Pervasive Code

A friend who is working primarily in the J2EE technology world (as I was, until early 2006) asked me for a how’s-it-going with respect to Ruby and Rails.

The short version:
- Ruby is fun to program in, as you’ve probably heard
- Rails is over-hyped, but it’s still quite good (definitely not perfect)
- I like the productivity of Ruby on Rails but I wouldn’t call it a silver bullet by any means
- Ruby performance was bad and is getting less bad, and can even be good if you do what the experts say
- The real gem (har har) in the Ruby and Rails space is the community itself
Read the rest of this entry »

GNU Screen is a remote terminal multiplexer, described welll elsewhere.

I use it to eliminate the too-many-Terminal-windows problem on my laptop. I also use it to help me achieve some level of continuity on remote hosts, by leaving half-completed sysadmin tasks as-is until hours or days later even if I get interrupted or if the task is really long-running and I need to roam around with my laptop.

Today I decided to invest some time in making my command-line development environment launch with a single script. Here are the details.
Read the rest of this entry »

Starting with Netscape 4.5, I’ve used Netscape, then Mozilla, then Thunderbird for email. I have a similar relationship with Firefox. I’ve watched with great hope and been disappointed over the years as Thunderbird bugs that really annoy me just… stay. I think I know why. It’s because Firefox and Thunderbird are built in such a way as to create a catch-22 situation — one that actually discourages new contributors.
Read the rest of this entry »

7.04 (meaning “the major release planned for 2007/04″, not meaning “the minor release following 7.03″) was released on April 19th. I upgraded today and it went pretty well, with a bit of manual cleanup required. More details after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

For two weeks (ending on this past Wednesday afternoon), most of my days and nights were occupied with a self-administered crash course in the Ruby programming language, outside of the Rails framework. I had struggled somewhat with Objective-C in January, partly because of the massive combined burden of learning the language, the Cocoa framework, the Xcode IDE, and the odd but brilliant Interface Builder. So, I wanted to try and attack Ruby in isolation.
Read the rest of this entry »