Posted by Deirdre
Tue, 14 Nov 2006 22:54:00 GMT
If you've tried to install the postgres ruby gem like so:
sudo gem install postgres -- --with-pgsql-include-dir=/usr/local/pgsql/include --with-pgsql-lib-dir=/usr/local/pgsql/lib
...and you get the error:
checking for PQsetdbLogin() in -lpq... no
Could not find PostgreSQL libraries: Makefile not created
* extconf.rb failed *
...then it's possible you didn't compile postgres with the --with-openssl option. Doing so made everything work perfectly.
Posted in Development | Tags macbookpro, postgres, rubyonrails | no comments
Posted by Deirdre
Mon, 13 Nov 2006 21:56:00 GMT
I've got a new Mac, a Mac Book Pro. As this came at the end of a very long, exhausting week, I'm glad it's done.
Unfortunately, I bought it because I needed it. Saturday afternoon, after my mother was sprung from the hospital, I discovered that my Mac wasn't charging. Fortunately, it ran off batteries fine (though it had no charge at the time). Several long visits to the Mac store and some plastic later, and I had a new Mac with everything migrated.
Now it's time to send the old baby off to be repaired and enjoy the speed of the new baby.
Posted in Development | Tags Macintosh | no comments
Posted by deirdre
Mon, 05 Dec 2005 16:06:18 GMT
So, this morning I did an 'svn up' on a project before I went to breakfast, then went off onto the other side of the hotel property to do some work and schmooze.
Later, I got this error:
$ svn up
svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/reposname/!svn/vcc/default'
svn: REPORT of '/svn/reposname/!svn/vcc/default': 400 Bad Request (http://domain.com)
See, I hadn't changed anything, and svn up on some other domains worked -- which made the problem significantly harder to debug, actually.
Ultimately, the problem was simply a blocked port. Thanks to Daniel for figuring it out while I still had some hair remaining.
Posted in Development | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by deirdre
Wed, 19 Oct 2005 01:05:27 GMT
If you are an un- or under-employed engineer, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Chad Fowler's book My Job Went To India. If nothing else, it will shine some light into a different culture and different values.
However, what might be of more interest in the short-term could be this article from Kevin Barnes.
Fascinating.
Posted in Development | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by deirdre
Mon, 10 Oct 2005 10:53:32 GMT
A week or so ago, I was trying to explain to someone (who is not a programmer) what the difference in object inheritance between Ruby and Java is. I explained duck typing, but the person still wasn't getting at what I meant.
I blurted out something different. "Well, Java is aristocratic, and Ruby is democratic." I went on to explain that Java, in order to determine what you're capable of depends on what your parent was capable of, plus those special methods that make you you and not your parent. It doesn't matter if some other kid can do the exact same thing (with the exact same code), if it doesn't have your parent, Java will think it can't do it. Thus, aristocratic, because capability is determined by inheritance.
In Ruby, all you ask is "can you do this?" by invoking the responds_to? method. If it does, you're golden. Thus, Ruby is a meritocracy, which doesn't, strictly speaking, equate to democracy.
While this may not seem like a big deal, I should point out that it can be. For example, for my first large C++ project, we used zero class libraries from other vendors because none were ready yet. However, when they started coming out, it would have required huge chunks of re-coding to incorporate into another library because the inheritance would have changed.
At the time, when working with Windows coders as a Mac developer, I was keenly aware of how different the object hierarchies were: on Windows, everything was a subclass of window: text panes, buttons, everything. On the Mac, none of the other visual elements were subclasses of windows.
So, in other words, if we'd moved our custom framework into another company's, such as PowerPlant, we'd have had to do a lot of code changes -- probably more than if we'd used a C library -- because we'd have to have had everything inherited from the right classes to buy into the framework's inheritance model.
Had we been using Ruby (which didn't exist at the time), we might have been able to do this in small chunks rather than all at once -- because Ruby cares about what you can do, not who your parents were.
One of the geniuses of Sun was not the language per se, but the idea of releasing frameworks that helped standardize the use of the language. There's now a lot of competing frameworks, though, so that didn't last long.
On a completely different note, a couple of weeks ago, we went out to dinner with our friends. One of the people made a comment about Java being slow doing something or other. The person across the table, who works for Sun, commented, "You do realize that Java is a language invented by a hardware vendor...."
