“You see, I tend to change from one media to another, and explore anything that interests me at the time”, she explained. She isn’t one of those artists that has a particularly successful theme and moves to mass produce pieces.

This doesn’t make things easy, but during development we managed to draw together coherent themes in her work and present them as collections. But she’s certainly not saying “here you are, this is what I do”, she wants to keep her options open.

As she explained her position, it seemed strangely familiar. The fact is that I’ve always been that kind of generalist, and I’ve exactly the same misgivings about marketing myself, but this is where I’d start.

Pick and choose where you’re seen, and I’m not just referring to seedier side of the Web. Use services you’re comfortable with, you’ll express yourself more effectively: I don’t like the feel of Facebook, so I don’t use it, but I like Twitter.

Make sure all your online profiles tell a consistent story so that you’re not confusing potential customers. OK we’re generalists, so what story do you tell? Talk about what you can do, and why being a generalist makes you such a valuable asset without making rash promises.

On the techie side, I look at the way search engines like Google and Bing perceive websites with Webmaster tools and Google Analytics. Try checking the keywords their crawlers identify to see if they’re seeing what you expect, it can be quite instructive.

Finally, try a Vanity search by sticking your name or brand into Google. Look at the results and see if they correspond to the image you’d like the World to see. How many pages correctly, and flatteringly, apply to you will give you a clue to how much work you’re got left.

These are just a few ideas to get started, and they’re not guaranteed, but I’m testing them on myself, and then maybe Margarita.

I’ve been using Sinatra for more and more projects, but there came a point this week when I realised that I was in danger of accidentally upgrading gem versions without testing first.

Dependencies in crisis

You see, my applications all use the system gems, and require "gem_name" to load the most recent local version.

As the number of applications on the server grew, I found that this had the effect of automatically upgrading all my applications whenever I upgraded a gem, whether intentional or otherwise.

Now I like to take advantage of bug fixes and new features of the latest releases whenever possible, but I don’t necessarily want to upgrade every application in a single mammoth coding session, or have to hold back the deployment of a new application until the others have been upgraded and fully tested.

Gem and version dependency control

It dawned on me that I needed some control over both the actual gems and the versions each application used.

Simplicity

The simplest approach is to control what it available in the application load path before loading it in the usual way, and these are the commands for the job.

gem "gem_name", "gem_version"
require "gem_name"


I tried this with some success, and quite a few of my applications are still using this method for now. But I decided to try using Bundler as a long term solution.

Bundler

If you want to know about Bundler I suggest you try the github repository or some of the posts on Yehuda Katz blog.

I found it pretty easy to integrate with Sinatra by following these instructions, and my Gemfile looked like this.

source "http://rubygems.org"
gem 'sinatra', '1.0'
gem 'haml', '3.0.13'
group :test do
gem 'rspec', '1.3.0', :require => 'spec'
gem 'rspec-rails', '1.3.2'
gem 'cucumber', '0.8.3'
gem 'cucumber-rails', '0.3.2'
gem 'webrat', '0.7.1'
end


Testing with WEBrick went like clockwork, working smoothly with both RSpec and Cucumber, but when I tried to get things running on Passenger this is what I saw.

This had me stumped for quite a while. I reinstalled Bundler; checked out the installation of Passenger, my $GEM_PATH, and the Ruby environment; nothing worked.

The solution turned out to be much simpler than all that: add the Bundler gem to the Gemfile dependencies.

gem 'bundler', '0.9.26'
gem 'sinatra', '1.0'
gem 'haml', '3.0.13'


I wish it had occurred to me earlier, but the simple ones never do. Anyhow, my Passenger deployments work perfectly, and I’ll be migrating all my Sinatra apps over to Bundler.

Capistrano integration

And if you, like me, want to use Bundler to manage dependencies during Capistrano deployment, you might like to try these useful recipes.

But the time came to rebalance my portfolio, and I’m here to report that I’ve learned something new about my tactical approach: there’s a right order for trades… and a wrong one.

The position.

Aquarius Platinum (AQP) has more than doubled in price since I added to the position I’d held since before the Crash. But at 450p a share I wasn’t really expecting much more.

