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

for i in *.rb ; svn mv $i  new_dir/ ; done

I have two of my ruby on rails web sites running on Godaddy and for the past two days it just suddenly stopped working.  Their tech support didn’t know why and still tried to figure out.  When I first called them, one of their tech support guys blame me.  It is time to switch to other hosting company.

Please!  All the software developers especially Java developers.  Stop over engineering.  Stop using abstract factory when there is no need.  Stop making it configurable when it doesn’t need to be.  Make it simple.  I am reading a piece code that right now which have a class that is an abstractfactory to create another factory.  Crazy!

I have to say.  JRuby on Rails is very cool.  It is so easy now to deploy to Tomcat and JBoss.   I tried and did it on both server and it ran like a champ.  Here is the steps (Mac OS X):’

1. sudo port install jruby
2.  sudo chmod a+w /opt/local/share/java/jruby/lib/ruby/gems/ and all the directory underneath it
3.  sudo chmod a+w /opt/local/share/java/jruby/bin
4.  jruby -S gem install rails mongrel jdbc-mysql activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter activerecord-jdbc-adapter jruby-openssl warbler –no-rdoc –no-ri
5. sudo port tomcat5  (or you can install jboss.  Just download and unpack it to a directory)
6. jruby -S rails your_rails_project
7. cd your_rails_project
8. generate a simple model: jruby script/generate scaffold car model:string
9. create a development database:my_own_development in mysql
10. change config/database.yml:
11. development:
    adapter: jdbcmysql
    database: my_own_devevelopment
    pool: 5
    timeout: 5000
    host: localhost
    username: root
    password:
12. jruby rake db:migrate
13.  jruby -S warble config
14. change config/warble.rb file:
15.        make sure:  config.gems += [”activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter”, “jruby-openssl”,”activerecord-jdbc-adapter”,”jdbc-mysql”]  #include all the gems you need
16.        make sure: config.webxml.rails.env = ENV[’RAILS_ENV’] || ‘production’ # point to the environment you want.  By default it is production
17. make sure you are on your rails project’s root directory
18. jruby -S warble war
19. that will create war file like your_rails_project.war
20. cp your_rails_project.war to your tomcat_home/webapps directory or your jboss_home/server/default/deploy directory
21. start tomcat or start jboss
22. go  http://localhost:8080/your_rails_project/ to check if your project has deployed.  To see the scaffold car go http://localhost:8080/your_rails_project/cars

Google usually changes their logo for special days like new year, mother’s day, etc.  Today, Google missed Chinese new year.  Yahoo didn’t miss it.  Google did.  One for yahoo.  Zero for Google.  That makes me wondering.  Is Google anti-Chinese?

I had several interviews with Amazon.com in the past.  The first set of two years ago and I got all the way to the face to face interview.  I didn’t get the job but was impressed by the interview process.  They asked a lot of tough questions.  It is good to go through the process because it helps you to prepare almost any kind of interview in the future.  Today, I had a phone interview with them again.  I already got a job but I like to go though it to practice my interview skills.  I don’t think I did as well as I did last time.  I missed a couple questions.  I think being a manager last two years are making me less technical.  Anyway,  here are a list of questions Amazon guy asked me on the phone:

1. How to you make sure a link list doesn’t have a cycle?
2. Data structure question:  Hashtable, array and tree.
3. Architecture:  what are the three tiers?  Answer: Presentation, Application and persistent.  How to implement a service oriented architect. Scaling, etc….

Again, it was fun to practice interview with Amazon.  I am probably not qualified for the job.