Rubify

>> local_variables 
# => ["_"] 

>> a = "Chardy" 
# => "Chardy" 

>> local_variables 
# => ["_", "a"] 

I always have a lot of energy at the beginning of a project and then at 80-90% completion I see myself lagging. I feel bored, annoyed, frustrated and the project would fall by the wayside. Some of the projects which remain unfinished and still keep going, in fact, I have no intention to finish it up. In my company, i am considered the youngest developer among, I should admit my incompetence and learn from my seniors. Getting started to learn to be good and effective in project development, i started managing myself in proper way. Not recently though and the reasons for that are a few ideas and tips I’ve had from a variety of sources so here is my quick tips taken from listing of tips on completing a project:

1. Imagine the Completed Product

Make it a prototype or image in your mind and hear the responses from your happy users in order to feel the good vibes. This will be good encouragement for ourself to start the finish end of the project. Prototyping a mock up in photoshop is also a good idea to get the image up to your mind. I feel strongly, this is important, though some of people think this is waste a time.

2. Don’t Procrastinate

Its difficult to do it than said it. Think about it as the times to relaxed which helped us produce the greatest creativity. Its when you know, feel and believe you should be getting on with the project but keep putting it off that you fall into a rut. You develop tension and end up resenting the whole product. If you feel tired or just need a break - then have one, but then get back to the task at hand. Take a break purpose is to run longer road.

3. Switch environment

One thing need to remember that coding is not the only thing in the project. It's involved planning, generating ideas, talking it through with your team. We need to be happy and create the happiness within your working environment. Try to create diversity of environment for your workspace, in term of people, desk, room, and also color. A change of environment whether it be your desk, monitor, office or even your IDE can have a massive impact on the way you feel and therefore your motivation. Remember, like what DHH said, Happy Programmer create good quality of project.

4. Talk to your Client.

Programmers can feel that if they find contact with other human beings is a frightening or disturbing process but there’s nothing that gets the passion moving by using the enthusiastic chat with the customer about the project. Getting better ideas and refresh the ideas again and again, thats the purpose.

5. Be Positive

No matter what, come rain or shine you have to remain positive. If you remain positive the others in your team will bounce off that and it’ll make them positive. Being surrounded by positive people will make you feel positive and give you a drive and sense of purpose in your whole outlook. Thinking positive means talking, walking, behaving, feeling, seeing, hearing nothing but positivity. A user criticizes you? Take it on the chin and sort it out. It will help the product and you grow. Getting stuck in a rut is all about losing sight of the final goal and losing faith in its fruition.

6. Release daily deadlines

Everyday, when you step into your office, do a short briefing and discussion with your team or within yourself, to get to list down todo list and achievement list within a day. Every line of code that programmer code, make sure it error free. The impact of buggy system can make the project testing phase is become longer than the project estimation itself.

7. Encourage Criticism

Many programmers don’t want their code to be criticized and if anyone does its put down to user or managerial stupidity. However, the more criticism you get the better the system. The better the system the happier the users. Don’t expect praise though, that programmer must act selflessly to take all suggestions, comment and critique then set about making the our skill as hard as a diamond stone. Yeah, this is the beginning of bullet proof concept. Be a bullet proof programmer.

8. Enjoy It!

If you don’t have any enthusiasm for a project from the outset you never will. If it fails to inspire you or get you into the groove then you’ll never make it a success. You have to have some connection or desire to do the project, even if only for a short time. If you’re in this position then maybe you’re in the wrong job?

9. Break the Project Up

If you look at the complexity of your project and feel daunted then its best to concentrate on the component parts. Complete them in a procedural manner and just keep it moving. Sometimes, its good to have your colleague to help you up for the module that not within your expertise. Learn from other people also one way to keep you up for the project motivation. Working in a team would be good, but you must make sure you understand and know every one strength and weaknesses for every scope of the project. Break it up to the right people to speed the project completion.

10. Last but not least, Reward Yourself.

However is it, we are still a being, a creature who live in this earth, we have habits, moods and learned behaviors. When you complete a certain task in the project reward yourself. Plan a reward for the completion of the project too - a new monitor, book, holiday, meal, mac book pro or anything you want but only give it to yourself at the completion of the project. That way you’ll be learning and training a habit of forward momentum and completion. Nothing will stop you once you’re habits are forward moving and active!

