Month: December 2016

Having gotten Vagrant working generally to host a development environment on Windows, I have two main objectives left:

1. Run a Rails server locally in my Vagrant vm so that I can do rails dev on Windows.
2. Push a vagrantfile onto AWS so that I can “deploy” a rails server from Windows.

In pursuit of goal 1, I spent quite a bit of time looking at different posts that claimed to set up a rails environment on Virtual box in different ways. I learned that there’s a reasonable amount of variability in what people call a rails stack. Some of the posts depended on Chef, which is fine, but it’s not the tool I’m trying to use right now. Other posts depended on setting up a bare VM and SSHing into it and running a million little commands to get rails running properly, but that seems contrary to what I think Vagrant is for. I want to get all my Vagrantfiles and bootstrap.sh‘s right, and then just vagrant up. I don’t want to spend all day babysitting some VM that has weird locality errors when you install Postgresql. Continue reading “Ruby on Rails on Vagrant” →

Last time, we set our vagrant box to be repeatably remoted into, basically by telling it to always use the default private key. This solution makes me a little sad, and I’ll try to clean it up later.

Anyway, we’re here in Vagrant’s tutorial, and we’re setting up bootstrap.sh. The basic idea is: In the root directory of the project, make a shell script that installs stuff you need. Then make sure that Vagrant’s provision command will invoke that shell script when the VM boots up. Continue reading “Apache in Vagrant” →

Last time, I shared a happy story of vagrant being easy to set up. When I was done using vagrant ssh in my git bash window, I dutifully typed logout, scheduled the post on WordPress, and did some dishes.

I wanted to start my next post and keep experimenting, so in the same git bash window, I typed vagrant ssh, which had worked a moment ago. I was prompted for a password which is weird because (1) vagrant is supposed to use private key SSH authentication and the keyfile was still there and (2) vagrant made this account and I don’t know what the password is. Hmm. Try a blank password. No dice.  Continue reading “vagrant destory” →

I’ve decided to continue my break from Rust by exploring some Rails development with Vagrant and VirtualBox.

I’m going to go throug the Getting Started process on Vagrant’s Website and write down what happens. Continue reading “vagrant up!” →

Richard Feynman was a famous physicist, and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman is a famous biography of a famous physicist. In it, Richard Feynman, who is taking a biology class for some reason, goes to the library and asks for “a map of a cat.”

Now, the thorough modern biologists have surely mapped the cat – there are no surprise organs left – and a well-stocked university library surely has some document that tells you what organs occur in which parts of a cat, so what’s wrong with Feynman’s question?

Continue reading “Know the Nouns” →

I’ve written about podcasts before, but I want today to write about audiobooks in particular. Here’s the TL;DR:

Get an audible.com account, get your library card set up to borrow audiobooks, and get headphones you like to use with your phone while on the go. Do it now.

If you’re interested in knowing why I recommend those things, read on.

Continue reading “Audiobooks are Awesome” →

This post is another slight digression in my series on building a Lisp interpreter in Rust. Because I’m writing the posts as I go, the shape of this series will follow the shape of my own path through learning Rust.

Anyway, Rust has memory safety. This safety means that I probably won’t have people attack my Rust applications via a buffer overflow, which is great, but it also means that the compiler is always yelling at me, which can be frustrating.

Continue reading “I Found a Great Rust Tutorial” →