Posted in Development, Ruby on Rails | 3 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by deirdre
Mon, 03 Oct 2005 15:47:16 GMT
As some of you know, I worked for Be briefly, so I feel some ownership in this even though the BeBoxen were a thing of the past when I was there.
Here's the story.
Posted in Development, In Memoriam | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by deirdre
Tue, 20 Sep 2005 01:31:40 GMT
Over the weekend, I attended the WOW design conference. My head is still threatening to explode from being overpacked with information.
When I signed up for the conference, I recognized the names, but (being somewhat bad with names) didn't realize how cool the instructors would really be. I haven't even begun to finish transcribing all my notes.
One thing I realized, I'd fallen back into a bad habit of using occasional presentational css class names. I won't do that again. Really.
I'd also had a site that vexed me, but, with a deadline, I used a single table to work around a browser rendering issue. Or, better description, what seemed at the time to be a browser rendering issue.
When I heard Andy Clarke talk about floats, I realized what I'd probably done wrong. I opened up my project, edited two files, and voila, the entire site was fixed in all the browsers I had on that machine, including the quirky old IE 5.2.3 Mac.
I'm working on some other tests before uploading the changed site, but that was a huge success.
I don't want to leave Molly or Aaron out, I'm just quite literally inarticulate right now. When I find the brain unpacking device, I'll post more. I hope.
::stumbles about::
It's around here somewhere, isn't it?
In the meantime, Craig Cook has posted a more complete review.
Posted in Notes, css, Development | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by deirdre
Tue, 30 Aug 2005 23:06:53 GMT
Today was my last day at Quova. I really think the company is doing some interesting and important work, it's just that where I needed to be was going one direction, and what they needed was going another.
It all kind of crystallized when I went to BarCamp and realized I was missing a lot of that je ne sais quoi that caused me to move up to the bay area in 1999. It's not that Quova's not that kind of place for other people, though.
And so I left what a coworker jokingly called "the cube of infinite sorrow," (it wasn't personal, it was a 4-person cube) off for a new and uncharted land. I'll miss the inflatable T-Rex mascot (named Fluffy).
I thought I'd mention a few things about Quova. What they do: network geography, specifically, where IP networks are located in the world. While that might seem simple, there's an awful lot of interesting wrinkles.
Of all the CEOs I've ever worked for, none have I respected more than Marie Alexander. She's got that insight into the tech industry, plus a southern charm that I admire.
And where else have you worked where the HR director baked brownies? Every week? And made oatmeal? Thank you Lynda for all those extra details that keeps the place humming.
Mood: Mostly townsville (which will mean something to those of you who've seen the defcon scale).
Posted in Notes, Development | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by deirdre
Sun, 21 Aug 2005 12:43:31 GMT
I was asked a few weeks ago how many languages I've been paid to develop in during my thirty years as a software engineer and developer. At the time, I came up with twenty-five on the spot, so I'm obviously missing a few here and there.
I've excluded database languages (e.g. dBase II) and language dialects, but here's the list, in approximate chronological order:
- Basic (and not that visual kind)
- Fortran
- PL/1
- Assembly
- Pascal
- Ratfor (which, while a preprocessor for Fortran, is much more Algol/Pascal-like than Fortran like, thus listed separately)
- Forth
- Lisp
- Ada
- C
- Hypercard
- Smalltalk
- C++
- Prolog
- Applescript
- awk
- sed
- Perl
- bash
- Objective-C
- Javascript
- Python
- PHP
- tcl
- Java
Posted in Notes, Development | 4 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by deirdre
Tue, 16 Aug 2005 22:31:00 GMT
Thursday night, I went to the first meeting of the Silicon Valley Cocoa Heads, which was a lot of fun. Unusual for a first meeting, there were 24 people there, including long-time Mac writer Scott Knaster. He showed off his latest book, and people introduced themselves and talked about their current projects.
Of those there, almost half either currently worked for Apple or had worked for Apple. I don't suppose that's surprising, it's just that BaNG! rarely got that sort of a crowd.
Anyhow, great fun.
Updated to add: Ah, found my notes. Knaster talked about his experience working on the Longhorn project, during which time he spoke with approximately a thousand Microsoft engineers, each of whom had a different view of what Longhorn was going to entail. When it was pointed out that Longhorn still hadn't shipped and that Microsoft hadn't had a major OS release in some time, Knaster quipped: "Microsoft has become the company that has forgotten how to ship software."
Posted in Reviews, Development | no comments | no trackbacks
