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This goes out to Richard Feynman,
He was not a Simple Simon
- Jeff Coffin, "Ah Shu Dekio"
At PlayFirst, I'm in the process of a very lengthy installation of packages on
a Mac Mini. I'll skip the details, but the short version is that I must add
a dozen or more systems to this machine, most of which aren't entirely stable
in their installation processes yet. Documentation is scarce - and very poor.
Part of this process involved installing the mysql gem for Mac OS. I've marched
this trail of tears before - thrice - on the PC. For whateverthehell reason,
you have to install a huge chunk of MySQL itself in order for the PC install to
even get underway. From there, you're still up a crick. You'll get to the
ocean eventually, but you'll want a couple spare patch kits.
Having been through this nightmare a couple times before, I heaved a sigh and
pulled up google. Finding a step-by-step for the Mac was not turning a profit,
so I heaved another sigh to properly bracket the attempt and fired up a Richard
Feynman blurb about bad science I found online (maybe someone sent it to me.)
The entire article was a lengthy read and looped through paths of thought
which didn't seem to progress in a steady direction, but I got through it. I'm
used to such meanders, being a regular reader of my own blog, so it was an
enjoyable game of intellectual hide-and-seek. The article eventually made the
point that before a scientist tries the new experiment, the old one must be
repeated. Always. My paraphrase does it no justice, but you can read the thing
yourself if you feel the need.
The point was that Feynman spent a long time addressing his readers/listeners
about the virtue of trying the knowns before the unknowns; that there is
integrity in open self-deprecation. At this, I thought to myself, "Feynman
should have been a computer scientist. He might easily have missed this
observation in our field... debugging is nothing but the iterative process of
hypothesis, test, hypothesis, test - and usually the subject of this iteration
is our own work. The observation would, to a computer scientist, be so
obvious as te be self-evident and unworthy of note."
Well. Maybe it wasn't so obvious. I did leave the article thinking that there
were nuggets in it that I could apply to my own work. I looked at my Mac and
thought, "Maybe I'll get a clue on how to start on this if I see the error
message again." Keep in mind, I'd seen errors a-plenty in the days I was doing
this on the PC.
> sudo gem install mysql
You're thinking it worked, aren't you? Well, it didn't. But at least I have
more crap to punch into google to push this further toward completion... and
I've managed to get you to waste another 5 minutes of your life suffering at the
expense of ruby, gem, and mysql. Welcome to the club. =]
-rbarry
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