I would like to hear any comments, please advices and fill the gaps. There must be a room for improvement. Thanks.

For every mac users, i think these command you should know.

Action/Explanation	Keystroke
Eject CD on boot	Hold Mouse button down immediately after powering on
OS X Safe boot	Press Shift during startup
Start up in FireWire Target Disk mode	Press T during startup
Startup from a CD	Press C during startup
By passing primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume (CD, etc.)	Press Cmd-Opt-Shift-Delete during startup
Choose Startup disk before booting	Press Option during startup
Start up in Verbose mode	Press Cmd-V during startup
Start up in Single-User mode (command line)	Press Cmd-S during startup
Force Macbook screen reset	Press R during startup
Force OS X startup	Press X during startup

Mac App a Day will give away free software everyday, limited only to first 5000 copy, Just visit this site everyday, they started this site at 1st Dec 2006.

I have my copy of Mira Remote Control Application, its cool.

sudo is su -c
su is sudo -s

I can say its about preference. Some linux like Fedora, and Centos activate su command by default, hence ubuntu, debian and Mac OS X default to sudo command. For me if I need to execute 1 time command as root, I will use sudo, and if I need to perform many commands as root (admin) then i will use sudo -s (in this case I am a mac user).

How to activate su command on mac? Use your finder and point to Applications→Utilities→NetInfo Manager→Security→Authenticate...→Enable root user. Thats all. But its advisable to use sudo command on mac os x.

I really miss tortoise svn on Windows XP. Since i use Mac, i gotta get used to it with terminal. I source out some subversion client and plugin, no luck for it. Ok, lets run through what i found out. First of all to get subversion running on your mac, you need to install it first. Get the installation from Subversion Mac OS X or get the latest version of the source code and then compile it yourself (this link). Set the path in your .profile or .bash_profile:

# svn command located at /usr/local/bin/svn, so set the path in your profile:

$ vi ~/.profile
$ export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"

Next, if you not comfortable with command line, below is the subversion clients availabe for mac:

• SCPlugin - Integration with Mac OS X Finder. Download .dmg file here.

Assemble of tortoise svn but it sometime crash my Finder. Not recommended for Intel Mac. Just refer to this link for the binary and source (not the official site, but it work). After getting the binary, copy SCFinderPlugin.plugin to ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items/ and relauch your finder by ⌘⌥⎋ choose Finder and relaunch. The subversion contextual menu (with right click) will show up.

• svnX - Recommended

A cool GUI client for Mac OS X. Even work with Tiger and Mac Intel. You need to put a little effort to understand how it work to foster your coding. I am using this, in fact.

• SmartSVN - Recommended (Commercial - US$69)
• rapidSVN - Multi-platform Subversion GUI

Similarly to svnX with a simple interface and tree directory structure.

• ZigVersion - Not recommended. Still early phase of build. Maybe will mature in future.

Site which help you to understand more about subversion in mac os x? Click here.

Note for rails developer: Assume you have read above article link, and have set up your own svn for your rails application. Few things you need to note down for rails application below: (do these!)

$ cd ~
$ svn checkout svn://(your svn server)/(your rails application directory)
$ cd ~/(your rails application directory)

$ svn remove log/*
$ svn commit -m 'remove logs directory in the version control'
$ svn propset svn:ignore "*.log" log/
$ svn update log/  
$ svn commit -m 'in the repository also log files either'
$ svn move config/database.yml config/database.example
$ svn commit -m 'rename database.yml to database.example'
$ svn propset svn:ignore "database.yml" config/
$ svn update config/
$ svn commit -m 'ignoring any commit to database.yml'

In the case of you need to get the source from svn without .svn folder (without svn linkage), do:

$ cd ~/(your svn working directory)
$ find . -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;

# OR #

$ cd ~/(your svn working directory)
$ svn export svn://(your svn server location)/(your application directory) 

Both way serve some purpose. Try to find out yourself whats the hidden purpose.

Cheer!

