Endless Errors – Week 4 Transition

I can confidently say that this was a week of productivity. Granted, as the title indicated, it was full of endless errors. Some of them were not too surprising, however. First, I made the big transition in programming by jumping from Windows platform to Mac platform. Now, this is an older Mac, but I was able to upgrade it to Snow Leopard, so it is strong for 90% of tasks, except 10% of tasks involve programming.

So, of that 10%, the biggest challenge was with Ruby on Rails. I had older version of Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails, and unlike in Windows where I used Rails Installer, I was unable to do the same with this Mac. This meant that I had to upgrade Ruby to 1.9.3 and Rails to at least Rails 3.0 (I didn’t even bother with Rails 4 since that’s so new, and I can really live without having the most updated and shiny software).

As you may guess, updating was not a walk in the park. In fact, I found myself e-mailing the author of Ruby on Rails Tutorial and posting the question on Stack Overflow. None of those responses gave me the solution to my problem — but they did tell me that it was not physically “impossible.” I could fix it, but it would be painful and not easy.

So, I decided to use sudo command, which is not recommended but the only way to get the job done. I had previously consulted RVM, but that was not doing the job for me (I don’t know why). I even tried using Home Brew. Nope, that didn’t work either. So, I used sudo and it worked somewhat, but I’m still running into tons of errors when I tried to do bundle install. It’s not surprising though since I knew I would encounter some errors, and even on Windows, I did have errors (they were milder ones though). It’ll be interesting to see how far I can go with this…Obviously, with Rails 4 coming out and my machine stuck at Ruby 1.8.7, it will be limited. But, I think it’s at least good attempt to keep trying and not give up even though my panic level (as shown in the drawing above — made with Adobe Ideas, which was FREE for one day this past week!) rose exponentially with increased errors.

I also had time to go through a book – well, flipping pages and reading few pages that is – this week, and it was titled 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts. A lot of contents in the book were irrelevant to me since I’m still early in the stage of programming, but there were some interesting things I could relate to, such as reminding yourself to other languages.

I’ll certainly expand on that part (learning other languages), and hope to become narrower in my focus. It’s not that the constant errors in RoR made me not willing to proceed with it – instead, it simply told me that it would be worthwhile to know other languages since someone else with more programming experiences could have solved this problem better than just forcing the system with sudo.

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