Monthly Archives: November 2005

La lengua argentina, por Fede

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Este E-Mail es solo para argentinos. Analisis profundo de la palabra “PEDO”

Esto aconteció en Bahía Blanca, y tuvo como protagonistas a una familia y una visitante canadiense que se alojó en su casa por espacio de tres meses. La historia es así y es, palabra más, palabra menos, totalmente verídica. Creo que es digna de un profundo análisis lingüístico.

Transcurría un plácido almuerzo, cuando de pronto, la ilustre visitante, en un castellano con neto acento canadiense, preguntó inocentemente:

  • Pero… para ustedes los argentinos… ¿todo es pedo?
  • ¿¿¿ Cómo…???
  • Sí, claro… Es que hay cosas que todavía no entiendo del todo… ¿Por ejemplo? Continue reading →

busco maestr@, por hernún

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si me pongo triste pierdo tiempo. y no es que esté apurado, simplemente vivo. y la tristeza, lo sabemos, no es la mejor magia para reproducir. de los cuatro canales de TV que recibo en mi televisor portátil blanco y negro, tres están contándome cómo es que un motntón de gente cortó la única ruta de acceso al aeropuerto en medio de un conflicto sindical con aerolíneas argentinas. entonces un desfile de viajeros entregados a la hegemonía de unos y otros se dibuja al paso en un asfalto caliente por verano y por bronca. Continue reading →

Change the “autocompletion” key in Windows 2000

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Windows 2000 has been around for a while, and it will certainly be here for a while too.

Now here’s a handy tip if you have to work often with the command line: to enable or disable file and directory name autocompletion on a computer or user logon session, run Regedit.exe and set the following REG_DWORD value:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompletionChar\REG_DWORD

Set the REG_DWORD value to 09, which is the TAB character.

Now you can open a command line window (Start / Run / cmd) and start playing with the TAB key! *nix users have had this for a while, I know, and Windows XP has this by default, I know, but as I said Windows 2000 is not about to disappear anytime soon…

Installing Ruby on Rails almost everywhere

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I am happy to have successfully installed my first Ruby on Rails full corporate application in these fine platforms:

  • Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar” (development and test, in my old and faithful G3 iBook)
  • Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” (development and test, in my G5 desktop) before and after installing Xcode 2.2 tools (special article)
  • Windows XP (development and test, in my employer’s Dell Latitude D600 notebook)
  • Windows Server 2003, with Apache 2 and FastCGI (production) (special article)

In all of these systems, I’ve only run Rails on top of MySQL (4 and 5) so far; I will try with other database systems in the future as well, even if MySQL is an absolutely great database system. Particularly I am interested in SQL Server / Oracle (for corporate clients these remain first-class choices) and SQLite for lighter installations.

Anyway, I’m amazed to see just how versatile and portable Rails can be! The setups are not always simple, but with the help of the Rails community, it is really worth doing it.

Actually I see Rails with very special eyes right now; Ruby is an amazing programming language, very powerful yet extremely easy to learn, and Rails all in all is an incredible platform. Yes, because I consider Rails to be a cutting-edge development platform, one that could very likely go mainstream and corporate in 2006. I do not see any problems for that. Lightweight for development, in any platform, and scalable for production use. Fast, small, in a word: beautiful. And if all that was not enough, free and open source.

I am getting really excited about all this. I have been doing web applications since 1996, and Rails is just the way i should have been doing them in the first place. I will definitely contribute to spread the word on Rails and develop all my future applications with it, without a doubt.

Amor verdadero

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(recibido por e-mail)

“Cuando veas que se cierra tu horizonte… sólo mira el cielo”

Un hombre de edad avanzada vino a la clínica donde yo trabajo para hacerse curar una herida en la mano. Tenía bastante prisa, y mientras se curaba le pregunté qué era eso tan urgente que tenía que hacer. Me dijo que tenía que ir a una residencia de ancianos para desayunar con su mujer que vivía allí. Me contó que llevaba algún tiempo en ese lugar y que tenía un Alzheimer muy avanzado.

Mientras acababa de vendar la herida, le pregunté si ella se alarmaría en caso de que él llegara tarde esa mañana. No, me dijo. Ella ya no sabe quién soy. Hace ya casi cinco años que no me reconoce. Entonces le pregunté extrañado. Y si ya no sabe quién es usted, ¿por qué esa necesidad de estar con ella todas las mañanas? Me sonrió y dándome una palmadita en la mano me dijo: “Ella no sabe quién soy yo, pero yo todavía sé muy bien quién es ella”. Tuve que contenerme las lágrimas mientras salía y pensé: “El verdadero amor no se reduce a lo físico ni a lo romántico. El verdadero amor es la aceptación de todo lo que el otro es, de lo que ha sido, de lo que será y de lo que ya no es”

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How to install Ruby on Rails in Windows 2003?

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Great day; my first full Ruby on Rails application is up and running in production environment. It is installed in an intranet server at my employer’s premises, so I will not be able to show it :(

But anyway, here goes some tips and tricks for installing such an application in a Windows 2003 server, using a MySQL 5.0 database, and running it with Apache 2.0 with FastCGI (pretty latest stuff altogether, isn’t it??? :)

Continue reading →

My Bookshelf (Part III)

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This is the third and last part of the article “My Bookshelf”, with the list of the books that I recommend anyone in the software engineering field to read.

This last part has my preferred books about:

  • Project Management and Methodologies
  • Computing History and Industry Trends

As usual, all book references include links to their official websites, to Amazon.com as well as their ISBN, cover and list of authors. Continue reading →

Xcode 2.2, GCC and Ruby on Rails under Mac OS X Tiger

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I wanted to update recently Ruby on Rails to version 0.14.3 (the final 1.0 release seems to be closer than ever) on my Mac, under Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.3 with Xcode 2.2 (the latest version) installed. Well, it turns out to be quite difficult.

First of all, I tried the classic method “sudo gem update” but that won’t work, for many reasons:

  1. To begin with, it seems that Xcode 2.2 changes the default path of the fixrbconfig file; thus, you should do the following to fix it:
    1. cd /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.0 and then
    2. sudo ln -s /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/universal-darwin8.0/* ./; this is because Xcode 2.2 has some additional support for multi-platform development (“Universal Binaries” as Apple calls them) and thus, some paths have changed internally.
  2. Once you’ve done this, you will re-run “sudo gem update” but it will get stuck when trying to update the mysql gem. To solve this, do the following:
    1. sudo gcc_select 3.3; the default version for Xcode is GCC 4.0.x
    2. sudo gem install mysql — –with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql –with-mysql-include=/usr/local/mysql/include/ –with-mysql-lib=/usr/local/mysql/lib/ –with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config; this way, the mysql gem will be compiled using GCC 3.3
    3. Then, last but not least, sudo gem update should finish updating the other gems without problem :)
  3. Finally, you can reset the GCC 4.0 doing this: sudo gcc_select 4.0

Actually I found another way of correcting it (see comment 55), but it applies only if you use fink.

If someone has problems with these instructions, just leave me a comment.

Update, 2005-11-26: Actually I found out that this problem appears when you have installed Ruby in your system using Fink… since I had installed Fink for getting Maven (that I do not yet use) I just uninstalled and removed Fink from my system, then reinstalled Ruby, RubyGems and Rails, and everything came back to normality.

Update, 2005-12-13: This article is much more comprehensive than mine :) check it out! (Local copy if the link is broken)