I’ve been playing with Ruby in my cheap shared hosting provider. They don’t include everything I need so I had to install Ruby Gems in my home directory. The instructions don’t work. So here’s what I did…
First set up environment variables to tell Ruby and Gems where to find stuff:
export GEM_HOME=$HOME/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
export RUBYLIB=$HOME/lib/ruby:/home/ian/lib/site_ruby/1.8
Download and unpack the Gems source (this is the version I downloaded, you should grab the latest:
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/20989/rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.4
Run the setup.rb script with the right arguments to install into your home directory:
ruby setup.rb all --prefix=$HOME --siterubyver=$HOME/lib/site_ruby/1.8
This will install the gem command (and a couple of others) into $HOME/bin and the Gems source into $HOME/lib/site_ruby. Gems will be installed into $HOME/lib/ruby/gems/1.8. You should add $HOME/bin to your path. If you want to install it somewhere else replace $HOME with the prefix you’d like to use.
Posted in Default | Tagged dreamhost, ruby |
Anyone who has lived with me or worked closely with me knows that I have a lot of trouble staying organized and a lot of trouble keeping on top of my email. Typically my inbox grows to a couple of thousand messages and then I “archive” it and start again. This happens every couple of years.
When I receive email I either discard it immediately, reply if it will only take a few moments, or if its important and will take some time to deal with I leave it there to be dealt with later. This almost never happens, my inbox grows, my family wonders why I never respond to my emails, my coworkers form the opinion that I’m unreliable, my wife sick of people emailing her when they want to get my attention.
Last week I came up with a great idea. I’m going to put my inbox on a diet. Every day my inbox must shrink by at least 25 items. I estimated that I should be able to get through the 700 or so emails in a month if I can keep up the pace.
Being a nerd, the first thing I did was make a spreadsheet. For each day it tracks my goal inbox size and how I’m doing. I have ups and downs but I’m making solid progress towards zero. There’s even a chart:
As I’m going I’m also building the habit of processing email as it arrives. I can’t afford not to. I know that I’ll fall off the wagon again and I’ll let my inbox get out of control, but I think I’ve got a strategy for recovering.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged email, gtd, inboxzero, lifehacks |
In the past couple of months Mozilla Corporation has sought to narrow its scope. First there was the announcement that at least for the next year and a half or so the focus of platform development will be on developing the Firefox browser as the platform. This primarily means no standalone XULRunner. And since being standalone was kind of the whole point. Now there’s the announcement that they’re dropping Thunderbird because they think it’s a distraction from building their web browser.
When I look at this graph from Janco Associates I see Firefox’s market share’s growth slowing:
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged mozilla |
