Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Deja Rue - I know again that I will regret this

Chatting with a colleague about parenting. He says, "You know how you're always talking about how much you like your kids? Well, I've gotten to that point!" "Oh," says another colleague, "your kids are finally interesting?" "Yes, " responds the first, "they're old enough to be interesting now. My wife and I aren't talking about orphanages so much any more."

I chime in, "I think you're up to at least 150, maybe 200."

My colleague is puzzled and it appears on his face.

"Thousand dollars in psychotherapy bills to help your kids recover" I clarify.

Comprehension dawns on the first as the second says, "Oh, sure, as in 'I just ruined the kid for month with that!'"

"Yes, " I agree, "we call that 'deja rue', as in 'Once again, I know that I'll regret this.'"

Friday, January 07, 2011

Engineering Prioritization

Welcome to the Engineering Department.

So we can respond to your request, please let us know the priority of the request:

  • High
  • Higher
  • Urgently High
  • Wicked Urgently High
  • Higher Than That
  • Critically Wickedly Urgently Higher
  • I'm the CEO
Thank you

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Bundler Install issue with Nokigiri on OS/X

I finally have an opportunity to move into the Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0 world having spent some time in earlier versions while supporting our main applications. Let's note that I know some other folks who are in a similar situation, which may have been predicated by our moving from OS/X 10.5 Leopard to 10.6 Snow Leopard by using the automatic migration rather than by manually re-installing all of our libraries, tools and applications. I had to do some rebuilding and patching just to get my Snow Leopard system up and running. However, this may be an hold-over from that process.

I used RVM to keep my Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.9.2 versions playing nicely. After installing Ruby 1.9.2 (wicked easy), I downloaded Rails 3.0.3, got the code base and ran 'bundler install' to install all the needed gems.

The process failed while building nokogiri. The error was:

libiconv is missing. please visit http://nokogiri.org/tutorials/installing_nokogiri.html for help with installing dependencies.

Popping over to the supplied URL showed that I probably needed the libxml2 and libxslt libraries. I didn't think so because I was sure nokogiri was working in my other ruby environment, but nonetheless I ran:
sudo port install libxml2 libxsl
After doing so, I tried the bundle install again only to have the same error.

Now I was looking at a crisis. One colleague who has successfully navigated this waterway recommended that I rely on homebrew for package management. However, I've used port and fink, plus homebrew doesn't link to system directories by default, so I knew there would be some pain. I briefly considered uninstalling port and moving entirely to homebrew, but I have nearly 200 installed packages. Didn't want to go there.

Simultaneously, I was working in another terminal when I realized that my subversion was no longer working. It was complaining about a newly installed libiconv, which was installed with the libxml2. This actually was a good thing.

Now cutting to the chase: The Berekly DB needed to be updated in order to make all these things work. So I uninstalled Berekly DB, which involved uninstalling apr-util, python26, subversion, serf, and gone-doc-utils (using port for all of this). Then I did a 'port clean ' on all those packages and reinstalled everything.

Subversion now worked, but the bundle install still failed. Confident that the problem lay elsewhere, I cast around and found Chris Roos' post on Libxml2 Problems when Installing Nokogiri.

The solution I chose was to do a universal install of the libxml and libxlst libraries with

  $ sudo port upgrade --enforce-variants libxml2 +universal
 $ sudo port upgrade libxslt +universal
The bundle install worked after this, Subversion still works and I'm back in business.