At Sea Without The Net

Two weeks ago from today, at about this time I was kicked back in the main show room of the **ms Nieuw Amsterdam** waiting for the opening act to begin.  With a full stomach from an awesome meal, and a refreshing drink in hand, I was in full relax mode.  The last thing I was thinking about was code.

When I woke up, Monday morning, I had an itching to crack open the laptop and work on some things I had left hanging from two days prior.  But first, a quick stop for breakfast, then I headed to the ships library.  I was knocking out tasks one by one, committing away locally on my laptop.  Then instinctively, my muscle memory kicked in and before I could catch what I was doing, I typed:

git push origin master

Duh!  You are on a ship, in the Caribbean, without a connection to the net.  No big deal, I can push my stuff to github when I return home.

I continued working on different things until I found myself stuck - I needed to refer to the api docs or some type of reference.  I was on vacation - the smart thing to do would have been to shut down my laptop and go relax.  Can you guess what I did?

Perhaps the thick-headed Irish blood in me, I decided to find a solution.  After a little digging, I found some gold nuggets in the following path:  ~/.gem/ruby/2.1.5/gems/rails-4.1.7/guides/source/

Reviewing some of the files in the above directory, I was able to get an answer for what I was looking for.  Saved my work, closed the laptop and headed to the gangway to catch a tender to a beautiful private island.

Later that day, while chatting with my dad, he let me know that he purchased a block of 200 minutes of internet time.  Satellite internet is not very fast, but good enough for quick browsing or checking of email.

I knew that I'd be cracking open the laptop from time-to-time, and working on Flex Blogger as well as an app for my day job.  But I didn't want to burn through those sacred internet minutes when I needed to review either the Ruby or Rails APIs.  Surely there had to be a better way.  Of course there is, and I found the following site:

https://rubydocs.org/

One can visit the above site and download a local copy of the Ruby and/or Rails APIs.  The neat thing is, you can choose which version or Ruby or Rails that you want to download the documentation for.  Neat!

With a local copy of the documentation I was needing, I pushed my committed changes from the previous day, then logged out - only used about 15 minutes of our satellite internet.  :)

Learn Something New Every Day

Last Edited by: John on November 14, 2015