You learn more from your mistakes than anything else, and I have made my fair share. The trick is to actually learn from them rather than just suffer through the consequences and call it experience. I have watched developers push code to production on a Friday afternoon because the business was breathing down their necks. The deadline was immovable, the pressure was real, and the production environment was treated as an afterthought. I have seen it happen more times than I care to count, and each time the same thing goes wrong: someone breaks something, and nobody wants to own it. ...

I grabbed the openSUSE 11.4 64-bit ISO last night and spent the afternoon installing it in a VM. Here’s the full walkthrough, screenshots and all. Boot menu. Standard options – Installation, Rescue System, media check. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. Welcome screen. The green chameleon is back, and so is the striped wallpaper that’s become the distro’s signature look. ...

Firefox 4 just dropped and you want to try it without losing your current setup? You can run both versions at the same time. Add the Mozilla Daily PPA, update, then install: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install firefox-4.0 Firefox 3 stays as firefox. Firefox 4 runs as firefox-4.0. Both show up in your applications menu, or you can launch them from the terminal whichever you need.

Got this from Puppet? err: Could not retrieve catalogue: Could not find class php in namespaces standardbuild at /etc/puppet/manifests/templates.pp:15 on domain.internal.com The error points at a missing class, but the real culprit is often a missing closing brace somewhere above that line. Puppet’s parser gets confused and reports the wrong thing. Check your manifests for unmatched { and }. A syntax highlighter helps — or just count your braces.

Hit phpize and got a “not found” error? You’re missing the PHP development package. sh: phpize: not found ERROR: `phpize' failed On Ubuntu or Debian, grab it with: sudo apt-get install php5-dev That’s it. phpize should work after that.

The freemium model has become all the rage in software circles. Offer a basic version of your product for free, then charge for the good stuff – premium features, extra storage, advanced functionality. It sounds like a clever way to build a user base, and for a handful of companies it has worked. But as someone who has watched this approach play out across the industry, I have my doubts about whether it is the right strategy for most startups. ...

A friend sent me a VMware image of Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1, so I’m sharing it here in case anyone wants to try the new release without installing it. The image is a fresh install with GNOME on a 64-bit system. VMware Tools are included, and it was built on VMware Workstation 7.1.2 (build 301548) under Windows. No software updates have been applied, so it’s a clean snapshot of the alpha as it shipped. ...

Got this email from Weebly after a week of inactivity. It’s genuinely good writing – playful without being annoying: It’s been 7 days, 4 hours, 13 minutes and 2 seconds since you last logged in, and we’re starting to get really worried. We were just getting to know each other. You created 1 site, 1 page, dragged on 1 element, and then… nothing. We were really excited for your new website, it had so much potential! ...

Spotted this broken link on the Chrome Extension Labs page. Looks like the Google developers forgot to update the path. Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/2014/http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/apps.html

The idea that you could push code to production without anyone touching a server, running a script, or holding their breath still sounds a bit mad to most developers. Most teams deploy like this: someone merges code, someone else pulls it down on a staging server, runs the tests manually, fixes whatever broke, then schedules a deployment window. Someone SSHs into production, runs a script or types commands by hand, crosses their fingers, and hopes nothing catches fire. If something does go wrong, you roll back by remembering what the last working version was and praying your backups are current. ...