bishopeous

Following up on the idea that limits we put on ourselves can fuel creativity, Tony Morgan has posted the following quote from Jason Fried, cofounder of 37signals (Wired, 25th Feb 2008):

"Remember — size does matter: A small group of 10 great people will outproduce, outwork, outthink a large group of 50 average people."

Is sticking to small teams a constraint that helps rather than hinders? Is a team of 10 average people better than a team of 50 average people? I’d say yes - it’s impossible to relate to all 50 people in any meaningful way. With 10, you’re in with a chance of building a team instead of a crowd…

For more about How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams, check out Jason’s presentation.

As an architect I spend a fair amount of time presenting. Over time I’ve gathered together a number of tools and resources to help me create them. You can find the ones I use regularly on the "Liberating Ideas" Squidoo lens here. It would be great to hear about yours - feel free to share them in the comments.

Photo Credit: Exploring an idea by jjay @ flickr

The idea that imposing limits (or constraints) fuels creativity has cropped up a few times recently. First time was in Garr Reynold’s book on presentations. Second time was in an Unclutterer post on writing. I’m not sure why this should be a surprising concept to me as we have been using self imposed limitations (or patterns) for a number of years in software engineering.

Note: DarkRoom, the windows version of WriteRoom mentioned by Unclutterer can be found here.

With all the announcements around OpenID recently, I’ve gone and got myself one. This really is an interesting proposition because it separates out the more difficult problem of trust from identity. The public sector is also looking at federated identity. What could we learn from OpenID and it’s meteoric rise? 

One of the projects I am working on is a Standards Information Base (SIB) to support our enterprise architecture work. As this is a relatively small implementation project we’ve taken the opportunity to introduce Ruby on Rails. The following recipe documents how we have set up our development environment for rails on Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2. It may not be the most elegant solution but it fits nicely with the range of other dev tools we have installed. This is part one of a four part series. Follow all four parts and you will have everything you need to develop and deploy a rails application.

The first part in this recipe is about getting the basics in place: ruby, rails, a web server, a database and a development tool.

Install InstantRails

The first thing to do is to download the latest version of InstantRails (currently version 1.5). This gives you ruby, rails, apache and mysql packaged up and ready to run. All you need to do is unzip the contents to a local drive. This folder will hold all the Ruby on Rails related applications. It is a good idea to make sure that you use a location that has no spaces in the path as this will, at some point, break something. For this recipe we’re placing the folder in the root of the C drive:

C:\\InstantRails

Later in the recipe we install RadRails. To help in running it from InstantRails’ ruby console you need to change the following line in InstantRails\conf_files\use_ruby.cmd

PATH ${path}\\ruby\\bin;${path}\\mysql\\bin;%PATH%

to

PATH ${path}\\ruby\\bin;${path}\\mysql\\bin;${path}\\radrails;%PATH%

At this point you need to rename the InstantRails directory. This will force InstantRails to apply the change in the path to the relevant files. Rename the InstantRails directory to RubyOnRails

C:\\RubyOnRails

This is now the root directory for your rails dev environment. For the rest of the recipe this directory is referred to as RubyOnRails.

InstantRails is now ready to run. Run InstantRails.exe and you should see something like this:

It is a good idea to check that RubyOnRails\use_ruby.cmd is correct. You should have something that looks like this:

:------------------------- WARNING ! ----------------------
:         This file is GENERATED by Instant Rails.
:
: If you need to make changes to this file, you should edit
: the source template file instead. The source template is
: C:\\RubyonRails\\conf_files\\use_ruby.cmd
:-----------------------------------------------------------
CD C:\\RubyonRails
PATH C:\\RubyonRails\\ruby\\bin;C:\\RubyonRails\\mysql\\bin;C:\\RubyonRails\\radrails;%PATH%
cd rails_apps
dir

I have found that sometimes the ${path} in RubyOnRails\conf_files\use_ruby.cmd is not expanded out properly when it is copied to RubyOnRails\use_ruby.cmd by InstantRails. You may need to manually edit it just to make sure that the paths are correct. If you make any changes, restart InstantRails. Once running, hit F2 to start the apache and mysql servers.

