Sep
22
When art meets science, technology, engineering and math. In season 43 of Sesame Street, the show continues its focus on STEM education, adding the arts to the equation, creating STEAM. The cornerstone of the curriculum remains the connection between the four main domains: science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but the updated approach integrates the arts.
Sep
16
Value: is your story golden?
(Photo credit: Clearly Ambiguous via Flickr)
Last Thursday I attended Producers Go Digital hosted by Digital LA at the ioLA incubator. The panel shared a variety of insights about the realities of being a producer (some of may favorites are below). Yet there was one question I had trouble getting answered…
How do I value the worth of a story?
Most of the answers I got focused on the cost of the project. The problem is that cost does not equal value, not in digital media and not in any other industry. While it’s relatively easy to put a cost on the effort that will be required to tell a story (think location fees, salaries, equipment, logistics, manufacturing, printing, marketing), the real challenge is deciding if the value of the story is great enough to warrant all that cost.
One formula for value: D.U.S.T.
Nov
14
Before starting with Ruby, it’s useful to have a copy of git on hand. Git is a software configuration management tool, available here. It’s widely used in the Ruby and Rails communities.
I visited the Ruby on Rails download page that has instructions and links to relevant information about RoR.
The page explains that I’ll need Ruby version 1.8.7 or 1.9.2. The following command checks to see what Ruby version I have installed on my Mac…
$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-12 patchlevel 174) [universal-darwin10.0]
Next, I updated to the latest version of Ruby Gems. A gem is sort of like a ruby application. Rails is a gem.
$ sudo gem update --system
Since I met the system requirements for Rails 3, I continue with the Rails update command…
$ sudo gem update rails
This command took a while to run (maybe 10 minutes).
Finally, I needed to clean up old gems before rails would work. The next command handles cleanup by removing prior gem versions.
$ gem cleanup
Now let’s try generating an App.
$ rails new app_name
$ cd app_name
$ rails server
And we’re off and running with a Rails 3 application!
…Oh, all my old apps stopped working. I guess I should have looked into how to upgrade them first, but at least they were all demos. So nothing important was lost.
