect to MySql, after some search around, I found out database.yml cannot use localhost, muust use 127.0.0.1 which for a tcp/ip connection.
- RadRails: at first creating an empty Rails project just do nothing. No error message or any indication what went wrong. Hmm, running generator show what's wrong: no Ruby.exe found. Ah, PATH problem. Onece I setup my environment variable PATH to contain ruby.exe, RadRails comes to life. Everything works!