In Balance

I have a great need to be more organized in the planning and recording of my activities. My progress in all things is quite eclectic and wide ranging. At the same time it is not very focused and often not appreciated. This results in dissolution and also makes it difficult for me to reach goals.

I really am not at all goal orientated except when I'm employed. This doesn't mean I'm lazy, just not focused on specifics. So whilst I might spend a several hours a day thinking and working on guitar, and am making progress in a number of areas, I often feel a deal of frustration about what I am doing.

In an almost direct contradiction to the above, a major problem with my guitar is that I focus to much on one thing. For example currently I'm focused very much on Blues and the Woody Mann 'Basics' DVD. This is a great DVD and well worth studying. Still in addition I could and should be doing

• 15 minutes of ear training
• 30 minutes of theory and scale playing
• 15 minutes of rhythm training

all of the above should be done daily

What this means is that a day then consists of very many small activities rather than one or two big activities. This is a real problem for me as I feel I can only do at most three things a day. So I can compute, eat well and play guitar (these three are really tough), but that gives me no real room to run, stretch, wash up, be clean and tidy. Perhaps I can address this each day by planning very specific activities. However for this to succeed all the activities need to be much more specific. This leads to a very GTD like approach to things were we have alot of projects and alot of specific activities to do. Each of these activities requires planning and recording, and this of course goes against my general pattern of learning, and takes considerable time, effort, and consistency. It also may remove the time for general thought and speculation - but that should be included in the activities as part of the process of planning and review

So my conclusion is that I need to get back into GTD and try a very much more detailed approach to planning and executing my life. Does this mean I now have to spend days dicking around choosing my GTD tool!

Been struggling a little with testing Admin::Controllers, mainly because I don't fully understand the scaffold functional test code. Anyhow just generated Admin::Poop!! so we can see how the nesting affects the tests

class Admin::PoopsControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase
  def test_should_get_index
    get :index
    assert_response :success
    assert_not_nil assigns(:admin_poops)
  end

  def test_should_get_new
    get :new
    assert_response :success
  end

  def test_should_create_poop
    assert_difference('Admin::Poop.count') do
      post :create, :poop => { }
    end

    assert_redirected_to poop_path(assigns(:poop))
  end

  def test_should_show_poop
    get :show, :id => admin_poops(:one).id
    assert_response :success
  end

  def test_should_get_edit
    get :edit, :id => admin_poops(:one).id
    assert_response :success
  end

  def test_should_update_poop
    put :update, :id => admin_poops(:one).id, :poop => { }
    assert_redirected_to poop_path(assigns(:poop))
  end

  def test_should_destroy_poop
    assert_difference('Admin::Poop.count', -1) do
      delete :destroy, :id => admin_poops(:one).id
    end

    assert_redirected_to admin_poops_path
  end
end

rake db:fixtures:load loads fixtures data into the current environment.

This is an alternative to having data migrations, although whether its a better alternative is something I have to think about.

Setting up a Rails Project that is kept under svn and uses svn:externals for plugins for use locally with Git

Many others have done this, so thanks to those who provided the info used here.

Gem Installation

When setting up gems unset the environment variable RUBYOPT RUBYOPT=""

Rails Installation

Don't need --include-dependencies switch any more, they're installed by default.

MySQL

In Cygwin you'll want to install the MySQL gem. This needs the MySql libraries/source in order to build, so you need to download the source. Then run

./configure
make install

This failed at first, trying to resolve by

• installing g++ using cygwin setup

Now you have what you need to install the MySql gem. gem install mysql

1

Differences between the two editors are quite apparent, with textmate being way ahead at the moment. Some of this is down to environment, some of this down to the usability of OSX (hate to say it as a veteran XP user) and some down to the immaturity of E.

No Templates in E

This was a bit annoying as I wanted to create this post in E, but couldn't get the blogging bundle to work correctly. However as Typo's web interface in Firefox is super speedy, I may well not need E for this functionality

I did get the blogging bundle working with E, and then was deeply disappointed by it. E does not recognise that posts are in Markdown format and so does not syntax highlight them. So your workflow has to be

• retrieve post with e
• save as a markdown file somewhere
• post

Just not enough benefits to be useful enough. So that means that E has to be killer for doing Rails development, otherwise I'll probably not be buying it.

Amazing seems like I’ve finally got my own typo blog and the ability to blog to it from textmate. This really is something else.

Now all I need is something worth saying

So it seems you can quickly post the blog (need to learn that shortcut pronto), and then textmate will submit it and open the post up (currently in Safari). Really quite spiffy. And of course you can preview locally.

Some Things to work out

• why is the markdown formatting not working anymore
• how to do tags and categories.
• convention for naming locally saved posts
• doing same thing from windows using e
• how to have Textmate remember username and password
• how to have shortcut for posting not clash with Cog’s shortcut for play
• how to get headers in an article (to) be smaller than the actual header of the article (which is <h2>) - some CSS trickery needed.

Could it really be that Safari is killing my installation of Typo?

• preview seems to be working correctly on firefox
• laptop committed immediately when I did a post on it

What will happen here?

Well I’ll be … - a really quick post from Firefox, looks like I’m ready to start blogging!!

Really need a backlit keyboard for my laptop. I can’t see a bloody thing at the moment. Will this post. My other post from the Mac still hasn’t submitted!

This failed miserably, will have to stick with localhost and the socket for now.