JEOS might not be small enough

I might have to look at other distributions to run on my VM with only 2GB of disk space. I definitely can't use apt-get to install much on the system I built using JEOS from the Ubuntu 8.10 server CD.

I just came across the instructions on the Psychocats web site about installing a minimal version of ubuntu and manually installing the windowing system packages. I'm going to make another attempt at installing bare bones system.

That's the great thing about snapshots in VMWare! I can try this out without losing any work if I want to go back!

Creating virtual development environment

I'm in the process of setting up a virtual machine running Ubuntu 8.10 server edition. This is going to be the system I setup as a Ruby development system. I created it with just a 2GB hard drive and used the jeos(Just Enough Operating System) options when I installed Ubuntu.

The trick is going to be installing everything I need without running out of disk space. I wanted the disk to be small so I could carry the virtual machine around on a usb flash drive.

I just tried using apt-get to install ant and it tells me that it needs to download 98 MB with 255MB being used when everything is done!

I just went to ant.apache.org and downloaded Ant directly. I think it might have taken up a tenth of the space it would have if I let apt-get do it's thing! Looks like that's the way to go!

I was able to get JRuby installed and running following the instructions in this blog post. Thanks Dermot!

It's funny how that post is over two years old! I guess I'm a little behind the times!

LOTY and TOTY

Another concept that was discussed multiple times at the NFJS conference was the idea of choosing a LOTY and TOTY, (That's Language of The Year and Technology of The Year.)

I had already decided that I was going to learn about the Struts Framework, so that's my TOTY.

I think the LOTY is going to be Ruby.

The first thing I need to work on is probably time management!

First Post, 2nd Day!

I wonder what the statistics are regarding blogging and how many people start a blog and then quit? A quick google search found this article from 2007 on the top-5-reasons-most-blogs-dont-last. I'll have to keep looking for information about how long blogs typically last. Something along the lines of 'if you blog at least 5 times a week you'll keep on blogging' or something similar.

I did register this blog with javablogs.com so I better start writing some Java posts as well!

Future? Reading list

There are so many books that I want to read it's getting hard to keep track. This is the beginning of a reading list:

• Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas
• Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
• Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the Real World
• Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
• Daemon
  

No Fluff, Just Stuff, Boston 2009

I just attended the New England Software Symposium March 20th -22nd. The keynote presented after dinner on the 20th was given by Jared Richardson. He said that everyone should have a blog and if they didn't they should start one that very night.

Doing my best to conform to non-conformity I went home and went to bed instead.

In Jared's book, Career 2.0, Take Control of Your Life, he talks about the fact that:

"When your catching crabs you don't need a pot with a lid. Once you get two crabs in the pot, none can escape. The one crab that reaches the edge, and freedom, is always pulled back in by the other crabs."

I need to either not be a crab at all or be the first crab that doesn't let the others drag me back in!