Let’s be clear it is not an issue of being depressed. It’s also not an issue of believing God somehow dealt me a poor hand in life. He gave me an embarrassingly high IQ and eidetic memory mixed with thorough creative, analytical and athletic abilities, I’ve never had to overly-worry about my needs being met, and I know the wholeness that comes with repenting your sins and placing your faith in Christ for your salvation. I truly have nothing to be desiderate about.

That being disclosed, It has taken a year of reflections to finally start deducing what really has been bothering me, and I have come to the realization that it is actually two intertwined items weighing on my soul.

The Drive

I have a cardinal rule in life. Every morning, without exception, in the mirror I stare through my eyes into my soul and honestly ask myself:

“If I die soon, would I do what I am about to do today?”

Life is such that if you are honest you will always have “No” days, but if the bare honest answer is “No” too many days in a row, something needs to change.

Until I turned 24, this served me well in setting priorities to help satisfy my insatiable drive to succeed. I cannot remember anything I have tried to do in life I have not achieved. However, since turning 24 a year ago, my daily answer every day has been “No, I wouldn’t do today what I am about to do”. So what changed?

After a year of wrestling with this, I am finally starting to figure out the issue. I know I haven’t lost my drive and I still have big dreams I’m working hard toward every day. The problem lays in the outcome of the dreams. What is the value of success? We all want wealth, recognition, and influence, but I find these wants have largely lost their appeal to me. The crux of the waning of their appeal I only started to comprehend recently… bringing us to issue two: The Who.

The Who

My drive to succeed has had what I believed the necessary need, and now I believe unfortunate consequence, of not committing to people. I never allowed myself the time to get to know most of the people whose paths mine wove across. “I do not have the time” is my usual line of thought.

I did not realize until recently that deep down I have a lot of regrets about the relationships, both friends and girlfriends, that I threw away to have the time to succeed. Would I go back and do it differently? No. I am happy with what I have accomplished thus far in life and the groundwork I have laid for accomplishments in the upcoming years is exciting. Do I regret it nonetheless? I now believe perhaps I do.

The Quandary

Last Friday I came to the postulation that what has been devouring my ability to say “Yes” to my daily reflection the past year are the following questions:

What is the value of success if you are too busy trying to succeed to enjoy life and the companionship of others?

Can you truly have both? Or does it have to be a balance?

The quandary of what I need to actually change in my life and dreams to be able to say “yes” in the morning continues. Pray I find inspiration soon as the burden of a year of “No, I wouldn’t.” every day is starting to vanquish my soul.

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now playing: Lecrae – Fall Back (feat. Trip Lee)

active_support/inflector/methods.rb:124:in
`block in constantize':
uninitialized constant [class] (NameError)

Turns out the custom library files you write and store in the ‘lib’ directory of your app are no longer automatically included on application boot. Luckily the fix is simple. In your Application.rb configuration file add the following line to automatically load all ruby files in the ‘lib’ directory:

Dir.glob("./lib/*.{rb}").each { |file| require file }

Hopefully this can save someone time and frustration.

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now playing : Jes – Ghost

Most files only needed a few changes, but my highly customized routes.rb file was a four hour ordeal that I hope this post can help save someone else time as Rails 3 documentation for declaring methods for named routes is sparse at best right now.

The premise of what my app needs to have happen is the RESTful routes that are automatically created by scaffolding need to be modified to live at my domain’s root without relying on any web server tricks. For the rest of this post let’s focus on just one of these overrides: the “new” verb for the “events” controller.

Default route created via scaffolding is:

http://domain.com/events/new

However, I want the new_event helper to point to:

http://domain.com/new

In Rails 2.3.x this is accomplished via declaring a named route with a conditions statement restricting to only ‘GET’ requests:

map.new_event 'new.:format',

:controller=>"events",

:action=>"new",

:conditions => {:method => :get}

In Rails 3, the new way to do named routes looks like:

match 'new(.:format)' => 'events#new',

:as => 'new_event'

Seems simple, but when the conditions statement restricting to only the ‘GET’ method is added it’s ignored.
The following does NOT work:

match 'new(.:format)' => 'events#new',

:as => 'new_event',

:conditions => {:method => :get}

In Rails 3 the ‘method’ condition is ignored by design because the proper way to limit the named route override to a specific http method is:

get 'new(.:format)' => 'events#new',

:as => 'new_event'

The beginning keyword can be any one of the http methods: get, post, put, or delete

Pretty sexy to say the least!, just wish it was better documented. Hope this helps others out.?

