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

I upgraded Ubuntu to 8.04 LTS on one of my laptops (it is a Dell).  After the upgrade, the mouse just started acting like crazy and moved on its own like it has been controlled by a ghost.  I Google and see if I can find any solution to this problem and there is not one that solved my problem.  So I click on Preference and click on mouse to change the configuration of the accelaration and sensitivity settings by changing them to almost zero.  Then the problem is solved.

The tainted baby formula in China to make us to rethink free trade.    Free trade without proper safety and environment enforcement is going to be disaster.  Food and drugs has import inspection program but it is not well fund and it simply can’t inspect all the product.  In fact, so if there are issue in imported food, we will not find out before we consume it.  We will find out after massive amount of people get sick.

Wiki Nazi is a term that I created for people who spent all of their time on editing wiki and think they own wiki. They are the people who think they have the authority to determine if an external link is spam or not and delete it even generally  external links don’t do any good for SEO and it is related to the topic. When you don’t agree with them, they say you are rude and you try to spam. You know who they are. Call them Wiki Nazi.

I am using Godaddy sharing account running ruby on rails. The problem of running ruby on rails on Godaddy shared hosting account is that Godaddy is still running rails 1.1.6 and there are not many gems that Godaddy has it installed. So if you want to use twitter4r, you can’t really do it because Godaddy will not install it for you. So what I did to get it running is to do the following:

1. unpack twitter4r in the vendor/plugins directory and create an init.rb file with one line require 'twitter'.
2. But that is not enough, you will have to also unpack json_pure gem in the vendor/plugins and create an init.rb with one line require 'json/pure'. The reason is that twitter4r depends on json but Godaddy doesn’t have json gem.
3. Finally, you need to make sure you config twitter4r to use proxy server because twitter4r needs to communicate with twitter through https. here is the code to config that: Twitter::Client.configure do |conf| conf.proxy_host = 'proxy.shr.secureserver.net' conf.proxy_port = '3128' end

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.

Here are the three pillars of a modern society:  Energy, health and education.  We need to have sustainable renewable energy so that all of our modern industries and life can depend on.   Health and education is the basis of human capital.  We need to a healthy population and a health care system that can provide health care to all citizens.  We need to have the best education system that will continue educate his citizens throughout their life.  That means it doesn’t end at college.  If we have these three strong pillars, we can build a sustainable modern society.  That should be our priority.  Nothing else.

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

I tried out clearspring’s platform today to develop and deploy a widget.  It is as easy as drinking milk and eating cookie.  In less than 15 minutes, I was able to develop a widget and publish it to major platforms like facebooks, Yahoo, Google, MSN and Netvibes.  If I were to do this for each platform, it will probably take me days.  They clearly have a wonderful platform.  The question is how they are going to monetize it.    If it is going to be based on advertising, they will probably need to put some ads on all the widgets that they host.  If it is not based on advertising, they will need to charge a fee but that won’t be happening because the service is now free and users will scream if they start charging.   The other revenue model could be charging Enterprise.  Assuming that business might want to create business widget and used them within their intranet, clearspring might provide them a good platform to do that with a fee.

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!

No software can last forever. My first commercial rails app (revolution health’s symptom checker) has been retired. The reason for the retirement is that we want to replace one that doesn’t require paying license fee for the backend and data. The original one used rails as front end and talked to a Cold Fusion backend app (which we licensed through Mayo Clinic) through web service. Just 3 days before we retired the old app, the old symptom checker get mentioned in Rachael Ray (the TV show). Yes, very ironic. It reached its highest moment and then it died. But better die at the top then live at the bottom. Here is the segment: