Personas: rich insight developed through research and making it an actionable design and decision-making tool

A great quote I discovered regarding the purpose of personas in the comments on a post titled Putting personas under the microscope in The Cooper Journal: It's important to remember that personas aren't an end in themselves, but a way of taking all that rich insight developed through research and making it an actionable design and decision-making tool (by talking about personas engaged in scenarios, etc, etc.). -- Dave Cronin

Adaptive Path: Making Strategy Tangible

Reading Adaptive Path's article on Marking Strategy Tanglible, I came across a brilliant definition of strategy. While the dictionary defines strategy as:

a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim

Jared Cole provides a more practical definition:

… a way of communicating the value of a pursuing a particular goal, the activities required to attain the goal, and the ways that leadership will guide the process.

undefined method `reenable' (Rake)

Having an issue with rake db:migrate? Update rake:

$ sudo gem update rake

Installing Feedzirra on CentOS 5.2 64-bit

I was installing Feedzirra gem on Centos 5.2 64-bit. It appeared I had a few 32-bit libraries installed instead of the 64-bit libraries which gave me a bunch of incompatible library messages. Anyway the following yum install and symlink got me on the right track:

sudo yum install libxml2-devel libxslt-devel krb5-devel libidn-devel
sudo ln -sf /lib64/libcom_err.so.2 /lib64/libcom_err.so

Hint: After updating a Bundle you should update Textmate Support

$ /Library/Application Support/TextMate
$ svn co http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Support

For example, after updating the Ruby Bundle I got this error:

run_script.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- /Applications/Editors/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/tm/executor (LoadError) from /Users/user/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/Ruby.tmbundle/Support/RubyMate/run_script.rb:1

For more information about Bundles see the Textmate site. Credits: http://lists.macromates.com/textmate/2008-September/026802.html

Cannot connect with Capistrano or sFTP on CentOS

If you are trying to do a "get" operation with Capistrano and receive the following error:

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.3/lib/capistrano/transfer.rb:156:in `[]=': undefined method `[]=' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
 from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.3/lib/capistrano/transfer.rb:207:in `handle_error'
 from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.3/lib/capistrano/transfer.rb:48:in `process!'
 from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.3/lib/capistrano/transfer.rb:43:in `loop'
 from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.3/lib/capistrano/transfer.rb:43:in `process!'
 from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.3/lib/capistrano/transfer.rb:11:in `process'
 from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.3/lib/capistrano/configuration/actions/file_transfer.rb:40:in `transfer'
 from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.3/lib/capistrano/configuration/connections.rb:170:in `execute_on_servers'
 from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/net-ssh-2.0.3/lib/net/ssh/transport/algorithms.rb:296:in `each_slice'
  ... 17 levels...
 from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.3/lib/capistrano/cli/execute.rb:14:in `execute'
 from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.5.3/bin/cap:4
 from /usr/bin/cap:19:in `load'
 from /usr/bin/cap:19

or a simple sftp connection and get the following error:

Request for subsystem 'sFTP' failed on channel 0

It is likely your sftp server is not running due to a mis-configuration in the /etc/ssh/ssh_config file. For CentOS 5.2 Final on a 64-bit architecture I made the following change:

  # The default is incorrect
  # Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server
  Subsystem sftp /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server  

The restart ssh server using:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/sshd restart

Setting up a Business in Ontario

Setting up your own business is a pretty straight forward affair, when you know how. Here are the basics:

1. Register your Trade Name
2. Setup Bank Account - typically with your current bank
3. Register Business Number - Online Registration

Additional References

• Canada-Ontario Business Service Centre: Services for Entrepeneurs (COBSC)
• Naming your Business