rubyish

I should learn some Ruby.

In which I avoid thinking by obtaining more documentation instead.

Building the database underneath my application.

Oh dear. As I suspected would happen, I’ve somewhat let my little project fall by the wayside before Christmas and through the holiday period.

And getting back to work, with full five day weeks, has not been conducive to concentration.

However, excuses must cease. Especially as my workmates (not to mention the people at PlayCentre) are waiting to use my very vapourous piece of ‘ware.

<sigh.>

In a quest to waste more time on tangential diversions, I conceived a burning desire to find a free, cross platform tool for easily creating a database diagram that would be useful when setting up models in ActiveRecord.

For some reason, mere paper would not suffice for this task. So I spent many happy hours looking for alternatives to expensive things like Visio, almost settling on Inkscape (very fine tool, by the way) before discovering Gliffy.

I’m hooked. Here’s my extremely complicated lending library schema (which is currently serving as my training application):

It’s got just the features I need and no more; it’s easy and intuitive to use, and I can share stuff for others to edit (or not) as I wish. Plus there’s a plugin for Confluence, which would go down well at work.

Highly recommended.