dave-smith.co.uk

So in this my first year of being a gun for hire I’ve done quite well, I’ve managed to keep the family fed and watered (well provided the money to do so) and in the house, and all is good. However as of this week I have nothing lined up for 2012, time to get talking.

So if you read this post, (Hello) and need someone with all sorts of technical ability (Programming and IT Infrastructure) then let me know, you’ll make me very happy and directly impact Iona and Nell’s Christmas.

So if you can’t do it for me, then do it for the kids

Ok so joking apart if you know me, which is probably the only reason to read this blog, and have a need for me let me know, if you’ve stumbled across this blog through some horrific Google searching accident and in some happy coincidence have a need for a programmer or IT person then get in touch and we can talk.

Maybe the dullest subject line ever but it took me a while to get Ruby 1.9.3 installed on my laptop and so here to help me in the future is the secret sauce.

This is all on a Lion based machine (clean build, not an upgraded machine)

Download and install XCode from the AppStore
Install RVM:

$ bash < <( curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm )

Update your .bash_profile

$ echo '[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ' >> ~/.bash_profile

Reload .bash_profile (or close and re-open terminal)

$ source .bash_profile

Install Ruby 1.9.3

$ rvm install 1.9.3 --with-gcc=clang

Set Ruby 1.9.3 to be your default

$ rvm --default 1.9.3

And check using

$ ruby -v

And then install Rails

$ rvm install rails

So if you code or write and create text files on the Mac the chances are you use the excellent Textmate to do it, and if you do and you haven’t already, you should upgrade your Textmate experience using this to make it pretty and work better.

As an added bonus the icon is changed to look like a moleskin note book.

It’s funny how life works out, at the start of the year I had a vision in my mind of what Wirewool would be, and what it could do, but then as time progressed things changed and the needs and wants of my few clients and my various attempts at networking changed things, instead of becoming some kind of loose collection of talented digital and marketing savvy individuals working for a common goal, it became me. The work I do now is all about me, all about applying the skills I’ve learnt over the years, and I found that my initial thoughts on what I wanted Wirewool to be made me make some stupid decisions. I almost invented time travel to go back in time to 1999 and also forgot to trust my gut feelings, silly. However various discussions with other people and some interesting projects along the way and things are working better, I’ve managed to step back from the problems caused by the earlier choices I made and I’ve stopped my time travelling ways.

Now I’m ensuring that everything I do uses my existing experience, but more importantly builds on it for the better, best of all at the moment I’m back doing some coding (on one of my contracts) and so I’m creating, rather than just getting grumpy and stressed at people.

Wirewool looks like it is all about me, but still is about working with other talented digital and marketing savvy individuals so as Today I Should and Wicked Wolf oh and maybe just maybe I’ll get the Wirewool site sorted soon!

So there are times where I’m still in denial about the path my career has taken and every now and then I start “tinkering” so I’ve gone back to playing a bit with Symfony Project so using the Pear method to install I was soon up and running, to get it working properly I’d also chucked in a virtual host config into Apache, and then a bit later realised I couldn’t access any of my local sites elsewhere, no default vhost…

So did a quick bit of hunting around for some suggestions on a good vhost setup on osx and came across this.

*sorted*

Oh and for the record I’m using Entropy PHP5 and got the various bits working by replacing the standard php in /usr/bin by symbolic linking the ones in /usr/local/php5/bin

of bored geeks.

Although I’m generally too busy to be bored in my current role I miss the coding, and in fact my biggest concern prior to switching to the Sysadmin (dark) side was that I wouldn’t be coding any more, but it was all right I kidded myself, I’ll get some done while travelling….

Yeah, right.

So while sitting in the hotel room idling surfing I thought I’d get some tinkering done (on the laptop) and have a look at a few things.

So I’ve now got PHP 5.x running with Symfony installed to play with, but then I thought why stop there, why not have a look at Ruby so after reading this I now have a Ruby dev environment to play with.

Now on with the tutorials…. (after a sleep!)