Reference:

• http://funkatron.com/wp/archives/os-x/binary-build-of-scplugin
• http://mac.brajeshwar.com/2006/08/svn-plugin-for-finder/

I encountered a problem when i want to make new repository from earlier svn directory. I wanted to delete all .svn folderon my mac. Previously when i was using Windoze, i was pampered by Tortoise SVN. On mac (UNIX) everything is using command line. Use the following code to solve this problem:

$ find . -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;

Above script need to be executed inside the root working directory of svn coding. And tested on other platform of UNIX/Linux, it works. Also refer to this article, but its only work on linux (ubuntu), not mac. Strange. Maybe my way is better one ;p

Installing Ruby on Rails development platform, its a long process, which we need to do with our terminal, from download the source files itself to the installation part. Make it simple. Here, I just provided the installation script for Mac Intel platform since i am using it ;p and it proven. Just run a shell script file and run the whole installation. Download the file below:

Download Mac Intel Script Here

The Installation including:

• Ruby 1.8.4
• Rails Edge
• Gems
• FastCGI
• Lighttpd
• Image Magick (also as RMagick gem)

Those are the basic installation of so-called rails ready platform. For some cases you need to install your own gem by yourself.

After download rails-intel.tar.gz, just run the command:

$ tar zxf rails-intel.tar.gz

Then open up the script file to get better understanding how it work and all the installation pointing to /usr/local (you can change it, just change the PREFIX), Next, its better to set the path correctly for your sheel environment, normally the file to set will be .profile or .bash_login under your home folder:

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/bin"
export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"
export MANPATH="/usr/local/man:$MANPATH"

Before you run the script, just better create a directory 'src' inside your home folder and run the script from '~/src/' as the starting point. Next, run the script:

$ sudo ./rails-intel.sh

Wait for the installation finishing, the last piece of installation process running is mysql installation. After mysql installation done, viola.. run the script below for mysql gem

# TODO Do this after MySQL is installed
# NOTE: You may have to do "sudo gcc_select 3.3" first.
sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

Done!

Today i will discuss about Lighttpd installation. I am making few assumptions:

• Your machine running on Linux or Unix platform, infact, there is no distribution of lighty in Windows platform.
• Localhost as your IP and no other services running on port 80.
• No RPM please. This guide support for all UNIX/Linux platform.
• Ruby installed and Rails installed.

Below are the step by step installation:

Run your terminal, through ssh or desktop also applicable ;p Firstly, get the distribution first.

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.8.tar.gz
tar zxvf lighttpd-1.4.8.tar.gz
cd lighttpd-1.4.8

Make sure you put all your installation in "/usr/local/src", no doubt, just for tidy file management purposes. If you running on Mac OS X, there is no "wget" command, use below:

curl -O http://www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.8.tar.gz
tar zxvf lighttpd-1.4.8.tar.gz
cd lighttpd-1.4.8

Next, start to configure:

./configure
make 
sudo make install

Assume lighttpd already successful installed here.

Start configure the config file for running rails application and php. Below just the location where i put my setting file.

• Lighty's config file at /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
• Lighty's runtime pid file at /var/run/lighttpd.pid
• Lighty's access logs written to /var/log/lighttpd/access_log
• Lighty's error logs written to /var/log/lighttpd/error_log
• Rails application will be deployed to home_dir/rails_application_folder
• PHP aplication will be deployed to home_dir/public_html

In Linux, home_dir = /home and Mac OS X, home_dir = /Users

We will use virtual host for every application deployed. Before, i have created user chardy with configuration as apache group (just let it be under apache group, there is a purpose on that)

su -
useradd -g apache -G apache chardy
passwd chardy
su - chardy
mkdir public_html
rails depot

We need to install PHP first in order to run PHP application. Just follow the steps:

su -
cd /usr/local/src/
wget http://sg2.php.net/get/php-5.1.1.tar.gz/from/sg.php.net/mirror
tar zxvf php-5.1.1.tar.gz
cd php-5.1.1
./configure --enable-fastcgi \
 --enable-force-cgi-redirect
make
make install

Tips: for most common support php module, do below configuration.

