The Mongrel HOWTO was a big help too.

Things will probably be messy here for a bit...I'm running the default ozimodo theme while I catch up on posting some links and notes. After that I may turn my painfully deficient design skills to making it look a bit nicer. But information before style.

Installing Rails, Apache 2.2, and Mongrel on Ubuntu Dapper 64-bit ended up being the best guide I found to getting most of the bits I needed on the server for this stuff.

This Google Groups post saved me. It certainly wasn't obvious to me what the problem was.

Shoveling Rails tipped me off as to why I couldn't connect to my spiffy new server - wrong openssl.

Bluefish Editor is the best I could find for CSS editing on Linux on short notice, and it's not great for that purpose. What's better?

Visual Database Explorer in Ruby looks nice and was done with very little code. (via dzone)

MySQL Commands

The last time I completely walked off a job and started over with a new career was around 1992, when I shut down the publishing business I'd built around FACTSHEET FIVE. After a while I ended up writing software, and writing about software, for a living. I've spent the bulk of the last fifteen years developing some amount of reputation and expertise in the Microsoft universe, having published dozens of books and hundreds of articles, worked as an editor and consultant, written (as a subcontractor) parts of various Microsoft products, and so on. I'm also the editor of the Larkware site, which tracks news in the Microsoft software world for developers.

Unfortunately, over that time I've also come to the conclusion that, even though it is staffed largely by smart and ethical people, Microsoft itself represents a grave threat to the future of software development through its increasing inclination to stifle competition through legal shenanigans. Its recent attempt to claim that no one can implement a user interface that looks anything like the Office 2007 ribbon without licensing some nebulous piece of intellectual property represents a new low in this regard.

I'm in a bit of a bind. Unlike fifteen years ago, I've got a family, including four kids, and I can't afford to just walk out on a career that brings in good money. But I rather desperately want to find an alternative. This blog will record some of my explorations as I hunt around in other corners of the software world, trying to decide if there's a viable business plan for me that can include weaning myself off of Microsoft software.