What’s more, above average growth in the UK stock portion of the portfolio means it’s too large for my chosen asset allocation.

The strategy.

I prefer to maintain a stake in any company I’ve owned that doesn’t give me a good reason to back out. After significant growth I’ll reduce my holding and use the profits to diversify into new stocks. So the plan was to sell half of my AQP position, hold on to the rest and buy GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

I’ve been watching them for a while, and in the light of the current return on fixed interest investments, I estimate the dividend makes this stock worth £13–14 per share.

An additional attraction is the relative stability of these large pharmaceutical companies: my portfolio could use a little added stability considering the natural resources companies it contains.

Decision made! I’m going to move some of my money from AQP to GSK; and the remaining cash released from AQP will be redistributed to other asset classes. How hard can that be?

The tactical error.

Quite, as it turned out the Markets chose this week to teach me another lesson.

My first mistake was to get greedy: AQP was off its highs, but still representing a respectable profit, I was reluctant to sell without getting top dollar.

But wait, I’ve already got cash earmarked for incremental investment into other asset classes. I thought I’d be clever and use my spare cash to take up a position in GSK, leaving AQP to return to the highs when I could sell to replenish the cash.

My error was in the order I planned the transaction.

The aftermath.

The market fell steeply after I bought the GSK stock, and the AQP followed.

Strategically there’s nothing wrong with this, I’m in this for the long haul and I’m confident these two will recover.

Tactically I’m trapped with both stocks in my portfolio, which is even more unbalanced than before I started!

If I’d sold AQP first and it’d risen, I’d have lost out on a little profit but secured the GSK position for the dividends as planned. Importantly the portfolio would be balanced.

If AQP had dropped, I’d have secured the profit I already had and could have bought GSK even more cheaply. The portfolio would still have been balanced.

And what about the cash to meet my other investment plans?

As it is I’ve lost the opportunity to take my profit on AQP, bought GSK at a higher price than necessary, thrown my portfolio even further out of balance, and tied up cash that I could be using to buy other assets at a handsome discount.

Once again I’m humbled, and just because I failed to consider the order of my actions. Not a mistake I’ll make again.

You see I’m an Engineer that’s learned maths from a practical perspective. We’re taught particular mathematical procedures for application to specific engineering problems: the emphasis is on correct application.

But the series pointed out the sweeping range of mathematical branches in existence, each with techniques that can be applied to many different types of problem, but frequently discovered simply because they were there!

On a practical level, we’ve conceived many types of geometry and calculus, each based on their own initial assumptions, sometimes building on what went before, but often starting from a totally new perspective.

And I guess being an Engineer, the magic lies in the application. It’s possible to apply multiple types of mathematics to the same problem, using those differing viewpoints as leverage to free the solution.

The physical sciences are full of mysteries, seemingly intractable problems suddenly solved by a change in mathematical toolkit. It turns out that understanding our Universe is a function of picking the right mathematical tools for the job, those that describe the problem domain in the simplest way.

I’ve come to view mathematics as a language: a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for the physical Universe itself. Only maths provides the kind of rich syntax that’s required to understand such a mind boggling domain.

That human minds could construct this DSL is a beautiful thing, and the basis of my fascination. For me to understand how to find the right tool might take a while, fortunately there are smarter people around to show me the way.

With the Liberal Democrats and Labour having much more in common, the Tories could be forgiven for thinking that PR would leave them out in the political wilderness forever. At every Election the other two would gang up against them to form a coalition government.

This is why a successful Tory / Liberal Democrat deal could be pivotal. If the Liberal Democrats can prove to the Tory membership that they can work together, that there’s some common ground, it’ll show that PR isn’t the political suicide they suspect.

Such a situation could benefit the Country in the short-term, with the two Parties limiting the extremes of both manifestos through compromise on the Economy, Defence, Education and Environmental policy. The show stopper of Electoral reform could be left for another day.

But reform must come, and there are many Tories, especially those with MEP backgrounds, for whom this holds no fears. But as always you have to win the trust of the majority before progress can be made.

Sacrifices made during current negotiation on the subject of reform could bring greater rewards later in the form of all party support. We pro-reformers may need to exercise a little patience.

