The key to Cringely’s argument [...]]]> A couple of days ago I was sent a link to Robert Cringely’s latest treatise:  The second coming of Java – and to say I disagreed was a bit of an understatement. To me, it represents a fundamental flaw in his perception of developers, and more importantly the economics of software development.

The key to Cringely’s argument comes down to this:

When SSDs gain enough capacity there will be a shift from the Ruby world back to the Java world. Not for prototyping, because, well, it’s prototyping. But simply because the statement “Ruby is incredibly slow but I don’t care because my database is slower” will no longer be true.

What he’s missing here is the real reason people use frameworks like Rails; it’s not about it being Ruby, or being the latest cool thing – it’s about developer productivity. That’s it, and that’s all there is to it – Rails allows a developer to do more in less time. That’s one of the key reasons so many Java web developers jumped ship (though I can think of a few others), and what pushed Microsoft to invest so heavily in their MVC framework.

I could fully rehash the argument, but in what I consider to be one of Jeff Atwood’s best articles,  Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive, he covers a key point to my argument – developer time is vastly more expensive than hardware. Atwood’s take on the issue is clear:

Clearly, hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive. Whenever you’re provided an opportunity to leverage that imbalance, it would be incredibly foolish not to.

When there’s a choice between developer productivity, and spending money on hardware – the conclusion should be the same. It’s much cheaper to throw more hardware at a slower framework than it is to invest more developer time in a faster framework. For any non-trivial application, throwing more front-end servers at it will always be cheaper than slowing the development process down with a non-productivity-centric toolkit.

It’s simple economics; server hardware is getting faster and cheaper, developer time is only getting more expensive.

#embedly_twitter_14054401{background:url(http://a2.twimg.com/profile_background_images/71955358/DSCF0658.jpg) #C0DEED; padding:20px;} #embedly_twitter_14054401 p{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 0px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} #embedly_twitter_14054401 .embedly_tweet_content{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} #embedly_twitter_14054401 p span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:0px;height:40px; padding-bottom: 12px;} #embedly_twitter_14054401 p span.metadata span.author{line-height:15px;color:#999;font-size:14px} #embedly_twitter_14054401 p span.metadata span.author a{line-height:15px;font-size:20px;vertical-align:middle} #embedly_twitter_14054401 p [...]]]> Earlier today, a rather surprising tweet hit, being retweeted at least 80 times, including by a few rather influential people in the .NET world:

Needless to say, that’s not an announcement that anybody was expecting, but given the talk going on at the time – and the high-profile people talking about it, there wasn’t much reason to doubt. Announcing a product that has been dead for years is going open source would certainly be a strategy shift for Microsoft, but does it make any sense? Kevin Dente of Herding Code fame certainly thought that Microsoft had better things to release:

Shortly after the initial tweet, Doug Seven, the Director of Product Management, Visual Studio Tools & Languages, replied asking Roy Osherove (the original poster) to email him. Hmm, it’s starting to smell like something odd is going on. A couple of hours later, Doug set the story straight:

To which, Roy then tried to unset:

It’s worth pointing out that Roy Osherove currently has a full ten-times the followers that Doug Seven has, meaning his altered retweet was seen by more people (at least initially). For several hours word was going around, and accepted by a number of people who thought Microsoft was actually going to open the code to VB6 (including journalists who were too busy writing articles to do any fact checking) – all based on one person who made it all up.

Lesson here: be careful about what you re-tweet, it’s easy to endorse a lie as several people unwittingly did today (@blowdart summed it rather well).

This obviously isn’t all that helpful, nor did I find anything all that useful on Google – thankfully the issue is easy to solve. [...]]]> On my fresh Ubuntu 11.04 box running Ruby 1.9.2 instead of the standard Ruby 1.8, I ran into some undocumented errors while installing the mysql2 gem. Here’s what I was seeing:

$ gem install mysql2
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing mysql2:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

        /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1 extconf.rb
          <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require':
          no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
	from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require'
	from extconf.rb:2:in `<main>'

Gem files will remain installed in
  /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/mysql2-0.3.2 for inspection.
Results logged to
  /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/mysql2-0.3.2/ext/mysql2/gem_make.out

This obviously isn’t all that helpful, nor did I find anything all that useful on Google – thankfully the issue is easy to solve. All that’s needed is to ensure that the following packages are installed:

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev libmysql-ruby1.9 ruby1.9.1-dev

Then you can try installing the gem, it should work, hopefully

In a message on their Development Talk group entitled “consistency and ecosystem opportunities” – they make their position clear: we no longer need you. To demonstrate this, let me point out a couple quotes that deserve attention:

To make things easier, I used Platform Pro by Pagelines (a great platform IMHO) and so used their “deep [...]]]> While building a new website for a small ISV, I was asked to integrate a forum – should be simple I thought, I’ll just use WordPress as a CMS and bbPress. Simple? Not quite.

