Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

In a week that included running 10 kilometers for the first time in over 12 months, getting jabbed with a needle for a blood test, and setting a personal best for the cycle ride to the office, by far the most painful was trying to get RMagick installed on a Centos5 box.

For starters, the RMagick 2.x series requires ImageMagick 6.3.0 (which came out in early 2006). Of course, CentOS5 ships with ImageMagick 6.2.28. I understand the need for stability. But what’s a developer to do if COBOL isn’t a viable solution?

David Bock’s website suggests to try the older version. Which worked, kinda. However, the rmagick build threw up while running sanity checks. The issue is that I didn’t have the Microsoft True Type Fonts installed. Now to find an easy way to install them.

More googleing lead me to Corefonts, which has the installation instructions. I followed these directions and tried again.

Same error.

The finally step is to link the directory with the fonts to where ImageMagick wants them to be.

ln -s /usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType

One more gem install and everything is happy.

As rock-solid as Centos is, I’m getting very reluctant to recommend it anymore because of issues like this. Unless you’re running software that’s older or from a commercial vendor, it’s just not worth it. Eventually you’re going to want a library, a major upgrade or a snazzy new language that’s going to make you jump through all sorts of crazy hoops.

A lot of gem development has moved to GitHub. This really sucks because Ruby gems insists on updating the metadata for all 900+ gems every single time you want to install something. What should be a couple second process can end up taking over 15 minutes.

If you’re running into this, the new version of Ruby gems fixes this issue. Instructions on how to fix it are available on GitHub’s blog.

Modern technology rocks. I’ve got my entire music collection, and a few movies, in my left-back pocket. The phone numbers, email addresses, the telephone network, and the internet is in my left front pocket. In my back-right, is a couple bucks and some credit cards. Hardly anything at all compared to what’s in the other pockets. That’s why this picture is just so wrong:
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Every year, our cellphones, music players get smaller and do more, but my wallet has done nothing but get bigger. Eventually I got tired of it, stashed my ID and credit card for easy access and threw the wallet in my computer bag. However, I decided that having those rather crucial pieces of plastic floating around probably wasn’t the best of ideas either.

So I Googled “world’s thinnest wallet” and found my solution. I ordered it, along with a card-holder for my wife, and four short days later, a thin, regular looking envelope arrived in the mail. Much better (there’s only three cards less in this shot):

This wallet probably isn’t for everyone. It’s made of the fabric they use on sails. It crinkles a little bit when you touch it and only holds 10 cards. It lacks the prestige of a fine-grained leather wallet. So if these are your criteria, you’ll hate it. However, if you want something that hold what you need, will fit in your pocket, and not mess with your spine alignment, ALL-ETT billfolds is the way to go.