The latter is more about good leadership and confidence. That type of strength stems from the ability to compromise without feeling you’re losing control. You know the type of thing… being able to take advice, considering other points of view and adapting to changing conditions when formulating your plans.

And that’s exactly the sort of thing that Cameron and Clegg should be up to now. The greatest test of their ability to lead is lies in coming to some agreement and then winning the support of their respective parties. That’s what’ll determine how ‘strong’ the new Government will be.

We’ve had a long history of majorities yielding dictatorial Prime Ministers: Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and most recently that noted control freak, Gordon Brown. They may have possessed strong positions in Parliament, but considering the results how strong was their Government? Each lead us to their own brand of blinkered disaster: the loss of a balanced Economy, an illegal war in Iraq, and the Credit Crisis.

I voted for the Liberal Democrats—in an ubersafe Conservative seat I might add—to indicate my desire for a hung parliament. The absence of a single dominant party is the way of the future. Manifestos will be statements of Party negotiating position rather than an outright promise to the Electorate, that’s often broken.

The modern society is a complex web of systems in constant flux, it’s not one in which anyone can survive with the entrenched opinions our adversarial system promotes. General Moltke once said that “No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy”, and that’s still just as true.

Flexibility is the key and electoral reform is the way to get it precisely because it’ll ensure that no single party will be dominant again. This doesn’t have to mean perpetually weak government, rather it imposes a responsive approach to politics of which the General would approve.

If our current politicians can’t adapt, we’ll have to find some new ones that will. Cameron and Clegg are both young men that touted the need for change during the election campaign. With long careers ahead of them it’s time to start learning.

But that’s what Human Resource (HR) departments are paid to do. If you think about it though, you can’t honestly expect them to have a clue what most of these jobs entail; especially for technical roles.

If the job description is inaccurate how do you know if the employee in question is actually doing what you’re paying them to do? Perhaps more importantly, how do employees, including you, know what’s expected?

Taking a managerial stance, without supporting documentation you can’t prove a thing in the case of a dispute. So you just have to hope that employees do whatever needs doing to make your business a success: scary stuff for a control freak like me.

Until you realise that it requires trust; your trust in them, and their’s that you value their contribution and that they’ll be fairly treated and rewarded for their efforts. But there’s a catch. Trust becomes much harder to build and maintain as the number of people grows: why do you think no one trusts Politicians.

This makes large companies unruly and essentially unmanageable places, so it’s not a big surprise that most managers give up. If you want progress choose smaller self-determining groups where trust has a chance.

Everyone needs to know each other and believe, really believe that each has something to offer and will do their best. Self-determination is important so that everyone knows the team rules and believes they’ll be dealt with fairly: effort will be rewarded, slacking punished.

Large companies are a focus for funding and fulfil the a necessary role as legislation machines. You can’t take a product to mass market without wading through a morass of quality and safety documentation. Only large organisations can carry the kind of overhead this demands, and this is where their future lies.

Innovation is the province of small agile—with a little ‘A’—organisations. This is a strategy that can be realised by outsourcing, or by thinking differently about corporate structure. Loose alliances of small groups provides the manpower and range of skills to tackle large projects. There’s no reason a company can’t be formed this way.

The future is small, local and agile… choose trust over documentation.

The handles are plastic and after about 20 years the splines that connect them to the tap bodies have started to break up.

I thought I’ll replace them with something a little nicer, chromed metal ones should do. I looked around locally and found just what I was looking for… but you couldn’t buy them without replacement tap bodies as well, in fact you could buy any handles on their own. The Internet supplied the answer in the form of prompt service from Not Just Taps.com.

I suspected that the cold bath tap washer was started to fail last night. Replacing the washer is an easy job I’ve done many times and for which I carry spares, this should only take 5 minutes tomorrow I thought.

Unfortunately once dissembled, it became obvious that the tap body was also shot: I don’t have spares for that, and it took a long walk around town on Sunday to yield a suitable, though not exact, replacement part. Definitely not a 5 minute job!

The point of this post is that in both of these situations finding parts locally was really hard, and frequently a straight replacement was unavailable. But what really struck me was that the cost of the parts was often many times that of a complete new tap!

