Improving Wetware

Because technology is never the issue

Story About The Start Of Scientific Management

Posted by Pete McBreen 21 Apr 2011 at 11:04

An older article from The Atlantic, on Management Myths. Telling comment from the viewpoint of Scientific Management

the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is.

Worth a read if only for the historical perspective.

Strange error from RubyGems due to linux prelink ...

Posted by Pete McBreen 07 Apr 2011 at 14:32

After installing Ruby 1.9.2 from source on Centos, a few days later got a strange error from rake and gem commands

# gem list
<internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require': No such file or directory - ?? (Errno::ENOENT)
       from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require'
       from /usr/bin/gem:8:in `<main>'

Found a fix for this at Ruby Forum Beware prelink and compiling ruby from source. The problem seems to be prelink corrupts ruby, so just need to ban prelink from touching the ruby executables and libraries. Need to ban /usr/bin/ruby in /etc/prelink.conf. by adding the line

-b /usr/bin/ruby

to the conf file. Hopefully someone else will find this in the search engines and not have to reinstall ruby too many times (but once it has occurred you will need to reinstall to fix the corruption).

The Economist Gets It Wrong Again

Posted by Pete McBreen 01 Apr 2011 at 20:25

Not sure what it is about the magazine, but it seem to be incapable of reporting the implications of actions. A stunning example of this comes from their Babbage Blog reporting on the delays in the acceptance of the reports that CO2 is warming the planet…

Erring on the side of extra caution is not a bad idea, and various efforts are underway to develop, corroborate and better to underpin the work on temperature records that has been done to date.

Erring on the side of extra caution for climate change would suggest that we take steps to reduce CO2 emissions, not that we do yet more studies on whether the planet is warming and how fast. We already have the warming data, and it does not look good. “One sure bet is that this decade will be the warmest” on record – James Hansen