Markjuh

I just accidentally copied some files to the wrong location and in turn destroyed the already existing files… As a result of this, I lost my entry of what I did yesterday (which was on my notebook) and I lost all of my bookmarks on my desktop. The entry of yesterday’s work is unfortunate, but not unrepairable. But my bookmarks… Damn! Lost hundreds of handy bookmarks. Especially losing locations of HTML/CSS-related stuff and homepages of people bugs me.

Anyway, let me first recover - briefly – what I did yesterday. I installed a virtual desktop program to make my working experience even more fun. Then I was confronted with all kinds of package-stuff I was taking for granted on my Debian systems.

For example, installing a new version of MySQL on my machine. Installing the new version is not much of a problem, but purging the old package… There is just no predefined way of doing that, so the simplest solution is just to keep it hanging around and let it clog up your system.

Furthermore I had an issue with Ruby-FCGI. It seems the default Ruby-installation doesn’t come with that on MacOS X. No wonder I couldn’t get Rails to work. So I had to go and fetch the source, apply patches, build and install it myself. Quite annoying when you are used to automatically having dependencies coming along with your installation. Even installing the gems-version of Rails didn’t automatically download the gem of this library.

Of course there was no FCGI-version of PHP - which is needed for most webservers that don’t include their own PHP-module – installed on MacOS X, so I had to build that myself too. No package for phpmyadmin either, so I found out that the Debian package actually fills in quite a sane default for the config file (which I now had to do by hand).

There are some things that just work though. X11-support for MacOS X is just marvellous and installing and using The GIMP is quite easy that way. And once you get the hang of it, the default terminal that comes with MacOS X is quite usable too - after configuring default window size and keybindings – .

It didn’t feel like much work, but I had been working from 8:30 to around 17:15.Anyway, back to work.

I had set my alarm around 7:00, but I still felt pretty tired, so I slept until around 7:55. I got up, put some bread into the oven and sat down behind my computer. During breakfast I played around with Squirrelmail, but wasn’t quite as charmed by it as I thought I would be, so I switched to Thunderbird. I used it to send an email to Marc Voorhoeve, who will be my guide from university to help my out during my internship, to ask him what I needed to do for my report on this whole project. I got a reply later that day and with the help of some documents online and some of the reports class-mates had made, I started to set up the main document layout. After identifying risks and countermeasures, I filled in the guidelines for the rest of the document.

Furthermore, I noticed Rails was updated to version 0.11, which includes all kinds of new nifty features. I won’t repeat what is new, Rails 0.11.0: Ajax, Pagination, Non-vhost, Incoming mail lays it all out for you. It will also contain a link to a movie about the new Ajax-feature, which basically makes it possible to make web-applications more interactive (more like “normal” applications).

Somehow it felt like I’ve been doing quite a bit, but somehow I don’t feel as accomplished as yesterday. But I guess I also have to get used to the dynamics of working at home. At least it was nice to listen to some uplifting music by VNV Nation and some soothing music by Vangelis.

This morning around 8:30, I started the first day of my internship at Fingertips in Amsterdam.

Basically, I’ve been busy setting up my working environment all day. I’m finally in the fortunate position to work with MacOS X (panther) and although I still have to get used to some things, I must say that I really like working with this system. After completing the system installation and required updated, I continued with QuickSilver. Now that is an application I’m going to miss when I’m working my days at home. Once you get the hang of it - say in about 10 minutes – you really speed up your work - and I’m not even scratching the surface of all the functionality – .

To keep it short, I’ve got everything ready for the work I need to do. Just have to find a decent RSS/Atom-feedreader and fix a permissions problem with the Rails/lighttpd combination.

Left work around 17:30 with an accomplished feeling and some regrets that I have to work with Linux at home.