./configure --prefix=/usr --bindir=/usr/bin --sbindir=/usr/sbin --sysconfdir=/etc --datadir=/usr/share 
--includedir=/usr/include --libdir=/usr/lib --libexecdir=/usr/libexec --localstatedir=/var 
--sharedstatedir=/usr/com --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --with-libdir=lib 
--with-config-file-path=/etc --with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php.d --enable-force-cgi-redirect --disable-debug 
--enable-pic --disable-rpath --enable-inline-optimization --with-bz2 --with-db4=/usr --with-exec-dir=/usr/bin 
--with-freetype-dir=/usr --with-png-dir=/usr --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-gettext --with-gmp --with-iconv 
--with-jpeg-dir=/usr --with-openssl --with-png --with-expat-dir=/usr --with-pcre-regex --with-zlib 
--with-layout=GNU --enable-bcmath --enable-exif --enable-ftp --enable-magic-quotes --disable-safe-mode 
--enable-sockets --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --enable-track-vars --enable-trans-sid --enable-yp --enable-wddx 
--with-pear=/usr/share/pear --with-kerberos --enable-ucd-snmp-hack --enable-memory-limit --enable-shmop 
--enable-calendar --enable-dbx --enable-dio --enable-soap --with-mime-magic=/etc/httpd/conf/magic --without-sqlite 
--with-libxml-dir=/usr --with-xml --with-mysql --with-gd --with-dom --with-dom-exslt --enable-fastcgi 
--enable-force-cgi-redirect

To test PHP5 whether is running correctly:

php -v
PHP 5.1.1 (cgi-fcgi) (built: Jan  3 2006 23:48:02)
Copyright (c) 1997-2005 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2005 Zend Technologies

It will show up PHP 5.1.1 (cgi-fcgi). Next, configure your lighttpd.conf

su -
mkdir /etc/lighttpd/
cd /usr/local/src/lighttpd-1.4.8
cp doc/lighttpd.conf /etc/lighttpd/
vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Edit the lighttpd.conf to satisfy few lines below first:

server.modules = ("mod_rewrite", "mod_accesslog", "mod_fastcgi")
server.port = 80
server.bind = "localhost"
# server.username = "apache" 
# server.groupname = "apache"
# server username and groupname is not necessary, if not set, all will ignored
server.pid-file = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/access_log"
server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/error_log"
server.indexfiles = ( "index.html" )
url.rewrite = ( "^/$" => "index.html", "^([^.]+)$" => "$1.html" )
server.document-root = "/Library/Rails/" + var.appname + "/current/public"
server.error-handler-404 = "/dispatch.fcgi"

Below is the sample configuration to be added for rails configuration:

#### depot.spiragram.com ####

$HTTP["host"] =~ "depot.spiragram.com" {

  server.document-root     = "/home/chardy/depot/public/"
  server.errorlog          = "/home/chardy/log/lighttpd_error.log"
  accesslog.filename       = "/home/chardy/log/lighttpd_access.log"

  server.error-handler-404 = "/dispatch.fcgi"
  server.error-handler-500 = "/500.html"

  fastcgi.server           = ( ".fcgi" =>
                               ("depot.spiragram.com" =>
                                 ( "socket"            => "/tmp/lighttpd-fcgi.socket",
                                   "bin-path"          => "/home/chardy/depot/public/dispatch.fcgi",
                                   "bin-environment"   => ("RAILS_ENV" => "production"),
                                   "min-procs"         => 1,
                                   "max-procs"         => 5,
                                   "idle-timeout"      => 120				
                                 )
                               )
                             )

}

## end subdomain entries

For PHP configuration below:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "phpsite.spiragram.com" {

  server.document-root  = "/home/chardy/public_html/"
  server.errorlog       = "/home/chardy/log/lighttpd_error.log"
  accesslog.filename    = "/home/chardy/log/lighttpd_access.log"
  server.indexfiles     = ( "index.php", "index.html" )

  fastcgi.server        = (".php" => (("bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php",
               "socket" => "/tmp/phpsite.socket",
               "max-procs" => 1,
               "bin-environment" => ("PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "1",
                                     "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "5000"
                                     ),
               "bin-copy-environment" => ("PATH", "SHELL", "USER" ),
               "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable"
              ))
  )
}

Run lighttpd server by typing

lighttpd -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

To stop lighttpd server

killall lighttpd

lazy way ;p

To check your installation is running or not, just point it to below url (example):

http://depot.spiragram.com - rails application

http://phpsite.spiragram.com/index.php - php application. To test php application, just create th index.php

su - chardy
cd public_html
echo '' > index.php

You can see rails page and php info page after you access site provided according to your configuration of v-host.

Moving towards New Year, I finally updated my blog with mephisto. My blog was down last few days, some errors happen to my typo engine, don't be bothered to fix it, i just moved it to mephisto engine. Now porting my existing article over and thinking for New Year Resolution. Happy Holiday!