I haven’t mentioned it here, but I spent the better part of the last two months on furlough. While I understood, conceptually, that it was a temporary thing and no fault of my own, I took it kinda hard initially–there’s an implicit message of uselessness there that’s hard to get around.

Once I got over that (i.e. after the first month), I finally sat down and tried to create my first Rails app. My sister really loves books, and wanted some sort of way to track them: the ones she owned, the ones she wanted, the ones that were eligible for Amazon’s four-for-three promotion, that sort of thing. It was a nice fit for trying to learn Rails–not too large a scope, but you’d definitely need to fiddle with things a bit.

I dubbed my program Bookoff, after a Japanese used bookstore chain. I’m really proud of how it turned out. So proud, in fact, that I bothered to record a little video and upload it here (click through; it’s a big screen, so I’m not going to bother trying to embed it):

Not bad for a first outing with Rails, eh? (Psst: don’t bother trying to read too much into the books listed; I was just grabbing random titles off the top of my head and from the front pages of Amazon.)

The time I spent pulling up the “Comic” graphic novels was trying to show that the program uses natural sorting (one of a few bajillion things I butted my head against): by default, databases sorting by name would have sorted those volumes as

• Comic 1
• Comic 10
• Comic 2
• Comic 21

which is pretty silly.