Summer of Rails
meets RailsDay.
You installed Ruby on Rails, you bought the books, and you even made a shopping cart.
But that was months ago and you still haven’t shipped your first Rails app.
So let’s fix that.
Go on, you know you want to. I do!
Fixed image and added an actual link.
Lenovo + Ubuntu = Apple?
Mark Pilgrim did it.
Then Cory Doctorow did it as well.
O’Reilly has noticed them doing it.
…and now /. (that bastion of journalism) is talking about it.
What is it?
People (whom some would call alpha geeks) are switching from Apple’s OS X to Ubuntu. Noteworthy in itself, but so far I’ve not seen anyone make the connection that both Mark and Cory have switched to Ubuntu on Lenovo kit (the hardware formally known as IBM).
I’m not suprised they chose this combination – Lenovo + Ubuntu is a very good match.
In fact in my office right now I’ve got four pieces of Lenovo Kit:
Installing Ubuntu on the Thinkpad was a dream compared to getting XP running at the same feature level. It’s not just the latest and greatest Ubuntu that works so well with this hardware – before Dapper was released I ran Breezy on the two of the M51s.
Why undersell?
In his latest post
Aq. talks about two new directions for the LugRadio offspring Jokosher of which both sound excellent.
However he mentions the release schedule for Jokosher:
the development of a plugin system is on the roadmap for Jokosher 0.2 (at the moment, we're in bugfix mode for 0.1, due for release in three weeks at LugRadio Live 2006)
…and my immediate reaction was “why 0.1? why not 1.0?”. I know the Open Source way is to release early and release often – which is A Good Thing™ by the way – but I do object to the way projects pick < 1 version numbers to indicate their maturity (or lack thereof), because they’re underselling themselves. One of the common complaints levelled at Linux and Open Source Software is that nothing is ever finished, and this is because a vast number of projects never reach that golden 1.0 milestone. It hasn’t stoppped them being in widespread use, but they still give the impression they’re not ready yet. Why didn’t they hit 1.0? Because they reached the point where they were ‘good enough’ and didn’t need to go any further.
If it’s good enough to be used by the others, then give it a 1.0 version number to show that. It doesn’t matter if it’s not complete – as 37 signals would say:
Build half a product, not a half-ass product
It obviously does something otherwise you wouldn’t be releasing it yet, so say that. If it’s not then you shouldn’t be – you won’t stop yourself or the early adopters from using it by doing this and in the long run you’ll end up with a much better first release.
Just in case this post does get misinterpreted in someway, I’m using Jokosher purely as an example here. I’ve no idea how ‘mature’ it is, nor do I have an opinion on whether they should or shouldn’t release it at LugRadio Live. I just don’t want the team behind it – or any other project – to undersell themselves.
Deployment requires consideration
complains that deploying a Rails application is a sticking point for most:
For the average person, making choices about web servers and configuring proxying through Apache is too much.
…and he’s absolutely right. If I didn’t run my own server, I’d probably have ditched RoR by now. The only problem is what else would I have gone with?
Sure RoR has it’s fair share of unique problems – although I believe the benefits you gain far outweigh these issues – but anything except middle of the road PHP and vanilla HTML will have their own problems. Want to run ASP.NET? You either need Windows hosting (£££) or fight with mod_mono. PHP5? Not all hosts have switched to it, and you might be limited with libraries/versions etc. Want to use Postgresql instead of MySQL? You can poke holes in any language/platform/framework, and all of them have their own workarounds and solutions.
Deployment is part of the bigger picture, and one that often gets overlooked during development (especially for smaller webapps). If you’re going to pick an up-and-coming technology like RoR then you need to consider deployment issues. It’s not going to work with your generic hosting provider, and even if they do offer Rails support then you’ve still got the problems that come with sharing a server. If you’re lucky enough to get one with Rails and decent performance then you’re still restricted to their versions.
As far as I’m concerned, running your own server is the only way to go. For the (small) premium you pay to get a UML server over a virtual host, the freedom you get is more than worth it. Of course not everyone has the knowledge/skills or desire to run their own box, so there will always be a niche for companies like RailsMachine, EngineYard and Planet Argon and it’s up to them to streamline deployment for their customers.
So what if you want freedom of your own server but not the hassle of running it? Well maybe there’s a business opportunity there…
Going Cold Turkey
It’s amazing how quickly you get out of shape.
One of the side-effects of me not running for a while was that I noticeably put weight back on. Thinking back over the 19 days (19!) I wasn’t running, the amount of rubbish I ate was quite bad. So starting…now…I’m kicking off an experiment.
This isn’t a diet – I don’t want to lose weight per se, just get into shape – it’s a change of direction. For the next seven days I’m only going to:
We’ll see how I do…
Overcoming Inertia
A few weeks ago I was running almost every day, and thoroughly enjoying it. Then I stopped. I stopped for a fairly good reason – I came down with a summer cold and really didn’t feel like running so I thought I’d pick it up again in a few days.
This was 19 days ago!
I kept saying to myself that I’m going running today, or I’ll start again tomorrow but it just didn’t happen. I don’t know why – it wasn’t a conscious decision, something just kept getting in the way and when I did get time I had no motivation (“tomorrow” is so easy).
Even yesterday which was an absolutely glorious day (although probably too hot) I couldn’t overcome the inertia. As with all procrastination, I knew I was putting it off and was frustrated with myself for doing so but didn’t actually do anything about it. I decided enough was enough, and this morning I was going to get up a 6AM and go for a run.
Of course this didn’t happen. I got up, reset the alarm for 7AM and went back to sleep.
However once my wife took the Schwuklets to school I grabbed my trainers and headed out. Now I feel great, and I’m really looking forward to running again.
The nice thing about inertia is that applies to rest and movement.
Inertia is the tendency of a body to maintain its state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force. (source: Wikipedia)
So now I’m running again I’ll keep going until something ‘trips me up’.
The other thing I re-discovered is that I really enjoying running. Even though I’m listening to something (was podcasts, then music, now I’m back to podcasts) my mind is free to wander. I don’t need to think (too much) about the actual act of running, so I’m free to think about anything else and I’ve had quite a few ‘lightbulb’ moments this way.
Physical and mental exercise – what more could you want?
How to enable sound in Flash on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) has an annoying problem: if you install the `flashplugin-nonfree` package you get no sound. This is documented in bug #29760.
Fortunately the fix is easy:
Step 1. Install the `alsa-oss` package:
$ sudo apt-get install alsa-oss
Step 2. Edit `/etc/firefox/firefoxrc` to match the following:
FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss” Note that “auto” and “esd” involve the use of esddsp, which is known to be buggy and to make Firefox unstable. See https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/29760.
That’s it! Restart Firefox and away you go.
look good
