Tags: Programming   Rants


Poor blog, how I have been neglecting you! Precious, rambling, delicious blog. Always patient, loyal, and expressful.

In honour of my blog's title, I will post something that is somehow about geeky skillz that I have. No, the title of this blog is not "Geeks Kill"! That's something else.

Many things have changed in my geek ecosystem. I play no games on computers with keyboards and mice anymore. I have a PlayStation 3 with a funny thing shaped like a molecule that responds to the twitchings of my thumbs, and sometimes fore fingers. It seems to do a decent job of simulating a keyboard and mouse. Good enough to justify gaming from the couch! Ah, to play Oblivion in the horizontal position! Try it, you'll like it too. Was I a console hater before? Not really, but I definitely preferred pointing and clicking in the past. Did I hate upgrading my PC just to play games? Heck yeah! Goodbye to that. Toodles.

My beautiful rusty red Alienware PC has been sitting under my desk since January, unplugged and abandoned. I lost the desire to play any games on it, probably because of the pitiful PC games I last purchased: Spore? Complete shite. Utterly unplayable. Hellgate: London? Almost good, but kinda awful. Bioshock? Bio CRASH! Or maybe it was the experience of reinstalling Windows yet again, faced with the task of reinstalling everything. That was the last thing I did on my Alienware, and it kinda drained any enthusiasm I had left for the beast.

One day I connected my pristine white MacBook to my 20" widescreen monitor, and discovered how wonderful it is to program on a dual-display Mac! Wow, why didn't I do this the day that I brought my MacBook home?

Next, I installed Ubuntu on the IBM ThinkCentre I use as a web server. I'm now ashamed to admit that I had been using Windows XP Professional for the server before. I know, I know! XP as a server OS?? It was a moody animal, that's for sure. It was cute the first time it decided to install automatic updates while I was out of town, reboot itself, and fail to start my website services. Haha, good one, Windows! You got me! The second time? Not as funny. Every time after that? Die, Windows. Just die. You hate me, and I hate you. Ok, it was my mistake to use Windows XP on a server, but I thought it was reasonable to assume that if I disable Automatic Updates, that Automatic Updates would be disabled. I guess Microsoft has a different interpretation of the word "disabled".

So, Ubuntu server, and Mac development. Today I really appreciate how well the two work together. They really complement each other. Here's why.


A couple of my websites were begun on my Alienware PC (running Windows, of course). Later I moved development to my Mac. But tonight I started using Phusion Passenger to deploy my Rails web applications in Apache 2. An elegant and revolutionary solution for the Rails community, no doubt! But there was a problem when I finished the migration and started up the websites under the new Passenger setup. A lot of files failed to load. All HTML loaded fine, as did many images. But some images failed to load, and the stylesheets too. Hmm... Why would some images load and some not, if they're in the same directory?

It turns out that the images added when I was developing on Windows were not loading, but the images added from my Mac loaded fine. Why? Permissions! When you copy Windows files to a Linux server or to a Mac, the permissions look like this:

-rw------- 1 geek geek 781 2009-01-31 01:23 accept.png

-rw------- 1 geek geek 789 2009-01-31 01:23 bell.png

-rw------- 1 geek geek 882 2009-01-31 01:23 clock.png

Not good enough for Apache to serve them to site visitors. Mac and Linux copy the files with more friendly permissions, like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 geek geek   652 2009-05-03 14:13 feed-icon.gif

-rwxr-xr-x 1 geek geek 18173 2009-05-03 14:13 GeekSkillz_logo1.png

-rwxr-xr-x 1 geek geek  3214 2009-05-03 14:13 IK_guy_footer.jpg

So, a simple chmod on the files fixed the problem and all files started getting served again.

To me, this is a testament to how well Mac and Linux work together, since Mac OS X is really a highly customized distro of Linux. Develop on Mac, deploy on Linux, and win! Or just develop on Linux and deploy on Linux, I guess.

Why does Windows set the permissions like that? Another way that Windows tries to babysit its users? Assume users have the worst intentions and implement strict restrictions?

Anyway, what am I rambling about? Rails development on Mac for a Ubuntu server with Apache and Passenger are awesome? Abandoning Windows has made me fitter, happier and more productive? Yeah, I guess those are good conclusions.

Blah blah blah. I'm going to bed. Good night, blog.