I picked up a Raspberry Pi some months back without much of a need for it. Most of my electronics stuff is bought without a use, so I guess it's no surprise I jumped on the bandwagon. After running FreeBSD on it for a while, I've decided to install the Debian based Raspbian, but ran into some issues with my keybaord not working, and took the opportunity to learn a bit more about serial consoles in order to get the OS installed in a ver minimal configuration.
As a long time user of FreeBSD I've developed a liking for the C Shell. Since it's the default root shell on FreeBSD, I've learned how to use it for the situations where I would end up in Single-User mode, or with a bare install that I needed to quickly configure without waiting for Bash and all of it's many dependancies to compile from the Ports tree.
There are dozens of people complaining about Terminal.app's handling of Home and End keys (and page up/down as well) on the internet, all with fixes. The reality is, Terminal.app on OS X doesn't provide the correct keycodes out of the box, and the fix is really simple.
If there's one thing most people agree upon about me, it's that I'm passionate about what I do. Whether that be my current day job or my hobbies, when I start something, I like to get it finished, and then figure out how I can do it better. That latter thought is a kicker though. How to do things better. There are thousands of self-help books, coaches and seminars you could participate in that are geared to helping people do everything better. But, what are some things that won't help you get better?
One of the great things about Ruby on Rails is it's "Opinionated Conventions". Not having to worry about linking a model to a database table is one of the most brilliant ideas I have come across. I'm glad various other frameworks across many languages are following that path. Does it really matter if your table name is "posts" or "post"? Well, for me right now, yes. And it sucks. Thankfully Rails allows us to go against convention when we really need to.
I'm no expert UI designer, but my mind is better kept in code, not diagrams. When building iOS applications for the iPhone and iPad devices, Interface Builder is a great tool to get a bunch of stuff fleshed out quickly, but at least for myself, I get frustrated quickly when my project grows and I have to constantly switch between a half dozen windows trying to understand why one object isn't updating or displaying correctly. One line of code would fix it, but since the entire interface is in a Nib, I don't even know where to put that one line of code to keep my code clean.
It's been a while since I've posted anything. Been a busy year so far. So busy, that I haven't hacked at my apache configuration in a while, and have been focusing on frontends of applications and stayed away from the backends. Up until today. I ran into an issue that required me to reload my php.ini, by restarting apache. No big deal, except for this little error:
I like compiling and installing programs and utilities by hand on my development machines. Today, I decided to try one of the "new" NoSQL solutions, namely MongoDB. Unsurprisingly, there were no surprises. I did end up creating a new user on my machine, and borrowed a plist LaunchDaemon from the Homebrew project to configure it. Heres the simple commands that can help you not have to worry about running the database as your user or having to start it up every time you reboot your machine.
My last post, FreeBSD on Apple Hardware Part 2 went over how I installed FreeBSD on consumer Mac hardware. But FreeBSD, being a super awesome server platform, doesn't run the greatest out of the box on desktop systems. Doing some simple Google searches turns up a vast array of people trying to run and configure it though. Here, I'll try to combine a lot of those articles. For reference, I am configuring my macbookpro1,1 and imac7,1.
Despite my having FreeBSD dualboot systems, I still find myself in OS X quite a bit. Enough that I now require an expanded PHP version than the one that came with Snow Leopard. Basically, I can't do any graphics work in freebsd, but code hacking works well. It's a tradeoff.