A mass manufacturer can benefit from economies of scale when producing their product, but are our spares too expensive or the taps too cheap? If the latter is true, doesn’t it encourage waste: throwing away useful products because they’re not worth fixing?

I’ve been talking about my bathroom, but this situation will be familiar to anyone who’s tried to get any consumer product fixed. But it can’t be right… can it?

You see this cloud has appeared and spread relatively rapidly, but it’s a very localised phenomenon by natural standards. Yet it’s shown how vulnerable our developed-world lifestyle is to rapid change.

When talking about sustainability I’m often told how adaptable our species is, and how technology will provide solutions to all our problems, but here is a dust cloud from a modest eruption and there’s nothing we can do but wait.

And wait for at least one more day, or possibly weeks, nobody knows how long it could go on, it all depends on the volcano and the wind. It’s this enigmatic power of our Planet that fills me with wonder; despite our technological prowess we’re never in control.

Apologies to locals who’s lives are seriously affected, I don’t mean to belittle your life changing problems, but it’s a good thing to discover the fragility of our position when the lesson comes from something we can expect to go away… we hope.

But it’s interesting to note that this sort of thing isn’t a surprise, apparently melting ice, and climate change, could make this sort of thing increasingly common.

We can achieve carbon neutrality in the medium term by using nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions, but in the long term fuel stocks are not sustainable. Interestingly, in the medium term nuclear waste is a sustainability problem that disappears with a longer view due to natural radioactive decay. When I say long, I really mean long.

Alternative energy sources like wind and tidal power could be thought of as sustainable and carbon neutral. But that’s because we have no idea of the long term effects on atmospheric and oceanic dynamics, or biodiversity as a result of habitat damage. Of course there may be no such problems, however at this point we can’t definitively declare them as truly sustainable, even if we consider their life cycle to be carbon neutral.

Carbon neutrality is measured over a short time frame, usually even less than the life of a product, and is a relatively instantaneous measure of a single factor, it’s just the carbon cycle. Sustainability has no such limitations in scope, to my mind it encompasses all factors over an infinite time frame. So once again it’s a matter of choosing the right scale, with sustainability being much broader and deeper than it’s apparent twin.

Does this make carbon neutrality a convenient and ultimately meaningless political metric, leaving sustainability as the only really important consideration? I suspect that it’s often ignored because it’s too difficult to address, in part because I fear sustainability in any guise is unachievable whilst so many humans inhabit our World.

a person engaged or qualified in a profession : professionals such as lawyers and surveyors.

• a person engaged in a specified activity, esp. a sport or branch of the performing arts, as a main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
• a person competent or skilled in a particular activity.

I noticed that the emphasis is on two factors: competence and money. Whilst I’d agree that they’re both part of the equation, they’re hardly unique to professional employment, if you don’t have the skills, you’ll eventually lose the job, and then you won’t get paid.

Personally I think this definition is incomplete, in fact it neglects the most important aspects of true professionalism.

Professionalism is a state of mind, or a way of thinking that’s an intrinsic part of certain personalities and can be enhanced by training to affect your whole outlook and approach to life.

Importantly my view frees professionalism from dependency on job titles, qualifications and even money, after all, voluntary or open source work can be approached in a professional manner.

But I’m not flogging the traditional dead horse, you know… the one about being a graduate of the school of life / hard knocks / been doing that since before you were born / <insert your own excuse here>. Qualifications represent knowledge and training that is absolutely necessary to achieve worthwhile objectives. Knowing when they’ll help and picking the right ones is the professional thing to do: continuing professional development is the phrase and higher quality service should be the goal.

But what does professionalism mean in practice? It means treating clients, suppliers and anyone else equitably; delivering on your commitments rather than walking away when you realise you’re going to make a loss; and always striving to produce the best work that the situation permits, why would you do less?

In short, I guess I feel it’s about integrity.

The main limitation on my iPod use is the small size of the display at 480×320 pixels. It makes reading complex documents hard on the eyes, I doubt that my Mum’s eyesight could cope with the iPod at all, but scale the display up to the iPad — 1024×768 pixels — and the story might be very different. It’s probably no mistake that this resolution matches a long established web design standard size, an indication that the App Store isn’t the only way to get content onto the platform.

