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

Looking at the Olympic medal count, it reflects the new world order.  US is no longer the super power if sport is an indication.  Even sports were used to be dominated by US such as tracks and boxing, US is no longer the powerhouse that it once was.  Yes, we can say we still have the highest medal count but if you look closely.  It is China that has the most gold modals (almost double of what US got so far).  US is getting weaker and weaker.   It is time for change.  The country has gone wrong in so many way because of our government’s bad policy.  It is time for a big and real change.  Vote for change.

Google map’s infowindow is not showing up today due to a bug in Google map.  Here is the thread.

I was trying to install ruby-xslt on my Ubuntu laptop after I installed on my Mac. When I do a sudo gem install ruby-xslt, I got the following:

gem install ruby-xsltBuilding native extensions.  This could take a while...

ERROR:  Error installing ruby-xslt:

ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension./usr/local/bin/ruby extconf.rb install ruby-xslt

checking for xmlParseDoc() in -lxml2... yes

checking for xsltParseStylesheetFile() in -lxslt... no

checking for exsltRegisterAll() in -lexslt... no

extconf.rb:4: command not found: xslt-config --cflags

creating extconf.h

creating Makefile

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/mkmf.rb:1102: warning: global variable `$preload' not initialized

make

gcc -I. -I. -I/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/i686-linux -I. -DRUBY_EXTCONF_H=\"extconf.h\"  -fPIC -g -Wall -I/usr/include/libxml2  -g -O2 -DUSE_ERROR_HANDLER -DUSE_EXSLT  -c xslt_lib.c

In file included from xslt_lib.c:19:

xslt.h:36:27: error: libxslt/extra.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:37:26: error: libxslt/xslt.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:38:35: error: libxslt/xsltInternals.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:39:31: error: libxslt/transform.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:40:31: error: libxslt/xsltutils.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:41:29: error: libxslt/imports.h: No such file or directory

xslt.h:44:30: error: libexslt/exslt.h: No such file or directory

After I do some Googling, here is the solution:

sudo apt-get install libxml-ruby1.8 libxslt1-dev
sudo gem install ruby-xslt

That is it!

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.

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.

One of my colleague recently gave me a book called Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder David Weinberger. This book helps to open up my mind about how the new world order (disorder) of digital information should be and will be. The book’s idea applies really well to my current job which is struggling on designing a better way to service treatments information to users. I highly recommended this book. The basic idea is that our old way of depending on expert to classify information is restrictive, bad, not helpful to user. It restrict knowledge. The new way is let user organize it however they see it. Have infinite ways to organize information and knowledge is unbound. Very cool idea.

President Bush and the Congress is going to pass a stimulus package containing tax rebate.  Very nice for those who get a tax rebate but it won’t help the economy much.  It might delay the pain.  Like taking a pain killer.  You might feel better in a short term but the disease doesn’t go away.  US economy has fundamental structural problem: huge trade deficit and huge budget deficit from our government.  Our nation as a whole a debtor who depends on foreigners’ money.  Majority of our people also live beyond their mean.  If that doesn’t change, we will have a rude awakening.

Well, finally I got World press installed and now I can blog about nothing.