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Rail Spikes

Running in Packs vs. Going it AloneNovember 19

Most companies see competition as a threat. If someone’s products could substitute for mine, they’re a competitor; and if a potential customer chooses another product instead of mine, that’s a bad thing.

Lightweight startups take this even further. If you see a need, but another startup has already started addressing the need, then you came at it too late. You’re lightweight, and so your only real advantage is speed. But someone beat you to market. Makes sense, right?

Except it doesn’t work that way.

Going it alone

The typical, but wrong, paradigm goes like this:

Competition is bad

Competitors are enemies

Fewer competitors are better than more competitors

An opportunity addressed by a few people already is “taken”

An opportunity with zero competitors looks attractive

There is some truth to these things. Growing in the web search market today is pretty difficult. So is the operating system industry. So are dozens of other industries, and in these spaces, competitors may be be enemies.

But these are mature, settled industries. If you want to create a new search engine, or a new operating system, more power to you – but Google and Microsoft ARE going to be threats. Of course, most sta

iPhone as conference computerNovember 18

I recently joined the cool kids and got an iPhone. As mentioned Jon and I are going to Voices that Matter: Professional Ruby Conference (or as I like to call it, Ruby that Matters) as guests of Pearson Education. Except at this conference, I am not going to bring my computer, just my iPhone.

Ruby that Matters

I think computers actually take away from the conference experience. They are heavy and distracting and you gotta baby sit the stupid thing all the time. The two redeeming qualities are that you can kill time if a session is boring, and you can hack code. Well, if the session is boring, instead of reading blogs, I’m going to leave. And if I want to hack, I’ll do some pair programming.

I’ll be taking notes in my trusty Moleskin as well as tweeting interesting bits using my iPhone. If you want to keep up with that, follow @lof on Twitter.

Update: So how’d it go?

I liked not having to lug around my computer—this is the lightest I’ve ever packed for a conference. Getting through airport security was a breeze.

I was able to tweet sporadic observations and I picked up a few new followers (hi!). I was also able to keep up on my email which was nice

Aristotle and Software at RubyConf '08November 7

Here are slides from my talk earlier today entitled “Aristotle and the Art of Software Development”. I’m not sure how helpful the slides will be without the narration, but fortunately Confreaks recorded the conference. I’ll post a video (or link) here whenever it becomes available.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: aristotle ruby)

Receiving Email with Ruby (and Rails)November 5

Earlier this year, Mike Mondragon and I co-authored a PeepCode book about MMS2R. But it was never really about MMS2R, it was about the broader topic of receiving and processing email with Ruby and Rails—and MMS2R is a key library for this. MMS2R makes processing multipart emails a snap. It does all the heavy lifting for you. The rest of the book explains the ins and outs of processing email with Rails, including best practices for matching users to the emails they submit.

Because of that, the book’s been renamed. It’s now called Receiving Email with Ruby.

Everyone I’ve talked to about the book has said that it’s been very helpful for them. If you’re looking at integrating email into your application, this is the place to start. Learn from Mike and my mistakes to your benefit! At only $9, it is a steal. Buy your copy today! :)

Photo by a4gpa.

Upgrading Phusion Passenger when Apache is installed from sourceOctober 30

I have a confession to make.

I hate the way Debian-based distributions handle Apache. sites-available, sites-enabled, esoteric commands to enable and disable sites, config files moved around from their usual places. Ugh. I just don’t like it. So I usually install Apace from source.

Here’s what you need to do to upgrade Phusion Passenger on Debian/Ubuntu when you’ve installed Apache from source.

When you run passenger-install-apache2-module, it will try to find Apache, and fail.

You need to set the following environment variables:

export APXS2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs
export APR_CONFIG=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apr-1-config

With these set, the installer can find Apache and everything will work appropriately. Hopefully this information will help somebody out.

Via the Passenger documentation and Google Group.