Web applications can be docked on the Home screen in the same way as Apps, and open the way to a graphically richer experience even without Flash. It also allows closer integration with proprietary database applications on private networks, I guess they’ll need redesigning to be less dependent upon IE6, but even Microsoft would be in favour of that!

We sometimes lose sight of the fact that this restricted platform isn’t aimed at us geeks. We want to customise everything about our desktop environment, and if that’s you want take a look at Linux. In my opinion it’s flexibility has kept Linux from many desktops. I’ve personally been asked to replace perfectly good Linux installations with Windows because it’s unfamiliar and looks really complicated.

This platform is aimed at the often insignificant majority of people that aren’t like us. They just want a simple to use system that works without any special incantations or sacrificing animals at a full moon. Give them a wide range of applications that are stupidly easy to install and an internet connection that doesn’t need fettling and they’ll be happy, and why not.

On the geeky side, the iPhone OS can’t multi-task and some don’t like the fact. As a seasoned iPod Touch user, I’ve found that the single app life can have advantages, it enforces simplicity and robustness in the platform and the user’s activities.

The fact that I can’t open everything at once means that I focus more closely on the task, or the feed, at hand: we could probably all do with more of that. Neither can I have all the usual junk running in the background like it does on my laptop, reducing a quick machine to a crawl. Truly mobile machines need to conserve power and rarely have the extra resources to waste, opting for a single application environment allows modest processors to run like lightning… apparently.

Whilst listening to the conversation about the iPad on the Dev Show from 5by5 it seems that those in the medical profession won’t like the on-screen keyboard of the iPad. Personally I think the iPhone implementation is very slick, but I wouldn’t want to use it for an essay.

Anyhow it transpires that Doctors generally prefer to dictate notes. This could be a driver for another interesting interface: the ability to dictate into text files, the Mac already has limited voice recognition functionality and I believe the iPad specifications include both a microphone and bluetooth.

Dan Benjamin said that he sees the iPad as a platform for content manipulation not creation, and he’s right. You can’t code software on it, or edit images, or even write a book, but you can consume all of these. I can see myself having an iPad to carry on where my iPod Touch leaves off… but not for a couple of iterations, let them fix the bugs first.

There’s no better way to learn a new language than to actually use it in real life. My Nature Notes started as a project for my partner in PHP, CodeIgniter actually, but progress was slow due to an enjoyment deficit.

Testing is the main reason that I grew unhappy with PHP, most of the tools were there, but the integration was patchy: the basics are all there in Ruby and it’s associated development frameworks and integrating new packages via ruby gems or plugins is simple.

I started using the built-in Rails testing tools, but for no particular reason I’ve moved on to RSpec for unit and functional Rails model and standalone Ruby code testing coupled with Cucumber based integration testing. I’ve found that I need both.

Cucumber tests try to exercise the whole software stack – views, controllers, models and even the database. The use of natural language makes it easier to translate user stories into the appropriate tests, though it still needs some discipline to ensure that the edge cases are covered: I don’t think clients could write these as acceptance tests.

Involving the whole stack makes tests a little brittle, how specific is too specific? I’ve managed to break tests by removing fullstops (periods) from the rendered HTML!

I think that this is where unit and functional testing with RSpec at the model level is indispensable. I test model associations, validations and custom business logic in that order, I draw the limit at all the ActiveRecord CRUD functionality.

I’ve found that the development environment hasn’t really changed in the move, the same basic toolkit does PHP and Ruby.

I regularly use several code version control systems including Subversion, Git and Mercurial. Recently though I’ve increasingly turned to Git and GitHub. Like most good tools the more you use it the more attached you become, so I’ll have to force myself to use the equally fine Mercurial again soon. I love these distributed tools.

TextMate is my editor of choice for Rails development. I’ve tried to use Netbeans IDE, I use this for Java, but it seems like overkill. TextMate is quicker, simpler and provides the tools I need via the a range of bundles.

I have to admit that the code syntax highlighting is the most useful feature because I like using the command line too much, but I’m increasingly using code completion and I’m going to try the Zen coding bundles for HTML and CSS, I don’t like the default tools much.

That’s a round up of my current practice, more about the resulting software once I’ve decided to move on to a public beta.

