Lately I’ve been spending every other night sleeping in the office, trying to learn enough Ruby, JavaScript, CSS, etc. to put together a new website. Yesterday I spent hours trying to figure out why Ruby on Rails mangles Japanese text only when it comes out of the database encoded properly as UTF-8 but not when it’s stored in utf8. Hours.
Then this morning I’m just standing there in the shower and the solution comes to me out of the blue. Or maybe it came out of the shower head, I don’t know.
This happens ALL the time. What is it about showers? Why do they hold so many answers? Would it be possible to create a virtual shower? Some kind of contraption you stick your head into at work when you need to solve to a particularly hairy problem.
Maybe if you put a microphone in the shower you could podc– No, it’s over. I just gotta keep telling myself that.
I would talk about geeky stuff. It would be boring. Honestly, the only things I’m doing these days are studying and coding.
just like in dilbert comics :3
i was looking for it.. but can’t find. anyways, theres one where he’s talking about the oddity of how he gets paid– he sits around at work all day puting up with difficult co-workers and stupid bosses; and designs and solves problems in his mind while he’s at home taking a shower, far away from his place of “work”.
A bath, on the otherhand, inspires me to get stuff done and stop procrastinating. Don’t know why =x
I totally keep hitting reply in the wrong places. sorry!
Hope you’re having fun with Rails. I’m a totaly convert 😀 The i18n is a PITA. You’re right about shower-thinking though – works everytime.
Hey Rich, good to hear from you.
I’ve been hearing good things about Rails. And I’ve been converting from C++/Oracle to python/mysql myself lately. I’ve heard that Rails doesn’t perform well under high load and the codebase is not very well commented. Maybe you can give a more informed opinion on it..
The hard part about learning Rails is that it’s still new and evolving so there aren’t as many resources available for inexperienced programmers as there are for PHP, Perl, Java, ASP, etc. Most Rails developers are converts from other platforms who already know the basics concepts. It’s been so long since I’ve had to build anything from scratch that I’ve forgotten quite a bit and a lot has changed. When more books become available, Ruby on Rails will be a great way to introduce people to programming in general.
I don’t think it’s the shower itself. I think it’s what happens when you get in the shower. The falling water is mentally as well as physically soothing. Your muscles loosen up and so does your mind. Your brain lets go of all the little dead ends of circular logic and eddies of reasoning that keeps you from seeing the solution. Einstein said, “You cannot solve current problems with current thinking. Current problems are the result of current thinking.” It’s almost like meditation. Actually, it’s very like meditation. In fact, I would dare say that it practically is a form of meditation, complete with ritualistic proceedures (lather-rinse-repeat) and a falling water sonic mantra.
When you stop. A solution always appears.
Rich,
What was the solution — I might have to do something similar soon and while I like taking showers… 😉
Lon
You have to tell Rails to tell MySQL to use UTF-8. Things went screwy after I changed my development environment from WEBrick to Apache, so I assumed the cause was from something I changed. In the shower I realized that the problem was there right from the beginning and I just hadn’t realized it. I had been storing the data in Latin1 and it was apparently working fine.
This page outlines the solution. I wasn’t planning on showing anyone this site, it’s just notes to myself that my boss also reads occasionally to see what I’m up to.
https://richpav.wordpress.com/2006/04/11/to-make-apps-japanese-compatible/
Thanks, Rich!
I am starting to collect resources and this helps immensely!
And, wow, that use of a blog had not occured to me — thinking on it: using it as a way to keep your boss (and in larger working groups, the whole team) in sync makes sense. Who would have thunk, a legitimate use for a blog! 😉
It’s searchable, it’s available from anywhere, I can’t lose it, I can actually read what I wrote, etc. etc. And wordpress.com blogs are free and ad-free.
I find (annoyingly enough) that after thinking about a problem and doing something else for a few hours/the next day, the solution pops into my head. Its great, but its annoying on that I’m impatient in the “I want the answer now!” sort of way.