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Jumping Ship

I’ve abandonded Windows.

There, I’ve said it. I’ve been using some form of Windows since 3.1, but the time has come to say goodbye. Actually, the time came to say goodbye like, a year ago, but it had become kind of absurd lately. I spend my work day on Linux (SuSE 10.0), and then I’d come home and stare at Windows loading tray applet after tray applet… when you find youself screaming “Sweet mother of God, why would you not have proper pipes” at your operating system, and wisfully staring at package managers, it’s time to switch.

Tycho nails the feeling:

I have edited autoexec.bat files in order to optimize the amount of available conventional memory, and I liked doing it, liked being the sort of person who could. As a PC user, enduring the grotesqueries of that experience is something that we are actually proud of. It’s come a long way since then, jokes about “blue screens” and what not ring like tired vaudeville acts. But those struggles were certainly real, the battle wounds considerable, and now the skin has grown over it and to a certain extent we think this is just how it is.

While Tycho goes looking for the easy mode, I don’t mind editing config files, compiling things, etc. I’m a programmer, after all. But I don’t want my efforts to be in vain. I want to be able to tweak my box into silky-smooth perfection, not spend hours trying to get the bastard number of system tray blinkenlights down to slightly less than a third of my screen without also uninstalling an important driver or two. Explorer taking 30 seconds to open? Little magnifying glass hovering over your proto-files as if to say, “Now where did I put those files of yours… they’re around here somewhere…”? Defrag! Because everyone knows that file managers should bog down like a two legged guinea pig in cooling tar unless every single chunk of every single file is lined up like a rail for it to snort.

Now, I wish this was a post about how much my new Macbook kicks ass, but I don’t have $2000 to spend on another laptop, so it’s about how I’m now using Linux. And you know what? It’s a better user experience so far than Windows. Getting WPA to work was… interesting… but it’s been a breeze.

Ubuntu!

It is so refreshing to be able to smack Ctrl+Shift+Z and get a nice, clean POSIX shell for me to work in. I can automate a lot of stuff, and HOLY CRAP I CAN USE LIGHTY FOR DEVELOPING RAILS APPS!

I’m still keeping Windows around, since I need to use Photoshop and Illustrator occasionally, but it’s the red-headed stepchild on this hard drive now. Yay.

(In other news, I’m almost done with ResponsibleMarkup. It should be out this weekend [I know, I said that last weekend, but this time it's true].)

Grumpypants McGee

I was on the BART this morning when I realized something: trolling the intarweb looking for articles on how Ruby can’t work or Rails is just a toy and then writing long, tedious rebuttals doesn’t make me happy. It’s something I feel like I have to do; as if the world would be horribly misinformed if I let someone’s “Array has too many methods” comment slide. But you know what? That’s not my job; no one cares; and any effort I expend jabbering into the wind about how, no, Array#last is quite useful, thanks–that effort is wasted.

Array too complicated for you? Declare those methods private. Problem solved. Can’t figure out Rails? Well, I sure can. And you know what? It’s made programming fun again. I get to extend the language I work with instead of compensating for it. I write elegant code on a daily basis, and at the end of the week, I refactor it all to make it even better. For a guy like me, that’s the difference between a soul-crushing 9-5 and a wonderful working environment.

Molly’s post on stank standardistas cinched it for me. Yeah, I can bitch and moan about people misunderstanding a wide variety of things (e.g., Ruby, Rails, web standards, nonviolence, consensus, Thomas Dolby), but it doesn’t really produce anything. From here on out, every time I read about someone complaining about this, that, or the other, I’m going to take that irritation I feel and convert it into energy for one of my projects.

So what’s next? Well, I’m working on a plugin for Rails that provides unit test assertions for markup validity, unobtrusive Javascript, and other things we should be doing more often. It should be finished over the weekend.

On board with WordPress 2.01

That’s right world, I made an invisible change which you won’t see! Hah!

No, really, I upgraded to WP2.01, and boy do those cats have their upgrade process down. I’m waiting on one totally minor plugin (Smart Update Pinger!), but I went through and removed a lot of plugins that just didn’t add anything, or were superceded by WordPress.

It’s not a huge deal, I don’t think, but it’s nice to stay current. Eventually I want to come up with a new theme, now that I’ve got some metrics on what y’all bring to the table when you visit this site. But that’s a bit farther off.

ErrorMailer Generator v0.0.2! Yay!

UPDATE: Jamis Buck’s Exception Notifier plugin is way, way better than this. Use it instead. I am.

Okay, so 0.0.1 created some strange directories which it shouldn’t have.

That’s why 0.0.2 is out.

Download it. Install it. Love it.

ErrorMailer Generator v0.0.1 Is Released

UPDATE: Jamis Buck’s Exception Notifier plugin is way, way better than this. Use it instead. I am.

Ever wished your Rails app would email you when it blew up with an unhandled exception in production mode and let you know what happened? Ever wished you could set that up in a few seconds on any Rails app of yours? Well, I sure did. So here it is: the ErrorMailer Generator. From zero to letting you know it’s dying in a maximum of four steps.

Check it out now!