It’s a funny thing, but I found myself interacting with the people around me, you know, greeting other walkers as we passed and generally talking about whatever comes to mind. It’s probably one of those adversity effects, bringing us closer together by sharing a problem, but it also seemed that everyone was in less of a hurry, kind of resigned to a slower pace of life.

Something about the snow deadening the sound, and it’s effect on the speed of any remaining traffic, made everything appear more peaceful, a strange sensation considering the underlying chaos being reported in the news.

But much of the chaos is associated with the working lives of the Nation. Both my partner and I used to commute over 50 miles a day. I can still remember saving holiday, snow days, for when the weather sprung nasty surprised like this, and although Clare was lucky with snow, she fell foul of flooding and spend a whole day getting home one Easter.

But now I work from home and she works at a local company only a 12 minute walk away. This took a radical reshaping of our lifestyle, but we’re in the position of being able to save a lot of money and view the weather with ambivalence.

This lead me to question whether more people could work in a remote distributed manner, at least part of the time, developing this practice so that when events made travel dangerous they could continue with their routine, not having to worry about childcare for example.

I’ve had colleagues that viewed working from home with the same enthusiasm as they would a prison sentence, and for those maybe local satellite offices, or shared work spaces would be a better option.

More work can be done remotely than most companies care to admit, but that still leaves those not employed in offices.

Would more people be willing to move closer to their workplace if relocating weren’t so expensive? I’m not sure, but it seems logical to me that those being relocated would have more incentive if their expenses were dependent on their proximity to work, companies do pay relocation don’t they?

This is my view of the future of work in Britain, obviously coloured by all my commuting prejudices, but it’ll need better digital connectivity and a rise in fuel costs to be realised. Clearly I think it’d be a change for the better… I’m not sure everyone would agree.

We write down the environmental and ethical values we consider to reflect our lives. I’ve was informed that this is a Personal Social Responsibility (PSR) plan, apparently.

I suspect that this may be construed as a little anal, but if we actually have to write something we’ll have to ask explicit questions like:

• What should we be doing?
• Why do we believe in these things?
• Will we achieve what we expect?
• Do our actual actions reflect these stated beliefs?

I suspect we’ll discover some uncomfortable facts about the reality of our past actions. We may have to change the way we do things in the future, but I hope it’ll give us a framework for these decisions.

Then came the Credit Crisis and the market slump associated with the attendant global recession. Suddenly oil was relatively cheap again, and that brief period filled with innovative spirit seemed to turn to scepticism over the economic impact of carbon taxes. Nations became absorbed in their own relative competitiveness rather than the impact their actions would have on all of us.

Political posturing, and I’m looking at all you NGOs too, has turned climate change is a charged topic. Whilst the majority of people don’t care at all, those that do tend to be entrenched believers or sceptics; the depth of feeling seems to approach religious intensity. Unfortunately the real issue is masked by this squabble over carbon: we waste valuable resources by thoughtless pursuit of an unsustainable lifestyle, and one day we’ll by neck high in rubbish with little left to show for it.

I live in the UK and I’m guilty of doing my part to wipe out our species. Whilst I’m one of those that try to minimise my purchases and recycle whatever I can, a grossly unpatriotic position in the current economic climate, the standard of living I enjoy is plainly unsustainable. Those in other countries have just as much right to experience a similar standard of living, but that would accelerate our decline.

Alternative lifestyles are going to have to be adopted if we’re to experience more than a hellish existence on this planet, but the alternative needn’t be a poor compromise. It’s possible that there are better ways to live with a lighter footprint – and it’s not just about carbon – if we choose to look for them and consider our actions:

• What to buy and why I need it?
• Where does it come from and how much do I need?
• What I eat and how it’s produced?
• How many children I chose to have and what will their impact be in the future?
• Where I look for work and how our companies operate?

But how does this relate to my Copenhagen disappointment?

In the end I concluded that I’d no right to expect such a meeting of politicians from diverse cultures to achieve anything significant. I believe that modern government isn’t designed to produce results, it’s intended to generate a safe level of inertia that keeps us from civil war, and in this it’s been supremely successful for centuries.

