A Noted Path by Theodore Nguyen-Cao

I like Shiny New Things. So when I heard Eclipse Ganymede SR1 was available, I proceeded to replace the Stream Stable Build I was currently running.

This, of course, ended up causing me problems. After installing Subclipse and attempting to pull up any SVN history, I get an error dialog box that states:
“Unable to load default SVN client”

Confused, I RTFM and saw that “Subclipse 1.4.x requires Subversion 1.5.0 version of JavaHL/SVNKit”

Seeing the SVN I was running was in fact not 1.5,

  theo@notedpath~ $ svn --version
svn, version 1.4.4 (r25188)
   compiled Nov 25 2007, 08:20:33

I went here, downloaded and installed Subversion 1.5, restarted Eclipse and things are looking good now.

Stupid shiny new things.

With the launch of Chrome today, the net is all the buzz around how great Chrome is/can be. But this isn’t yet another post about chrome.

This is about me wanting to track the flight status of my parent’s airline that just came in from Cali. Of course I could go to the American Airlines website, which by the way is at aa.com, but that seemed like a lot of work when Google is my default homepage. So I thought I would just type in the flight information and hope Google would give me a direct link to the flight status page.

Google’s response surprised me with the following:

Wow. Thanks, Google!

So, Pat got a new MacBook Pro. Little does she know, I’ve start to install programs that I would use if I just so happened to be on her computer. The laptop already had Leopard installed and all of its goodies but a bit of upgrading was called for. So, of course I had run gem update.

pats-macbook-pro:~ pat$ sudo gem update

Updating installed gems

Updating RedCloth

Building native extensions.  This could take a while...

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError)

    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension./System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb update

can't find header files for ruby.

Gem files will remain installed in /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/RedCloth-4.0.3 for inspection.

Results logged to /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/RedCloth-4.0.3/ext/redcloth_scan/gem_make.out

But then I ran into a strange error I had never seen before. gem update would fail when trying to build native extension. It’s been awhile since I setup a rails development environment so a-googlin’ I went.

Turns out the ruby headers don’t come installed with the base ruby install with Mac OS X. These can been found on Mac OS X Install Disc 2 by installing the XCode Tools.

Once installed, all was well!

…That is, more educated in the formal sense. I think nothing can replace real world experience. However, one of the questions that have been on my mind for the past year or so is if I should be going back to school. I’m 24 and I got a couple of years of work experience under my belt. I recently got engaged. If there was ever a time to go back to school, now seems like as good of a time as any.

If I decided to go back to get more education, should I go for a Masters of Science or an MBA? In the industry I’m in, I find that a Masters in Computer Science or Engineering is not really rewarding as it was for my dad’s generation from a career perspective. Today’s smart IT employers focus on what you’ve done, created, or built more than what you have studied in a classroom or years of work experience (which I think is great). I think if I go back to school for a Masters, my reasons for going would be to surround myself with smart hackers and really dig deep into exciting research. I strongly believe that to get the most out of Masters program, you need to be there for the right reasons. Go back to school to learn more, not to get ahead in a career.

On the other hand, an MBA seems much more of a career booster and would give me the businessy-types of skills that I haven’t been formally trained with. The part about this that doesn’t excite me is all the finance and accounting kinda courses that I don’t seem myself really leveraging in my career path. That side of things doesn’t really get me excited. Plus, all of my friends that are taking MBA courses say that it’s nothing special. It’s just going to be another thing you put on your resume. Which might not be such a bad thing, but for me it doesn’t seem to make sense right now to pursue that avenue.

I would love to hear from people on their reasons for choosing to pursue higher education or choosing not to or choosing to postpone it until further notice.

As for me, I think I’ll postpone until further notice. There’s so much more for me to learn through real work experience and my natural curiosity of emerging technologies.

On June 19, 2008, I became officially engaged according to Facebook.

But the actual date was June 18, 2008.  I love you, Pat.

Can’t wait for what’s next, baby.

I’ll post some details soon…