I just had an interesting woops. Installed iPhone SDK onto my snow lepoard machine (for the first time) and it added a PATH= to the /etc/profile file. That took a little working around!

In a recent blog post, Brian Krebs mentions the following:

I also urge users to segment their systems so that important data files are on a separate chunk of hard drive space than the Windows operating system, which tends to make restoring backups a far simpler affair.

This is fantastic advice, and should be followed by every operating system rather then just Windows. I’ve espoused this method for years, and have actually gotten some grief about it.

I think this should into the “duh” category, but so many people opt for the easy and less safe monolithic partioning scheme (I’m looking at you, @mystic). If your OS implodes, and you have to re-install, it’s much easier to just wipe and reinstall the O/S partition and not worry about the user data in the /home partition. This does not in any manner replace the needs for backups – your /home partition could just as easily implode.

The event that really pressed this home for me was watching an old DOS 5 machine unravel when it’s FAT table got really confused. We ended up having to format from floppy, and reinstall everything. Total loss.

rvm (ruby version manager) is a kick ass tool that I use on a daily basis. It allows you to install lots of ruby versions, gems, gem sets, and what have you. You can test your app against new (or old) versions of ruby easily. You can also use it to manage rubies on a production system, for all users of that system.

Yes, you heard me correctly. After needling Wayne into getting root support built into RVM so many weeks ago, this is really the only way that I use it. There are a few gotchas however. I will go through my best practices for installing rvm system wide in this article.

updated: 8/1/2010 : @sutto and @wayneeseguin have baked root support into rvm – use that!

Continue reading ‘rooting with rvm’ »

One of the interesting paradigms in the technology field now days is “cloud”. I think that I have seen it bandied about more then “web 2.0″ a few years ago. It’s hit required buzz word compliance status in market-speak. I believe that is it over used, misunderstood and used to mislead. Let’s cut through the hyperbole and see what is really going on.
Continue reading ‘With Clouds, Come a Chance of Rain’ »