Opinions about People, Process and Technology
I’ve been spending a bit more time to get some real hands on experience with some of the technology I’ve been managing for a while. There’s still nothing more fun and exciting then building something new with your hands. As part of the learning experience, I thought I’d share some of my learning along the way to help others who are in the same stage.
I decided to do a full install of OS X when Yosemite came out and that included installing Ruby and Ruby on Rails on my machine again. Over the last couple of years, I’ve switched from rvm to rbenv because it is a lighter weight solution. Here are the steps that I take to install Ruby on Rails on OS X today
Continue reading “Installing Ruby on Rails on OS X with rbenv”
I recently started to play around with Pentaho again for a side project at work and found that it was crashing whenever I tried to edit the database connection details. After doing a number of searches, I came across this Jira ticket in Pentaho. The gist of it is that El Capitan is not officially supported and causes Data Integration to crash. Fortunately there’s a fix out there that seems to work.
Continue reading “Pentaho Data Integration crashing after El Capitan Update”
The easiest way to get the latest version of Ansible consistently is to not depend on the OS repositories (i.e. homebrew or apt) but rather through PIP.
sudo apt-get install python-dev python-setuptools build-essentials
With that install, you should get easy_install as well
sudo easy_install pip
Now with PIP installed, you can quickly install Ansible
sudo pip install ansible
I found that I needed to install python-dev and build-essentials to compile any of the necessary files
Hope this helps!
While we’ve been using Ansible for almost a year at Kinetic Cafe, I’ve been spending a lot more time with it at a personal level. A big part of it is that I tend to really like being familiar with the tools that my team uses at work and the other is because I actually have a lot of home and cloud servers running because I tend to like being familiar with the tools that the team uses at work. Ansible’s strength stems from the idea that you can ssh to a server and perform a series of tasks based on modules already built for you. At it’s core are concepts like inventories, roles, handlers, dependencies and variables but then allows users to use it in many different ways within that structure. However, this flexibility lead to chaos when I started to use it so I took some time organizing Ansible in a meaningful way for my home infrastructure.
We were running into some issues at work so I decided to pitch in. I had trouble listing my rake tasks as my rake tasks was spitting out this error through RMagick – Reason: image not found – /rmagick-2.13.2/RMagic2.bundle.
Continue reading “RMagick errors when running Rake Tasks in OS X Maverick”
I’ve been experimenting with Pentaho for the past few months to find an easy way to present users with a simple to manage reporting system. The components I’ve been playing with are the Business Analysis Server (Reporting front end), Kettle and Spoon (ETL tool), Reporting Studio and Mondrian (OLAP Server). Here are the install steps that I used to install Pentaho Business Analysis Server on Ubuntu.
I decided to install Ubuntu 13.10 on my current desktop to compare developing on Ubuntu versus OS X. As I needed to install Rails as well I decided to document the steps for future reference as well.
When I started programming, IDEs were the norm. I spent much of my time using tools like Microsoft Visual Studio and got very used to features like Autocomplete. However, that also meant I needed to have access to MSDN which for a young professional was very expensive if you wanted to develop on your own dime and time. IDEs also tend to be very prescriptive and require a lot of overhead in order to run the tools themselves. Almost a decade later, I was introduced to the world of developing using open source languages, tools and frameworks and I quickly fell in love with it. One of the biggest changes though was to not use an IDE. While most of my hard core friends use tools like VIM or VI, I use Sublime Text 3 for my Rails development which is a bit of a cop out but it’s still a pretty amazing tool. I decided to document my experience on my setup of Sublime Text 3 for my personal Rails development. Hopefully others will find this equally useful.
Most of influence of setting up Rails for Sublime Text comes from Michael Hartl’s site.
ln -s /Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin/sublime
Reload your profile
source ~/.bash_profile
import urllib.request,os; pf = 'Package Control.sublime-package'; ipp = sublime.installed_packages_path(); urllib.request.install_opener( urllib.request.build_opener( urllib.request.ProxyHandler()) ); open(os.path.join(ipp, pf), 'wb').write(urllib.request.urlopen( 'http://sublime.wbond.net/' + pf.replace(' ','%20')).read())
cd ~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Packages/
git clone https://github.com/mhartl/rails_tutorial_snippets.git RailsTutorial
{
"tab_size": 2, "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true
}
For other tips about Rails development type tricks, checkout my Rails cheatsheet or my OS X cheatsheet
I got myself a Macbook Air today to primarily be a development machine. For those of you who are looking for a shortcut, check out RailsInstaller that does a quick job as well. Personally, I just wanted to give a shot of installing Rails from scratch because it’s a good way of really understanding your system and the appropriate pre-requisites to run Rails. Also, it allows you to specify what version of Rails and ruby you want installed on your system.
I assume that you already have Homebrew installed on your system.
The operations that I most commonly use are db:create, db:migrate and db:reset. I was working with someone and found db:schema:load. I was pleasantly surprised when I came across this list of operations on Stack Overflow.