Install RadRails

RadRails is an eclipse-based IDE for Ruby on Rails. To run it you need to have version 1.4.2 or later of the Java runtime installed:

C:\\RubyOnRails> java -version

RadRails comes in two flavours: as a standalone version with eclipse included, and as a set of updates for an existing eclipse installation. For this recipe, we’ll use the standalone version so we don’t introduce problems with other tools that use eclipse. Download the latest version (currently version 0.7.2) and unzip it into your RubyOnRails directory. The directory should now look something like this:

Run RadRails:

c:\\RubyOnRails> radrails

You shouldn’t need to change any of the ruby settings in RadRails unless you installed ruby separately. Details of what you need to do can be found here: http://www.radrails.org/blog/2006/9/16/radrails-0-7-1-and-windows-xp-how-to-configure

Install HeidiSQL

InstantRails does not include a graphical management tool for the MySQL database. This is easily fixed by downloading and installing the latest version of HeidiSQL (currently Version 3 RC4), an open source interface for MySQL. This will install in the Windows default location (probably C:\Program Files). Once installed you can try and connect:

The MySQL server running in InstantRails is configured with the username root. The password is blank.

A note about changing the username/password for MySQL in InstantRails

In short, don’t. Everything seems to break if you do. The only thing you must remember to do is to set a proper username/password for your production server.

Get the documentation together

If you don’t have a PDF reader installed you will need to do that before going any further. You can find the Adobe reader here, but there are others available.
Create a directory for the documentation in the RubyOnRails directory, something like RubyOnRails/docs will do nicely. Download the following and put it in your docs directory:

1. Ruby documentation bundle
2. Ruby programming course 
3. Humble little ruby book
4. Why’s poignant guide to ruby
5. Rails api. Download the latest zip file and then copy the doc/api directory into your doc directory.
6. Rails cheatsheet
7. 4 Days on Rails tutorial
8. Version control with Subversion
9. MySQL Manual

Agile Web Development with Rails - Second Edition

Unlike the documentation above, this book costs money. It is worth the investment as it will take you through all the steps of putting together a rails app, something that this recipe doesn’t do. You can purchase the PDF version here: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails/index.html

In the next part, we will look at installing some ruby gems.

I’ve just finished reading a post about “google juice” - the effect of having a high ranking in google search results. This is something I worked hard on when getting the ISS4PS website up and running.  In his post, Fred makes the following comment:

But Google Juice is not a perfect system by a long shot. Everytime I see this effect and I see it a lot, I think two thoughts. The first is that I can’t ever change my domain and the second is that there’s a lot more headroom in search.

In reality it is not just your domain you can’t change if you want to maintain your google juice, it is all the services you rely on to. Take a look at Fred’s post, his top ranked result is actually a link to his feedburner feed.  So now, in the world of search, moving your feed provider is as fatal as changing your domain name…

I currently have a few things in my to_read folder:

• Everyone’s an Expert by Seth Godin
• Killer Flagship Content by Chris Garrett
• Chapter 9 of the book Clear Blogging by Bob Walsh

Great reading really does help the train journey to and from the office pass a lot quicker.

Lorelle shows love to the WordPress community:

I have a confession. I love WordPress Plugin authors. I worship the ground you float over. Without you, our WordPress blogs would be boring, ineffectual, and, well, just not the same.

Before reminding us that it is the simple things that make customers happy:

Your WordPress Plugins are invaluable, so make them invaluable to us by following a few simple guidelines when you write and promote your WordPress Plugins.

I thought that WordPress was not sending trackbacks and pings. It turns out that Windows Live Writer was the culprit - well, OK it was me not filling in the right boxes in Live Writer. I assumed that WordPress would do all its great automatic trackback magic when I posted with Live Writer. This isn’t so. You need to fill out the trackback box at the bottom of the page

You also need to set up pings on the preferences page (tools -> preferences)

This site gives a run down on WordPress pings and a WordPress installation for testing pings and trackbacks.

Agile and lean are two themes the public sector will be looking at over the next year. So it’s great to see that a blog has just started that is looking at both!