To make things easier, I used Platform Pro by Pagelines (a great platform IMHO) and so used their “deep integration” instructions (while they are intended for Platform Pro users, the steps are virtually identical for all other setups). While the setup went quite smoothly, it wasn’t until it came time to test user registrations that the issue came up: when a new user tried to register they would receive an error stating that “email is required,” even if they had entered a valid email address. This effectively made it impossible for users to register, and thus made the forum useless.

After a bit of research, it looks like there is a conflict between newer versions of WordPress (3.0+) and bbPress 1.0.2 (I’m not sure if older versions have the same issue, but I would assume so). The fix for this is actually quite simple: install a plugin. The plugin itself is quite simple – containing only around a half-dozen executable lines of code, and works around the issue with a simple hack.

Unfortunately, the plugin description is rather vague and required a fair bit of research to identify as the fix, and the official documentation makes no reference to the issue or that this plugin can be used as a workaround.

Overall, a simple workaround but a major issue if you don’t notice that it’s broke (as is quite easy to do).

If you are using Dreamhost’s PS offering (a managed [...]]]> I recently had an idea for a small web application, and seeing as I’ve not spent as much time as I’ve wanted to using Rails – I opted to build it the latest version of Rails. A decision that caused far more grief than I expected.

If you are using Dreamhost’s PS offering (a managed VPS for those that don’t know), the seemingly simple task of getting a Rails 3 application up and running is actually quite complex. The root cause of this is that Dreamhost’s OS image is based on Debian etch, which was released in April 2009 and has since been replaced; which means etch has become fairly outdated.

Here’s the process I used, and so far it seems to be working quite well:

Domain Setup:

When adding your domain to the Dreamhost panel, you’ll want to enable Passenger.

Once your application is uploaded to the server, you’ll be greeted with a particularly unhelpful error message (something like “uninitialized constant Bundler“) from Passenger (or perhaps just a 500 error page).

Server Updates:

This is where the work starts, and gets somewhat ugly. As a warning, it’s quite possible that you could damage your configuration doing this; though thankfully you can restore your server to a working state within a few minutes from the Dreamhost panel should something go wrong. You’ll also need to have an “admin user” for this task, as much of what needs to be done has to be done as root.

First step: Get your PS up to date; even after performing a restore on my server, there were a number of updates that are available to be installed. So let’s start off by getting those out of the way.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get -f install

Once you get past those three commands, the next step is to update SQLite to the latest version, as the version Dreamhost uses is quite old and won’t work with Rails 3.0 (well, to be accurate it won’t work with the latest version of sqlite3-ruby, which is the default database provider for Rails 3).

wget http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-autoconf-3070400.tar.gz
tar zxvf sqlite-autoconf-3070400.tar.gz
cd sqlite-autoconf-3070400
sudo ./configure --bindir=/usr/bin --libdir=/usr/lib
sudo make
sudo make install

If you don’t update SQLite you’ll get an error like this:

sudo gem install sqlite3
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing sqlite3:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb
checking for sqlite3.h... yes
checking for sqlite3_libversion_number() in -lsqlite3... yes
checking for rb_proc_arity()... no
checking for sqlite3_initialize()... no
sqlite3-ruby only supports sqlite3 versions 3.6.16+, please upgrade!
*** extconf.rb failed ***

or if you install the updated version, but don’t force it to /usr/lib you’ll get an error like this:

sudo gem install sqlite3
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing sqlite3:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb
checking for sqlite3.h... yes
checking for sqlite3_libversion_number() in -lsqlite3... no
sqlite3 is missing. Try 'port install sqlite3 +universal' or 'yum
install sqlite3-devel'
*** extconf.rb failed *** 

Once that is taken care of SQLite, the rest is easy.

sudo gem update

At this point if you visit your new Rails site, it should be working!

Notes:

1. I’ve not tested this extensively, and I’ve no idea if this breaks anything. All I can say for certain, if that all of my sites still work, but your mileage may vary. <Disclaimer />
2. I was a fairly early Dreamhost PS adopter, and part way through this process I reset my server to get it back to a clean state. After resetting, I noticed some differences with the behavior of apt-get (404s on update and upgrade are gone), so for other early adopters it may be necessary to perform a reset to get your servers configuration in-sync with the latest official setup.
3. I can’t say for a fact that this is completely necessary, though you’ll likely need to selectively update a few packages if you skip this step. Also, for me, gem was broken until I ran sudo apt-get -f install.
4. Special thanks to Matt for helping me get this working; troubleshooting the SQLite install was more than a little time consuming.