There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing nothing as long as it is done in moderation.
— From Freelance Switch
‘Become More Efficient By Simplifying Your Life‘
Author Archives: concept47
Frameworks vs. Libraries in PHP (why I choose frameworks)
David Otton (who I’ve never met) has an interesting take on the old Framework vs. libraries debate, that I identify with.
I went through the same struggle (in my head) months ago. However, after having that internal struggle that David went through, I came out on the side of frameworks.
Why? Continue reading
How to persevere … correctly
I just had to steal this 37 signal blog posting
How’s this for tenacity? John Dane is 58 years old and has been trying out for the Olympic sailing team for 40 years. He finally made it this year with his son-in-law, Austin Sperry.
Dane missed qualifying for the Olympics 4 separate times, each by a few minutes. He didn’t give up after each loss, he just improved his sailing skills. It would have been too easy to give up after losing one or two qualifying races. John Dane took the more difficult route and persevered.
New Netbeans release – version 6.5 Milestone 1
New in this release is support for PHP
There is a new feature list here
A couple of interesting Rails enhancements
About to check it out.
ReCaptcha kills wordpress spam comments dead!
Just wanted to celebrate the fact that after installing the Recaptcha wordpress plugin I’m down from 200 – 300 spam comments a week to 0.
Rockin!
Current Active Scaffold Rails plugin (1.1.1) not compatible with Rails 2.1
If you’re seeing errors like this
... gems/activesupport-2.1.0/lib/active_support/core_ext/module/aliasing.rb:31:in `alias_method': undefined method `find_full_template_path' for class `ActionView::Base' (NameError)
You’re not crazy.
Active Scaffold (1.1.1) doesn’t play nice with Rails 2.1!
Go here to get an Active Scaffold version (master) that does.
Fixing the libxml-ruby gem error: uninitialized constant XML (NameError)
I found the highly recommended libxml-ruby gem but was having a lot of trouble getting my sample code below to work
1 2 3 4 | require 'libxml' doc = XML::Document.file('http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=obama') root = doc.root puts "Root element name: #{root.name}" |
I kept getting this error
uninitialized constant XML (NameError) Continue reading
Build something you love, not what sells.
Every now and then I’ll run into a prospective client who wants to build the next newsvine, digg, flickr or Amazon. The thought being
“We’ll build it, throw it up there and see how it does.
If it doesn’t work we’ll move on.”
Whenever I hear talk like this, I flinch.
Why? Continue reading
Quote of the day
scalability is not your problem, getting people to give a shit is
Why requiring long term contracts could be bad for your business …
I was just chatting with some SEO/SEM guru buddies of mine about how yearly contracts in the SEO industry make potential clients nervous, but are still the industry standard.
They’d stopped requiring yearly contracts for their services, charging from month to month instead (with a deposit up front) . Their clients seemed more comfortable with that arrangement and they were a lot happier with it too.
That set me thinking about why businesses ever require contracts to service their clients. Continue reading
Compiled PHP not loading correct php.ini
This one drove me nuts.
I was compiling various versions of PHP4 on Mac OS X and even though the phpinfo() was saying that it was loading the php.ini at /usr/local/php/php.ini it really wasnt (still haven’t figured out what it was loading).
But after trawling about for a while, I found this excellent forum post that told me how to get my compiled PHP to load the right php.ini
The solution?
compile PHP with these flags
–sysconfdir=/etc –with-config-file-path=/etc –with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php.d
substituting the correct folder paths for each of the flags
Even Bill Gates knows that Microsoft makes crap software…
This might be old hat to some of you, but this was pure gold for me.
Without further ado, go read this rant that Bill Gates sent to members of his team about his painful experience in trying to download and install Moviemaker.
Welcome to my world Bill.
The haters crawl out of the woodwork on mod_rails project
There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.
– Ziglar, Zig
I couldn’t believe that someone would have the gall to actually go on record with grouses as trite as these against the creators of mod_rails … but they did
Basically here are their complaints about Phusion Passenger/mod_rails
– Their product has ‘Enterprise’ in the title
– They shouldn’t be up to version 2.0 already (yes … they actually said that)
– They release FREE products ‘late’ (late being an excruciating 2 weeks)
– They’d like for them them to be more ‘modest’ (like they haven’t heard of DHH)
– The marketing seems too slick and something ‘fishy’ is going on because they’re trying to make money with an Enterprise ready version of Passenger/mod_rails?!?!
– The ‘rails community’ will not embrace mod_rails because of these laughable quibbles … I guess these guys don’t count as part of the ‘rails community’ right?
ridiculous.
PS: Note that the original ‘rant’ appeared on Ruby flow, where it was rightly eviscerated
mod rails Passenger 2.0 RC2 released … even more stable?
The kickass developers over at Phusion have released an update to Phusion passenger (or as I prefer to call it … Apache mod rails).
You can see the list of original improvements here
It seems that this particular problem with mod-rails hanging after a few hours and taking down apache with it (I experienced this in an apache deployment that I tried personally … and its a bit scary) was part of the motivation behind the original mod_rails/Passenger Release Candidate. Continue reading
Ruby on Rails gotcha with empty? vs nil?
Just got bitten by this one in Ruby on Rails.
If you use empty? to check a hash slice that doesn’t exist you get an error, instead of the behavior of nil? which simply reports that it is actually nil …
irb(main):004:0> test = {}
=> {}
irb(main):005:0> test = {'test' => '1'}
=> {"test"=>"1"}
irb(main):006:0> test
=> {"test"=>"1"}