Name-based Virtual Host Support is another piece of the puzzle that I'm going to need in the near future - making Apache serve two Web sites from the same server. Hopefully figuring out how to use Mongrel behind the scenes with both sites won't make it much more difficult.

This morning I had to hunt down Copying a MySQL Database From One Machine to Another in the course of moving a Rails app from a development server to a production server, as I didn't feel like re-entering a bunch of data (and I hadn't used data migrations to put the data in the database in the first place).

This just goes to remind me of two things about this career transition:

1. There are a zillion things that I know how to do in the Microsoft universe (like copying databases from one server to another) that I need to relearn as I move sideways to a world of other software. This is a cost above and beyond whatever I spend on new hardware and software and directly learning my new core competency.


2. Fortunately, it's all out on the net somewhere, and I'm darned good at hunting things down quickly.

As you've probably noticed, things have changed around here. I've migrated the site from ozimodo to Mephisto . While the new software does look much spiffier, the main driver for this was simple: Mephisto supports comments out of the box. I've been getting a rather surprising (to me, at least) amount of e-mail over my postings on this site. Now you folks can play along right here and everyone can benefit from the back-and-forth. At least, that's the plan.

Rails 1.2 is out although I really doubt that anyone is reading the news here for the first time. I'm not done learning the previous version yet so I can just sort of roll right in to the new features when I get there, I guess. I also need to take a good look at Mike Clark's Managing Rails Versions with Capistrano when I get the chance.

There's that old saying about being able to recognize the pioneers because they're the ones with the arrows in their backs. So it was nice to wake up this morning and read Maybe it’s time to try something new, or maybe it’s the drugs over on Jon Rowett's blog, and see someone else joining the ferment of discontent that I'm a part of. I wouldn't say that any huge part of the .NET community is jumping ship, but it's nice to not be all alone in exploring.

Luke's Free Stock Photography Search Site

With the arrival of the new monitor the hardware buying binge is complete. Now I've settled in for some more serious development. I spent a couple of hours yesterday working with Rails on the Mac, poking along at my first "real" (as opposed to tutorial) application. I'm not ready to announce it yet, but hopefully I'll have something to show off within a week or two.

Rails development continues to agree with me. Lots to learn but the pieces fit together in a sensible manner.

I'm proceeding up the Mac learning curve reasonably well, with pauses to try to hunt down tools and utilities I need. There's not nearly as many choices on the Mac side as on the Windows side, but I knew that going in. Perhaps that will translate to market opportunity for me at some point.

A reader wrote to ask how many hours a day my personal "20% time" comes to. I've been allocating not less than an hour a day to this effort. Now that I have the dev environment set up, I expect to up that to two hours most days. As the year goes on and I transition into whatever my new career turns out to be, hopefully that will grow.

Piston lets you have your cake and eat it too by making it easy to manage bits of external Subversion repositories in your local repository.

Exception Notifier Plugin for Rails can send e-mail on any exception in a running app.

A clean slate, Edge Rails recipe is a useful set of instructions for getting a new Rails app set up for development with Edge Rails. I'm happy to see that I've gotten far enough along to understand which parts of it I can change for my own environment and preferences, too.

Daddy, someone took a bite out of your new computer.

- Thomas Gunderloy

Well, the new Mac is here and happily chugging along. I haven't started coding on it yet, though I have installed a batch of software. A few initial thoughts:

• It sure is purty, in an industrial design sort of way. But I suspect it could have been $50 cheaper if the case wasn't so overdesigned, and the keyboard and mouse frankly suck as far as I'm concerned (your ergonomic preferences may vary of course). I'm almost certainly going to pitch the Mighty Mouse in favor of a decent trackball. Unfortunately Unicomp doesn't make a Mac keyboard, so I don't know what I'm going to do in that department.


• OS X is reasonably easy to transition to, but I was surprised at the lack of any obvious "start here" introduction for new users. People who say it's intuitive are full of poop (just like the people who say the same thing about Windows).


• Some things, like getting hooked up to the Internet via my wireless access point, did indeed just work. But they just work in Windows these days too.


• James Duncan Davidson's Guide for Installing Rails on Mac worked perfectly after I tracked down one broken link.

Much more to come, I'm sure.

Looks like I'll be needing these links in a day or two:

• Right Way to Install Rails on Mac OS X?


• Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger


• Sandboxing Rails With MacPorts

Refactoring, Ruby Edition is the permanent home for the book project I mentioned a couple of days ago.

Well, I've done several things lately to make progress on my quest to invent a new career not involving Microsoft:

1. I let my current boss know that I expected not to be with the company past early 2008.


2. I spent a bundle of money on a new Mac (which should be here on Monday).


3. I've let the publishers I've been writing articles for know that I'm not interested in continuing to tackle Microsoft-related topics. This means an immediate income drop, but on the flipside it frees up some time.


4. I've started setting aside a solid, real, uninterrupted hour a day to work on new stuff - my equivalent of Google's "20% time," more or less. The past few days this time has gone to brainstorming on a few ideas for relatively small applications that I can (I hope) build with Ruby on Rails as a way to get some hands-on time in that environment. Next week I plan to pick one and start building.

To sum it up, I've been slowly snipping away my safety net, in the hopes of forcing myself into a new world. With any luck, this strategy will work.

How to paginate, sort and search a table with Ajax and Rails (via dzone) - I'm starting to noodle around with a little app where this might come in handy.

Jay Fields is tackling a rewrite of the classic Refactoring book to use Ruby as its language (with Martin Fowler's permission). Here's the announcement, and here's the first example bit.

Like a lot of other geeks, I paid some attention to the keynote at MacWorld yesterday. Though nothing announced there really interested me (oh, the iPhone looks like a fairly sexy bit of engineering, though it's a perplexingly stupid decision to not let users install their own software on it, but I don't carry a cel phone), I hopped over to the Apple store yesterday afternoon anyhow. That's because I was just waiting to see if there was any changes in the Mac Pro lineup before ordering one.

So, a couple weeks from now I should have a Mac sitting on (well, under) my desk along with the Windows and Linux boxes. I also splurged a bit and treated myself to a new Dell 24" monitor. I figure I'm going to cover about half the cost of this system by not renewing my MSDN subscription this year. Now it's time to get serious about spending a couple hours each day working on new skills.

Capistrano 1.3.1 is another piece I need to spend more time grokking.

If just installing Vista isn't enough for you, you can buy the Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Signature Edition, a limited numbered edition signed by Bill Gates. Didn't this sort of thing go out of fashion with Joseph Stalin?