Category: Brain Dumps

Permanent Damage, a retrospective

It’s been over a year and a half since I left my previous full-time job and I still don’t have a new one.

It’s not that I don’t have the skills needed to be employed; it’s actually the opposite: even though I’m not actively looking for a job, people still come to me asking if I could work for them. My part time teaching and Rails “consultancy” gigs fall under this (i.e. I never “applied” for them formally), and I’m getting emails requesting for interviews from local companies once in a while.

The reason I’m not taking any full-time job offers is different:

It’s been over a year and a half since I left my previous full-time job and I still haven’t fully recovered from burnout. I’m not confident that I’d be able to do software development “grunt-work” at peak performance for more than a few weeks on end.

After a year’s hiatus, I guess it’s safe to say that I’ve suffered permanent damage from my burnout.

—

Looking back, the main turning point of my career was on January 2006.

Continue reading “Permanent Damage, a retrospective”

Rails FTW with Rails 3.0.1 and mysql2 adapter now up

yayifications!

With mysql2 now working on Windows here’s a small update to my hacked together Rails on Windows installer. I also took the opportunity to update the Rails to 3.0.1.

Also replaced the libmysql.dll with the one from MariaDB. That should probably be enough to keep the Oracle lawyers at bay…

Download Rails For (the) Windows v0.2

latest version is v0.4. grab it here

Rails FTW, now with MySQL support!

One of the questions raised during the last Rails training course I held was “Can Ruby on Rails work with XAMPP?”

With this new version of Rails FTW, the answer to that question is YES.

installer

Download Rails For (the) Windows v0.1

latest version is v0.4. grab it here

OK, so this version doesn’t install mod_rails on XAMPP, but it does allow you to get around the headaches involved in making Rails 3 work with MySQL on Windows.

Here’s a basic rundown of the changes from the last installer:

  • The mysql2 gem still doesn’t work for Windows so I included the old mysql gem instead.
  • Like what I did with SQLite in the previous installer, I’ve included the DLL for MySQL (libmysql.dll) in the bin folder. MySQL 5.1 doesn’t work with the mysql gem so I used the DLL file from the latest “no install” package for MySQL 5.0 (mysql-noinstall-5.0.91-win32.zip).
    I know, Oracle will probably sic their lawyers against us if they catch wind of this project. Hopefully the MariaDB or SkySQL guys would give us an open replacement DLL file in the future.
  • I’ve modified the Railties gem to replace instances of mysql2 to mysql (e.g. database.yml, Gemfile).
  • Minor change: add a line to config to remove log coloring (useless in Windows)
  • Minor change: in the installer, the Add to PATH option is checked by default
  • Minor change: remove gems from gem cache to reduce installer size (a facepalm moment -_-)

Rundown of the quick blog app demo using this installer below the cut.
Continue reading “Rails FTW, now with MySQL support!”

Advanced Math and Software Development

laplace expansion

Back in college, we Computer Science guys had the distinction of having the second highest number of Math related classes in the university (BS Math obviously comes first). Given what I said about college education in a recent post, you might think that I would’ve preferred if the curriculum didn’t have those classes, and instead added classes on web development and design patterns.

I actually think otherwise.
Continue reading “Advanced Math and Software Development”