I remember in graduate school reading a paper from Gartner Group.  It was about outsourcing.   According to them a large number of the overall IT workforce in the United States would be outsourced to India, China, etc…  At the time I remember being floored but these assumptions and thinking that I’d just spent 6 years of my life going to school for a career that would disappear.

The assumptions in this article mean a lot of the same things to the IT workforce overall.  In my opinion at least.  Although I find it does not hit me as hard for some reason.  Maybe it is just me getting older.  Not sure.  Very interesting read though.

The 40-30-30 Rule: Why Risk is Worth It

An inspiring post.  Something that someone has put into words what I’ve known, but couldn’t myself.

Today I ran across 50 Cent’s 10 lessons for success in business - and in life.  Of all people I would not think he would give such advise.  I’m not a big fan but for some reason click on the link to read what he had to say.

My favorite was:

2. Make Everything Your Own - Self-Reliance

When you work for others, you are at their mercy. They own your work; they own you. Your creative spirit is squashed. What keeps you in such positions is a fear of having to sink or swim on your own. Instead you should have a greater fear of what will happen to you if you remain dependent on others for power. Your goal in every manoeuvre in life must be ownership, working the corner for yourself. When it is yours, it is yours to lose - you are more motivated, more creative, more alive. The ultimate power in life is to be completely self-reliant, completely yourself.

More people need to start thinking along these line.  I try to but need to be more dedicated to the idea.  Money and routine get in my way too much these days.

*** glibc detected *** corrupted double-linked list: 0×08d949a0 ***
** Daemonized, any open files are closed.  Look at log/mongrel.pid and log/mongrel.log for info.
** Starting Mongrel listening at 0.0.0.0:120xx
** Starting Rails with development environment…
** Rails loaded.
** Loading any Rails specific GemPlugins
** Signals ready.  TERM => stop.  USR2 => restart.  INT => stop (no restart).
** Rails signals registered.  HUP => reload (without restart).  It might not work well.
** Mongrel 1.1.5 available at 0.0.0.0:120xx
** Writing PID file to log/mongrel.pid
*** glibc detected *** corrupted double-linked list: 0×4a45e858 ***
** Daemonized, any open files are closed.  Look at log/mongrel.pid and log/mongrel.log for info.
** Starting Mongrel listening at 0.0.0.0:120xx
** Starting Rails with development environment…
** Rails loaded.
** Loading any Rails specific GemPlugins
** Signals ready.  TERM => stop.  USR2 => restart.  INT => stop (no restart).
** Rails signals registered.  HUP => reload (without restart).  It might not work well.
** Mongrel 1.1.5 available at 0.0.0.0:120xx
** Writing PID file to log/mongrel.pid
*** glibc detected *** corrupted double-linked list: 0×08285630 ***

I spent hours trying to track down why this was happening but ended up asking my Technical Support folks that host the server for help.  After about a dozen emails and a number of days that came up with the following:

“It was because of bug in ruby code:

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/164574

We have applied patch and reinstalled ruby on the server. Please try to test your application now.

Best Regards,
Support-VS”

After this reinstall of ruby things have been working fine.

In my mind MySQL and Ruby should go together like Gin and Tonic.  But… not so fast if you happen to be using Vista.  I lost that better part of a day (night really) trying to get things working with Ruby and MySQL.   There are some incompatibilities between the platforms that are not obvious or well documented.  Ruby and or Ruby on Rails developers don’t tend to give a shit about developers using a Windows platform.  On a couple of occasions I’ve been told straight out to use a Mac or Linux.  I usually use Ubuntu, but in this case I cannot.

I’ll also mention as an aside that getting Ruby to run against MS SQL Server was easy: http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/3906

Here is what I can remember doing to get Ruby and MySQL to play nice on Vista:

1. Install MySQL version 5.0.* and ensure it is the 32 bit version.  I run 64 bit Vista and I found MySQL 64 bit has compatibility issues.  Also, MySQL 5.1.* does not work either.
2. Run “gem install mysql –include-dependencies” and choose option #1
3. Put the libmysql.dll from the installed MySQL directory into the <installed_dir>\ruby\bin directory
4. Add the MySQL bin directory to your PATH

I wasted hours figuring out the above steps.  If this help even one person I think this post is worth it.  Happy hunting.

Overall I’ve always liked Netbeans and have used it for many year with Java.  Last year I started using it with Ruby on Rails and now PHP.  I’ve tried Eclipse and similiar tools related to it but always found it to be a little too abstract.  I mean sure I could use it but my heart was never in it.

Netbeans I always find to be more linear in its presentation and execution of development tasks.  Plus you cannot beat the price.

I have an .htaccess file at my DocumentRoot to redirect request to subdirectories to a path of my dispatch.cgi of my Rails application.  However, I want to host a Wordpress blog in a subdirectory on the same server.  Obviously I do not want to existing .htaccess rules to apply to this subdirectory.

In my Wordpress subdirectory I add a .htaccess file with one rule: rewriteengine Off