Even during periods of party political unity – mostly during world wars – government hasn’t driven progress, it’s the actions of the individual, or small groups, that have made the difference, with government usually very late to the game.

And this is where my regret led me; political action and public protest isn’t the answer, the future lies in the decisions we all make as individuals about our lives at home and as part of the corporate world. Governments can’t change the World, but we could.

During resulting extinction events, the number of higher species is radically reduced, along with the number of individuals of the surviving species, making more space for evolution to act in the context of the prevailing environmental conditions.

It’s this relationship with our environment that may be the reason we evolved into our current form. Given our complexity and attendant vulnerability, the evolutionary response to our unpredictable world was to produce a more adaptable and flexible form.

Walking upright freed our hands and coupled to a bigger brain has allowed us to develop existing tool use and problem solving skills. In the natural world we’re puny creatures, but adaptation is our greatest asset, but one that can be applied in two ways.

Millions of years have passed and we’ve become accustomed to altering the inconvenient parts of our environment rather than adapting to new conditions, but one day we’ll come to a point where the magnitude of change is too great.

It’s inevitable that the current abnormal period of climate stability will come to an end, and my concern is that we’ve become too numerous and rigid in our social organisation to apply the fruits of our evolution to the task of rapid adaptation.

We’ve become optimisers rather than innovators, trying to extract every last drop instead of searching for different solutions. We assess everything in terms of it’s cash price and expend our efforts in developing new regulations. We fail to find the important solutions when we need them, should we be surprised?

Imagination is the best part of being human, and it needs time and intellectual freedom to thrive, commodities I’ve found to be increasingly rare in our modern world. A return to uncertainty may be what our species really needs to rediscover it’s full potential.

The exiled Shah of Iran was reputed to have said Oil is too valuable to burn… There are more important uses for oil than burning it to produce energy, for God’s sake!.

He was right, fossil fuel based products are the basis of our modern lifestyle; pharmaceuticals, plastics, fertilisers, and huge range of products we rely on daily use oil and coal as a feedstock, and yet we squander this resource to burn for heat, power and transportation.

Without recycling we’d end up burning or burying these commodities, and using even more to replace what we’d just thrown away. I suppose one day we can resort to mining the old landfill sites for the valuable plastics they contain.

It strikes me that the climate change argument appears to be primarily over the concern for wasted money, but money is negotiable, we’ve all witnessed how effortlessly it can be created and destroyed. The natural resources we discard every day aren’t so easily manipulated, once they’ve gone, they’ve gone, money is a virtual resource, we can always make more.

It feels like I’m starting from the top of the software stack and working down from broad specifications, creating code as I go, rather than up from fine grained models based on specific unit tests. Is this a reductionist approach?

When writing my features and scenarios I’ve noticed a tendency to follow the CRUD acronym common in data access layers: Create Read Update and Delete. The order of these processes is significant and my reasoning goes something like this……

I can’t really expect to read the contents of an entity before I’ve generated the code to create it. Now I’ve created it, I’m not going to try to edit this same entity unless I can actually read it. I can read what I’ve got, but I might want to edit those contents, and delete comes last…… because it just does, I guess the order of “UD” is negotiable, but this way it’s easier to pronounce.

You get the general picture, but this is just the approach I’ve adopted through trial and lots of error. It’s far from perfect, so how do you use behaviour to lead the code?

This complete, I pushed the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack upgrade disc into the drive, and after a quick read, I’d signed away my life to Apple, pressed the install button, and found something else to do for the next hour.

I’d checked that all my key applications were compliant with Snow Leopard before I started, so the mainstream upgrade process was pretty painless: very promising for my chances of surviving my next upgrade.

I also remembered to install Xcode and the developer tools, vital for the next step.

The Pain of the Developer.

The problems started with the developer environment I’ve become accustom to using: PHP and Ruby. I started to wonder whether a clean install might have been a better idea.

I’m happy using the bundled Apache and PHP at the moment; these have been upgraded to versions 2.2.11 and 5.3 respectively, so there’s no major drama until they need to connect to MySQL.

Conversely, I prefer to build the majority of my tools from source in the /usr/local directory: MySQL, Ruby, RubyGems and Git.

