Sonya Barry's Blog: June 2006 Archive

Posted by sonyabarry on June 21, 2006 at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This last week and a half have been really interesting. James wanted to walk me through doing a build (of Mifos: mifos.dev.java.net) for several reasons. 1) We need to document the process. 2) I need to know how to do this. 3) He wanted to cement his own knowledge by teaching me.

I think we met those goals fairly successfully, except we never actually did get the build working on my machine. It compiled, but I never actually got it to let me log in. Two days later it occurred to me that it might have been a cookie problem. We're scheduled to move the source code into SVN at java.net this weekend, so I'm not going to try again until that's all done. I think we're close, and it was a great (if at times totally confusing) experience.

For me the most frustrating points didn't really have to do with the Mifos build specifically, just pulling the pieces together - setting up mySQL and getting JBOSS to behave.

Yesterday I started overhauling the Mifos wiki. Don't bother looking yet. The new (and improved, I hope) version will be up in the next couple of days. The current version has a lot of great information, but it's not organized very well so I'm trying to clean it up and make it more streamlined and readable. While in general it's my goal to get away from a career in doing these kinds of doc fixes, it's really nice to get back to something I'm comfortable with and good at every once in a while.

Drowning in acronyms.

Posted by sonyabarry on June 07, 2006 at 05:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have been lazy. I should have joined the mifos listserv eons ago, and I should have set up all my tools as well. I looked them all over and grunted a few weeks ago, and then decided I'd deal with it later. Later arrived, and I've been knee deep in alphabet soup for the last couple of days.

I submit that nothing has made me feel more clueless than trying to get mySQL installed on my machine. The first thing I tried to download completely locked up my machine, but then my cable modem crashed and I wasn't sure what was the problem. It was a couple of days before I could get back to it again, and it took a couple more tries to figure out which build I should use (based on the fact that it didn't completely hose my machine). And then there were all the install options. I went for the defaults across the board.

I think I got everything else working, but I'm looking forward to huge inexplicable things blowing up when I actually (finally) try to do a build some time tomorrow.

The other really lame thing I need to admit: I've never used a real IDE.

I've always recognized that some day I'd need to, but since all my programming has happened at school and I've never had to share code with anyone, I've done just fine with JEdit and using print statements to debug.

Now I've got to figure out NetBeans (for my Sun stuff) and Eclipse (for Mifos), in the next couple of days. Fortunately, a friend has taken pity on me and offered to show me how these things work tomorrow.

I know that individually none of these things is terribly difficult. All at once, the learning curve is steep.

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