Ubuntu's Edgy Eft Breakage

Ubuntu's latest version, the edgy eft was released last week and this weekend I made the switch on my laptop. The following is a list of the breakage it caused.

• ATI 3D acceleration broken


• VMware broken


• Problems with wine over VNC

I had to waste a couple hours troubleshooting this stuff, which I don't like to do, but I got it all (mostly) figured out. These problems look like they would only affect a tiny minority of users, but I tripped over them and thought perhaps this would be useful to someone else.

Random bumps along the smooth ruby way

I think this bitter old grouch, venting about ruby, gets alot right. Be sure to read past the headings of his five complaints. He actually has some legitimate gripes.


Do I have gripes about Ruby? At this point I don't know enough about Ruby to be sure that any gripes I have are legit. I found the above link while trying to figure out why REXML was so slow. I thought I was doing something wrong. Turns out you if you are trying to read in a large XML file with REXML, you are just doomed. JAXP is several orders of magnitude faster, although I couldn't find any benchmarks to back this claim. REXML works fundamentally differently from JAXP. REXML uses regexes to parse while I think JAXP parses at a lower level. That being said, REXML is sooo much easier to use than JAXP, so if your file size is small, it isn't so bad. I wonder if using jRuby to access JAXP would be an interim solution to this for ruby programmers.

Another gripe I have is with Rails fixtures. I find that making multiple tests dependent on a set of fixtures will make your tests brittle. If someone writes a new test and adds to the fixtures to support it, often you find tests will break because of it. If you are vigilant about it you can probably always write a test that won't break when someone adds

Beware the IDEs of Ruby.

LOOK! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a framework, no, it's RUUUBY on RAAAAILS! Scream like a teenage girl at a Justin Timberlake concert as you setup a working CRUD application in just minutes! Loose control of your bladder with every invocation of the mighty ActiveRecord! Prance and frolic through green fields of domain specific languages! Be hundreds of times more productive! One size fits all! Comes in all sizes! It slices, it dices, it even massages your grandmother! Ok, ok, enough. I'll get on the freaking bandwagon already. I've had about 4 days on rails doing real work, and so far I am satisfied with it, borderline impressed. The things I can rave about are: simple setup, TDD out of the box, nice project structure, elegant design, and good documentation. The things I can complain about are: lousy IDE support, the end keyword, and really lousy IDE support.