Jake Scruggs

One of the things that kept me from installing Linux on my laptop was concern about support for peripherals such as printers, digital cameras, USB devices in general, and my ThoughtWorks-provided EVDO card. The cool thing with Fiesty Fawn is that all except the EVDO card worked out of the box (I should say I had some trouble with my wireless on Edgy Eft). And the EVDO card only took about 5 minutes to get working after Peter Ryan pointed me to this article: Get broadband wireless with Verizon EVDO and Linux It's a few command line scripts to run and currently I haven't figured out how to turn it off or configure image detail (like you can with Verizon's software), but it works.

I moved to the newest version of Ubuntu over the weekend: Feisty Fawn. I was having troubles getting my wireless working (Intel PRO/Wireless 3945) and I had heard it works in Feisty. The upgrade, um, took out my system. Yep. Everything was chugging along just fine until it tried to upgrade Tomcat and then I got a cryptic error message saying the update had failed and I should email them. No real indication of what to do next. So I tried to get the upgrade running again, but I'm not savvy enough with the Linux. Tried to restart the machine... Big mistake. Not so much with the booting. So I had to wipe that partition and reinstall. I didn't lose anything except time. Then today when I was setting up my machine I couldn't get Tomcat5.5 to work (we use SOLR which uses Tomcat behind the scenes for fast searching). Lost more time trying to figure out what was wrong. Finally I thought maybe Aptitude's version was bad, so I removed it and got Tomcat straight from Apa...

When I first started working with Rails, I had a windows laptop and so that’s where I worked. Later I got on two different Rails projects that used OSX (on Mac minis). Now I’m using Kubuntu . I thought I’d take a minute to compare them all. I’m not going to mince words here -- try to avoid developing in Windows if at all possible for these reasons: Tests will run very slow (by a factor of 10 or more). The mysql drivers are not so good (When I developed in windows, I noticed I kept losing my connection to the database during operations that took more than a second or two and I couldn ’t get any of the replacement drivers to work). A fair amount of the plugins will be much harder to install (we are using the Raspell gem for “did you mean” functionality which needs aspell and the windows dudes still haven’t figured out how to install it. On Ubuntu , it was a simple “aptitude install”). Help online is usually not geared towards the Rails on Windows developer. If yo...

At my current gig I develop on Windows while the rest of the team is working on Linux (but not for long, I just got PartitionMagic and I’m going to dual-boot). This has caused several problems and one of the most vexing is that the Linux dudes can check in fixtures that blow up on my Windows box. Every time it happens I take a look at the offending fixture and it isn’t putting something into a column that has been declared ‘not null.’ So I fix it by adding in some data, but why the hell isn’t it blowing up on their machines (or cruise control, which is on a Linux box)? My colleague Ricky Lui figured it out today. Allow me to quote from his email: On our Linux machines, MySQL is installed with no default sql_mode. That means if there's a certain column that's supposedly NOT NULL, your unit tests can still pass even without setting that column (e.g. through test fixtures). For MySQL installation on Windows, the default sql_mode is set, so that same unit test that pass...