Dan Benjamin has a great set of posts to help you do this, but he starts with a clean install, and if you’re upgrading it might not go so smoothly. Here are a few pointers gleaned from the Web and personal experience.

A new MySQL build.

I’ve been using version 5.0.51a for a while and decided to upgrade to 5.1.39 as part of the whole process. The first step was to create a dumpfile of the old database to upload into the new version:

mysqldump --opt -uroot -p --all-databases > currentdatabasedump.sql

In my experience, following Dan’s instructions gives great results, but I install each version into its own directory and symbolic link the one I want to use:

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12 28 Oct 16:05 mysql -> mysql-5.1.39
drwxr-xr-x 12 root wheel 408 28 Oct 13:24 mysql-5.0.51a
drwxr-xr-x 10 root wheel 340 28 Oct 16:07 mysql-5.1.39


Now to load the old databases into the new management system, so I logged in as root:

mysql -uroot

notice there’s no password yet, and from the mysql command line I loaded the contents of the dumpfile:

source path/to/dumpfile/currentdatabasedump.sql;

Finally, the databases need to be checked for incompatibilities and upgraded:

mysql_upgrade

and the database was acting like the old one, with the expected users and passwords assigned.

Why PHP still can’t use MySQL.

Snow Leopard doesn’t come with a php.ini file, so I copied /etc/php.ini.default to /etc/php.ini, but this file still needed a little modification to work with MySQL.

I changed all the occurrences of /var/mysql/mysql.sock to /tmp/mysql.sock, restarted Apache and my local WordPress installations were back in action, but MediaWiki wasn’t.

At this point the irony of having my troubleshooting notes in the form of a local wiki struck home, fortunately an upgrade to MediaWiki version 1.15.1 solved the problem.

Building Ruby, Rails and Gems.

I based my attempt on Dan’s instructions, and this time I was greeted by a series of make errors from readline.

Rob Seaman sums them up nicely and making the suggested adjustments to config.h allowed me to complete the installation.

I also tried to uninstall readline, but this only resulted in more errors, so pragmatically I upgraded to readline 6.0, and stuck to with the file modifications; must solve this problem one day…

Back to Dan for RubyGems, and installing the MySQL gem, and the first leg of the job was complete.

Rebuilding all the other gems.

Time to upgrade every gem, and gem update won’t do the job, they all need to be reinstalled. I picked up this handy line of Ruby code that can be run in irb from Victor Costan’s blog:

`gem list`.each_line {|line| system "sudo gem install #{line.split.first}"}

It executes the gem install command for every gem on your existing local list, and it was at this point that I noticed that the arrow keys were behaving strangely in irb.

It turns out that the readline extension isn’t installed along with the rest of Ruby:

cd /usr/local/src/ruby-1.8.7-p174/ext/readline
ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install


should fix the problem.

The fly in the ointment.

Everything was going great, but whilst building the Nokogiri gem I ran into more errors. As Roger Neel worked out, I also tracked the problem to MacPorts, and the thing is that I can’t remember why it’s installed in the first place! So I took a risk, cloned first of course, and removed all traces of MacPorts:

sudo port -f uninstall installed

No good, MacPorts was too broken to uninstall itself, so next I took the direct approach:

sudo rm -rf /opt/local \
/Applications/MacPorts \
/Applications/DarwinPorts \
/Library/Tcl/macports1.0 \
/Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.* \
/Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup \
/Library/Receipts/MacPorts*.pkg \
/Library/Receipts/DarwinPorts*.pkg \
~/.macports


Gone, and with it the Nokogiri compilation errors, I can’t help wondering whether I’ll regret this step later… when I figure out why I installed it in the first place.

Building and installing Passenger.

Like all the gems, Passenger needs to be rebuilt using the new gcc compiler bundled with Xcode. My original Passenger configuration file disappeared from the /etc/apache2/other directory during the upgrade, so I made a new one:

-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 73 18 May 20:44 bonjour.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 287 28 Oct 20:06 passenger.conf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 194 18 May 20:44 php5.conf


This file contains the configuration instructions given at the end of the Passenger installation invoked by:

passenger-install-apache2-module

And Git.

Followed Dan’s recommendations and there were no problems.