Industry Zero: One man’s thought on software, business and life

We (the place I work) are having a debate on if we should move our infrastructure to VM that run ruby instead of default Ruby interpreter that is built natively for different OS. Running Ruby on VM can provide a better security and simplify the upgrading and deployment process. So there is a business case for it. One bad thing about Ruby is that there are a lot of compatibility issues between releases. So that will complicate things more. Anyway, so if we do want to go with running Ruby on VM, then we need to make a decision on JRuby or Rubinius. Rubinius is a Ruby VM that built specificly for Ruby so there is probably some advantage of using it because it will be optimized for Ruby. But Rubinius is still very beta. Recently they just rewrite it in C++ from C. Also there is probably no other language will be running on Rubinius (at least for the near future). So JRuby might be more logical choice because it is more mature and there are many languages now running on java VM. So it seems to me that JRuby will probably a better bet.

There is an article yesterday that Microsoft, Google and some other major players have agreed on EHR standard. The standard is drafted by Markle foundation’s connect for health. The standard document is here. This could be very interesting. It covers a variety of principle and guidelines on Consumer Policy and Consumer Technology. I am going to spend sometimes to read through the documents. I am sure that I will be falling into sleep but I need to read them to build a better PHR.

I ran into this website called: LimeExchange which allows company or individual to post projects and other companies or individual to bid to work on them. The idea is not new. It just add some web2.0 and social networking community features on top of it. The only thing bother me so far is that there are way more workers than employers. I only see a few projects under software development and there are over hundreds of developers registered with the sites. Another funny thing is that most of the developers are from India and the projects are also from India too.

Most of the time, the latest software or practice are usually improvement of the previous existing ones. However, sometimes they are not. For example, wiki is great for a community to edit and share information but it may not be good for as a central repository for all documentation even though there are a lot of people are using it that way. There is always a cost to move to the latest. Sometimes the cost to bring enough benefit that it is worth it. However, a lot of time it won’t. It will only help to build up people’s resume. Software industry is constantly trying to replace the current with the latest even some of those ideas are just repackage of old ideas.

One of my college best friend called me last night and talked about having a tough time to decide if he should marry his fiancee. He brought up a few issues such as worry about getting a divorce and worry she won’t get along with his family, etc. I asked him if he loves her. He said he loves her but not madly in love. He never madly in love with anyone. I told him he needs to go with his gut/instinct. I told him that marriage has to come from the heart, not the brain. To help him to do that, I suggest he thinks about this scenario, if there are two pill (blue or red), take the blue pill, his current fiancee will be gone forever and he doesn’t even worry about breaking up with her, in fact it is like she never in his life in the first place. Take the red pill, she is his forever and all of the family issue, divorce worry, money issue, kids issue will be taken care off. Which pill will he take. If he wants to take the blue pill, then he should break off the engagement. If he wants to take the red pill, he should work out those issues. That seemed to give him a moment of clarity. I don’t know what his decision will be. But if he follows his instinct, I think he will not regret his decision.

Layoff is part of business cycle that everyone of us have to deal with. For upper management who decided the layoff, the key is to make sure you do it quick and deep enough so that you don’t have to do a second, third, fourth round in next few months. For the middle managers who didn’t get laid off, the key is to be nice to the employees who get laid off and give them whatever support they have. For employee who get laid off, the key is to realize that it is not you, it is business. A business that couldn’t afford to have you anymore. You should take this as an opportunity to move on to better or greater thing. Remember the only constant in life is change.

The process of deploying rails app for a single domain is pretty simple and is documented in the following link. I ran into problem when I tried to deploy another rails app for an alias domain running on the same share host account. So here is the general steps:

1. create a rails directory for your new app. Let’s call it mysecondapp. Upload your rails app in mysecondapp directory.
2. create a symbolic link to mysecondapp (let’s call the new symbolic link mysecondlink)
3. create your alias domain and have the root path point to the symbolic link: mysecondlink. Let’s say your alias domain is myseconddomain.com. It’s content root will be mysecondlink.
4. This is very important step: change your dispatch.cgi for dispatch.fcgi to include the following line: “RewriteBase /” to set the base to the root directory so that it won’t try to find the dispatcher based on the related directory to the current content directory.

That is it. Godaddy’s support is no help. Asked them and they just give you the run around.