Month: April 2008 (Page 2 of 3)

Technology presents new challenges in raising well rounded kids. I think technology has always been challenging for parents even back to my grandparents days. Kids will always want to do the new and exciting things rather than what they are supposed to be doing and what is good for them. Homework and chores are always challenged by technology.

Horses and books got my grandpa in trouble. My Dad’s generation was the first to have cars. When I was growing up, my parents had to deal with TV and early video games. Now my wife and I are dealing with computers, the internet, and cell phones.

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Why doesn’t Mac OS have a standard package manager?

This was final thought Sunday night as I flipped my MacBook shut and stumbled off to bed. I finally got around to configuring my MacBook as my primary development machine this weekend. It’s been 3-4 months since I got my MacBook and I’ve since converted the two other PC’s in my house into Linux machine (Debian and Ubuntu). With that conversion mostly complete it was time to get cracking on making my MacBook into the web development powerhouse for which it was intended. OK, before anyone says anything – it took me 3 months because I had a Lego Star Wars addiction – Don’t judge me!

So after installing Xcode, MacPorts and then Ruby, rubygems and postgresql – I then reconfigured my Eclipse to use the port installed version of Ruby and gems. Which is when I realized that the pre-installed Ruby and gems was not in any way connected to the Mac port installed version. Well, that’s inefficient – I thought.
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Why doesn’t macports just link into what is already installed and go from there? In fact why isn’t macports pre-installed so developers can hit the ground running?

I still think Mac OS is a great platform for development – particularly web apps – but if it came with an integrated package manager it would be awesome.

Upon arriving to work this morning, sitting in my Inbox was the following email from a one Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools:

Hi there,

I hope this email finds you well.

It gives me great pleasure to inform you that IndexTools has positively agreed to be acquired by Yahoo! today. We firmly believe that our technology platform combined with Yahoo!’s extensive offering of on-line marketing services will provide our partners and clients with an unsurpassed marketing tool set.

So how does this affect you?

We would ask you to give us the opportunity to present this in more detail on Tuesday 15th April 2008. In the meantime, it is very much business as usual! Please be assured that, for the time being, our services will continue as normal and there will be no disruptions to your account.

We appreciate that you’ll have many questions and we look forward to providing you with answers to these early next week.

Until then, have a good week and look forward to speaking to you soon.

Kind regards

Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools

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As the company Rails evangelist one of my challenges has been working out a consistent and understandable deployment strategy. One of the biggest challenges is that I may not have access to the root user acct. Additionally we are generally required to stay within the Etch distro, going with Lenny (testing) requires special approval. A final challenge is that compilers are not allowed on the production server.

The “Ruby gem problem” is the result of not having access to the root user acct. On development servers Ruby gems are easily managed using the root acct with the “gem” command. But without root on the production server, how do get our gems installed? Well, you might think we can just request the owner of the root acct to install gems, but not so fast – the gem command does not place files in accordance with the Linux FHS (see http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html). And furthermore, the manager of the server has no interest in keeping track of Ruby gems and managing them seperately. If it’s not related to “apt”, you’ve got some explaining to do. Continue reading

The visitor pattern from the GoF is frequently overlooked by programmers who are used to object oriented programming. However, in some cases, it is significantly cleaner and easier to use than an overridden function. Unfortunately, it’s easier to misuse as well, and, when it is used poorly, it can be a real mess.

I was going to tell you about my static analysis project and how I’m using the visitor pattern there. Then I took a glance at the wikipedia article on the visitor pattern. It’s clearly written by a OOP fanatic who’s never seen the alternatives, so I’m going to contrast my implementation of visitor with the one there.

The contrast is useful because wikipedia’s implementation is written using object oriented principles. Part of my goal with this post is to explain about OO alternatives. My implementation is written using compile time polymorphism rather than runtime polymorphism. As we’ll see, this is significantly prettier and more flexible than runtime polymorphism. Continue reading