opal in sydney, ruby (on rail) in seattle?

i've learned a thing or two about taihitian black perl when vacationing in taihiti/bora bora a few years back, and learned a thing or two about opal while in sydney for lca2007; i like boulder opal and black opal for the dark & deep blueness more than the white shiney opal of other kinds, i learned.

back in seattle, i got a chance to have somewhat not-so-in-depth(mainly due to my lack of knowledge) discussion about ruby on rail and ajax. I, of course, googled ruby on rail and got forwarded to o'reilly's olamp.org site to read up on ruby, the language, and rail, the framework to house ruby and mysql on windows. hmm... ruby seem very high level language, and mysql on windows with all the odbc crap being taken care of by rail seem interesting.

of course i just got back from lca2007 where i saw someone like dave jones giving a demo on how many useless cycles of application/user layer system calls there are, and i bet making things easier for the developers on rail would create more of these extra system calls. heh. shrug...

i googled again and found watir, web application testing in ruby, or something like that? pronounced water, is what the web page says. i should try to play with both ruby on rail and watir. i also found this rather interesting website called opensourcetesting.org, listing many automation tools, like sourceforge.

something new everyday, i guess.