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Here’s a really quick tip for anyone using Rails on Cygwin. If you want to connect to a MySQL database the understood practice is to compile MySQL and go through the hassle of getting it all working within Cygwin itself. After what I’ve gone through with it all, the best way of getting this combination to work is to:

• Install MySQL under Windows itself rather than Cygwin.
• Make sure that the MySQL binaries are in your system path under Windows and, if installing via SSH, restart the Cygwin SSH service so that your login will be able to see the new path.
• When installing the MySQL gem (gem install mysql) select the mswin32 option rather than the pure Ruby option.
• Now, when you define your database connections just give the machine’s IP address instead of saying “localhost” and it’ll work great!

After wasting several days getting it all to work the “proper” way, the above is a much cleaner solution.

I’ve just been converted to a tool called Redmine, a combination of the ubiquitous Trac and something like ActiveCollab. Able to work directly with Subversion code repositories, Redmine gives you support for multiple projects, per-project tasks, content management (blog, news, document management, wiki), both a calendar and GANTT chart to view progress, a very comprehensive user management system that can even authenticate against LDAP (i.e. Active Directory, NetWare, et al), and as always is an open-source application so you can improve/extend the code as you see fit. I’m trying it out at work but it looks like something I’m going to start using for all of my project management. Awesome stuff!

There’s a bug in all versions of Internet Explorer, including the latest IE7, whereby if you have a floating block in a block inside another block which has a background image (possibly also background colors), text will disappear. I was hitting this at work where we had two columns created using floating blocks, inside two separate blocks that each had a background image, and just above the columns was a heading - the text within the columns showed up but the heading always disappeared after the images finished loading. While there are some detailed explanations of why this bug happens, nothing quite explained my scenario or had a fix for it. Well, after poking around with it for a while I came up with a nifty fix: I put the heading inside a DIV that was set to 100% and floating to the left, which worked wonderfully!

Apple just announced that the highly anticipated OSX Leopard release would be delayed until October. Bummer, I was hoping to have it this Summer.

Well, enough of that, I’m dumping Outlook off my Mac again until I can work out a better way of doing it. I spent another half day putzing around with it as it decided to explode on me. I went back to an older backup of the Crossover “bottle” but it still didn’t work. Created a new bottle with Office XP, it wouldn’t work as I hadn’t ran the setup program yet?!? Then I created another new bottle with Office 2000, which is supposed to be more highly supported than the newer releases - even it didn’t work, complained about there not being any network connectivity. Argh.

(Originally started in December 2006)

My wife and I don’t watch much TV, primarily because we cancelled our TV cable subscription several years ago. While we are both fans of science fiction shows there simple was too much junk on aside from two or three shows to spend upwards of $60 each month, and we also wanted to move towards more constructive ways of spending our time. However, there are still those one or two shows we really enjoy and wish to keep up with, without having to wait a year or more for the episodes to be released on DVD. Enter what is currently IMHO the best alternative solution to our predicament - iTunes!

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After working with Adobe’s ColdFusion for several years I’ve come to the conclusion that the single most important thing that a developer can do is use the CFQUERYPARAM tag. This single tag can help prevent many security problems as it will automatically work out how to pass the variable into the database based on the type of data you say it is, e.g. strings will get the proper quotation marks around it, dates will have pound signs added if needed, etc, etc. Wonderful stuff and one of ColdFusion’s best features.

I’m working on a lengthy article explaining how to install a bunch of web server software in Cygwin and I’ve found that I have to manually compile several key pieces. While I’m not unwilling to do this, the sheer hassle of having to go back ‘n forth testing different configuration and installation options is a pain. Why on earth PostgreSQL can be available through the Cygwin installer but MySQL isn’t is beyond me, likewise for PHP - every Linux distribution on the face of the planet includes them so why can’t Cygwin? I’ve easily lost over a day of work due to this, a day that I could have spent designing a new system in Ruby on Rails that I’ve been tasked with.