First Mac

I ended up getting the 2.53Ghz, with a 320GB HDD and 4GB of RAM.  I also purchased a wired keyboard with the number pad and a magic mouse.  The mouse is pretty good, like magic.  So far it’s been very easy to set up and use.

Now that I have the Mac I hope to take a little time to get to know the platform, try out some Obj-C, PyCocoa, and maybe try my hand at an iPhone app.  I’m very curious to see where this differs from my Linux platform.

If you want the play by play, here’s the Whrrl story to document my experience.

The company that makes the commercial version of WINE that allows you to install windows apps natively on mac or linux is giving their product away for free for 24 hours.  Here’s an article explaining it at length:

And here is the site to get the serial # and product.

So what else am I doing?  Well, I haven’t been blogging, that’s for sure.  I’ve been working on WPF at work and founding out there are some really cool things about it, and then there are a bunch of things it really lacks.  I hope to qualify that statement with some upcoming posts.

I also took a vacation – an actual road trip to a far away land (AZ) to see some family.

I honestly didn’t take the time to go and find out how to install 32-bit compatibility binaries. And of course I expect you, Dear Reader, to understand why.  I’m a developer and therefore I’m lazy.  If I can add a few lines to a shell script that will install the software I want, that’s an easy and known quantity.  It will probably take me a few minutes to write the script and a few more to run the script.

To install the 32-bit binaries, use the following command:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

So what do I really think of the RM-Install product?  It’s a good idea if you’re running on a 32-bit distro and need a Rails development environment quickly.  I’m sure there are many developers not using dual core 64-bit processors these days, I just don’t know any.   This is really more on par to what Instant Rails is for the Windows guys for a complete environment than the BitNami product is this time.

Congrats to FiveRuns for making it easier to start coding in Rails.

I tried the development install and it was very easy to click next a few times and let it run. The very first thing I tried doing was updating the gems with “sudo gem update”. It failed giving me an error about not finding a file in require for some ELFClass. I’d never seen that before when updating gems, so I’m inclined to think that it may be something from within the RM-Install package.

So at the end of my first experience with the RM-Install stack, I think it’s a better solution to just create your own shell script for installing your Ruby/Rails environment.

So far I can’t get the datamapper gem to install on either XP or Ubuntu.  It gives me the same compilation errors on either platform.  I realize the problem is that I’m missing some software I need to build, but it still seems like a hassle.  Active record “just works”.

I installed Sinatra via RubyGems:
gem install sinatra -y

After that I created a simple file following the example:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
"Now we're cooking with gas"
end

But much to my dismay, nothing happened when running this on my windows box. I instantly searched Google for “Sinatra on windows” and found the Google Group for Sinatra and a post explaining that Sinatra doesn’t run on Windows yet. As I read into the thread, I found someone had some suggestions for making it work.

John Bledsoe had the following suggestions:

My humble suggestion would be to remove the FileUtils#touch from
Sinatra::Server#tail and update Environment#prepare_loggers to
something like:

def prepare_loggers(logger = nil)
if logger.nil?
FileUtils.touch(Options.log_file)
logger = Logger.new(open(Options.log_file, 'w')
end
end

Making these changes allowed Sinatra to run, but it wouldn’t server the page. Instead it returned an error:

Fri Nov 09 16:26:26 -0800 2007: ERROR: undefined method `info’ for nil:NilClass

I made a post to the group and was promptly replied to! The general advice given is that it is a rapidly emerging framework undergoing a lot of changes and to check back soon.

More on testing Sinatra in Linux coming soon….

Before I could get a chance to work on my Slice, a friend asked me to set up a Slice for multi-site hosting.  This week has been a crash course in Linux software installation and configuration.  The speed of the server connection is excellent.  It doesn’t really take long to download or install anything.   I started out with an Ubuntu 6.06 OS and started working from there.  My first attempt failed miserably (building Apache from source proved more difficult and less reliable than just using the apt-get package) and that’s where this review really takes shape.

I had questions and needed answers.  I checked out the wiki and didn’t find what I needed so I went to the chatroom.  Jason and Matt hang out there a lot and they are extremely professional and courteous.  Even when I had what seemed to be silly questions, they were right there to answer it or point me in the right direction.  I was shocked.  This is the first time where I feel like I’m actually getting support from a hosting company.  I’ve had quite a few hosts in the last 8 years, and most of them had support that ranged from the mediocre to the terrible.

This was my first week of dealing with SliceHost, but so far I am very impressed.  If you need a Linux VPS, I would urge you to at least try them out for a week or two.

With Windows, you typically download a software package that has a graphical installer.  You click next a few times and installs.  I thought this was smooth and easy.

Now all day yesterday while installing software on Ubuntu, I was using apt-get.  Holy cow!  apt-get absolutely rocks!  With one command I can have it find, download, and install software.  Windows really needs an apt-get type of application.

The part that burns me the most is Microsoft is huge!  They have so many developers and resources, so why is it that their OS takes 551 MB to sit idle and won’t see more than 2.8 GB of ram?  This is what the World’s Greatest software company has to offer?

As I move on into learning more about Ruby and Mono using the Ubuntu partition, I will still need the XP partition to use my RealFlight G3.5 R/C simulator and have a stable installation of Visual Studio 2005. I can not go cold turkey yet! (And as bad as their OS may be, their tools are very good.)
So far I have completed the Ubuntu partition. It took me about 3-4 hours total to install, update, and add all of the software I wanted or needed. I have installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Ruby, Java, Eclipse, MonoDevelop, Apache, PHP, MySQL 5, OpenOffice, and PHPMyAdmin.

As an interesting observation, I have had some trouble with this hardware accepting 2GB of ram and the onboard NIC operating at the right speed when using Vista and XP. I have not seen the same problems while running linux.