14 Mar 2006
I’m not even thinking of homonyms so much (though that may be true of the word in question, if you ignore similar meanings) when I get upset (as I am at present) about the untenable nature of the word “class” or “classes” (as in school/education) in any context where it could possibly be confused with programming of any sort.
As usual, it’s the geeks’ fault. I suppose classes in programming generally refer to a grouping of objects, as a class of students is a grouping of the same… so perhaps context should make the distinction clearer. But still, waaaay too much potential for confusion. Roget’s was thoroughly unhelpful in this regard… “course” is inaccurate, “grade” is too broad, and everything else was way off the mark. I think I’m going to go with “course” for the minute, at least until/unless I come up with something better.
For those wondering why I’m talking about something IT-related outside of the murky realms of semantics (though this arguably relates, albeit in a different sphere!), pseudo-design/browser-bug-fighting, and my all-encompassing-JavaScript-ineptitude… well, I’m playing with Ruby on Rails again. Or rather, properly for the first time. Because, you know, I don’t think there are enough balls I’m trying to juggle already ;-) Meh. If Rails is really fast and I don’t run out of time and make this drag out forever (which I inevitably will… bleh) this’ll probably take about a month. If Rails actually sucks, which by most reports it doesn’t — speculation about crap performance for large-scale services and concern over the small bus-factor (if one dev member got hit by a bus, what’d happen to the project?) aside — then I might give up for another couple of months. Whatever!
If nothing else maybe I’ll learn some stuff about MVC along the way. Not bad for an Arts student, hey?
14 Mar 2006
I’m amazed at how long this takes! My guess is it’d take longer on over-selling systems (i.e. lots of accounts using very little resources, sold more resources on one host than would ever realistically be used rapidly enough to warrant concern) because of the volume of lines/files to be parsed for various services, but still. I just got rid of a site that’s wound up and it must’ve taken about a minute and a half (this is on a normally-quite-responsive dual Xeon 2.8 with HT (so it looks like a quad processor box! ;-)) with a not-so-small 4GB of memory). There was a really-quite-small database and less than 10MB of files (across probably less than 100 files for the entire site)… seems like a pretty long time!
I guess things would be slowed down by the fact that because the script is being run from a webpage (probably Perl?) it doesn’t multitask things (so, for example, syncing a password database for a particular service might be CPU/memory intensive whilst other processes are just quickly marking inodes as empty — but the two can’t occur at once). Shrug! I think this is the first time I’ve ever had to do this, so I’m hardly jumping up and down with anguish at all the wasted hours of my life (heh, I’m a uni student, I have no right to complain about such things! Or something.)… just seemed a bit lame.
14 Mar 2006
Great. So I try and do things all properly-like, using migrate scripts to make the database and stuff, and it goes and dies on me.
`
josh@whisper:~/public_html/XX/db/migrate$ rake migrate
(in /home/josh/public_html/XX)
rake aborted!
You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds
to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near
‘desc varchar(255)) ENGINE=InnoDB’ at line 1:
CREATE TABLE courses (id int(11) DEFAULT NULL auto_increment
PRIMARY KEY, name varchar(255), desc varchar(255)) ENGINE=InnoDB
./Rakefile:200
`
Nyaaaah. I think it’s coz I’m using the only version of Ruby that the Rails team don’t recommend:
We recommend Ruby 1.8.4 for use with Rails. Ruby 1.8.2 is fine too, but version 1.8.3 is not.
Hah. Yeah, I’m using 1.8.3. It’s Ubuntu’s fault! That’s just what happened to be sitting in stupid apt repositories. So now I need to add backports to an otherwise-clean computer. *shudders* Well, I guess the alternative is compiling and trying to stay on top of all that… *Josh is seen hurriedly running to add backports sources*
Well, maybe not tonight. wanders off to post on Ï„ÏανσλιτεÏατιον before sleeping
13 Mar 2006
12 Mar 2006
Too tired for writing but feel like I should post something, so photos will have to do :-)
(Even though Kim will probably post better photos on Flickr in the next day or two!)
Karaoke…
Bad Karaoke… (note Matt Harris in background ;-))
Obligatory crowd shot…
More Karaoke…
Balloons! (Photos aren’t good for conveying the influence of helium ;-))
Some sibling of Em’s whose name eludes me (and cake). He was hilarious in a way that only small kids can be!
Cake (I didn’t like cupboards in the background, so this photo got a bit butchered in editing. Meh!)…
It was a really good night… the karaoke definitely made it! Happy birthday Em!