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now playing: Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – Molossus

Please install the mysql gem and try again: gem install mysql. rake aborted! no such file to load — mysql

It turns out that database gem requirements should be declared in the project’s Gemfile. Add the following line to the Gemfile:

gem ‘mysql’, :require => ‘mysql’

Then in the top directory of your rails application run:

bundle install

You should now be able to migrate your MySQL databases.

The technical change in Rails 3 that requires this extra step is that the bundler reads the gemfile and then creates links in either the [application directory]/.bundle directory to the system gems, or alternativly downloads and installs them into the [application directory]/.bundle directory.

The concept is to allow gems to be installed per project that do not need to be installed system-wide in the system gem repository. This helps to reduce version collisions and duplications. Both of which are highly important now that rails 3 allows multiple rails applications to live together.

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now playing: Tiësto Feat. Maxi Jazz – Dance4Llife

Unlike other brands that talk about sustainability, but don’t really do much of anything, Puma is taking it very seriously and pushing sustainability to the next level. Introducing: the Puma Clever Little Bag. (see video below)

In typical Puma fashion it not only makes more sense, but looks cooler too. Look at that picture at the top of this post and just try to tell me that the new Puma shoe bag doesn’t look cooler than a Puma shoe box… Ahh… how I love thee Puma. For more detailed information about the new shoe bags and the rest of Puma’s ecological advancements check out the Puma.Safe site.

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now playing: Ferry Corsten – Punk (Cosmic Gate Remix)

The solution is to maintain using Rails version 2.3.5 but to role back to version 1.0.1 of Rake. In Netbeans you can do this by going to Tools -> Ruby Gems -> Installed and then selecting Rake and clicking uninstall. Do not select the default settings, but rather select 1.1.0 from the drop down menu to only remove that version. If 1.0.1 is not listed in this drop down then go ahead and select to uninstall all versions, and then install version 1.0.1 of Rake or reinstall Rails 2.3.5 as it will install Rake 1.0.1 as a dependency.

I’m hoping this will save others the four hours of my life I wasted trying to figure out what went wrong with my Ruby on Rails development environment.

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now playing: The Doppler Effect – Beauty Hides in the Deep (Envotion Remix)

Subject: Thanks for a great 28 years
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010
From: Scott McNealy
To: [all Sun employees]

Gang,

When I interviewed many of you for employment at Sun over the years, one commitment often made was that things will change above, below, and around you faster than any place you have ever been. Looks like this was one area we exceeded plan for 28 years. While it was never the primary vision to be acquired by Oracle, it was always an interesting option. And this huge event is upon us now. Let’s all embrace it with all of the enthusiasm and class and talent that we have to offer.

This combination has the potential to put Sun, its people, and its technology at the center of yet another industry and game-changing inflection point. The opportunity is well-documented and articulated by Larry and the Oracle folks. Not much I can add on this score. This is a very powerful merger. And way better than some of the alternatives we were facing.

So what do I say to all of you, now this is happening?

It turns out that one simple message to the large and diverse Sun community is actually quite hard to craft. Even for a big mouth who is always ready with a clever quip. The community includes our resellers and customers, our current and former employees, their friends and families who supported our employees on their mission to change the industry, our investors, our supply and service partners, students and educators, and even our competitors with whom we often collaborated.

But let me try. Though nothing I could write comes close to matching the unbelievably strong and positive emotions I have for you all. See, I never was able to master dispassion. I truly loved starting, running, and living Sun. And the last four years have not been without serious withdrawal. And the EU approval rocked me more than it should have.

So, to be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company.

And I sure “hope” America regains its love affair with capitalism. And except for the auto industry, financial industry, health care, and some other places (I digress), the invisible hand is doing its thing quite efficiently. So I am more than willing to accept this outcome.

And my hat is off to one of the greatest capitalists I have ever met, Larry Ellison. He will do well with the assets that Sun brings to Oracle.

What we did right and wrong at Sun over the years might make for interesting reading. However, I am not a book writer. I am a husband, father of four, and a builder and leader of people who want to make a difference.

But spare me a bit of nostalgia. Not of the mistakes we made, and lord knows I made a ton. But of the things we did right and well.

First and foremost, Sun innovated like crazy. We took it to the limit (see Eagles). And though we did not monetize our inventions as well as we could have, few companies have the track record in R&D that we had over the last 28 years. This made working at Sun really cool. Thanks to all of you inventors and risk takers who changed how we live.

Sun cared about its customers. Even more than we cared about our own company at times. We looked at our customer’s mission as more important than ours. Maybe we should have asked for more revenue in return, but our employees were always ready to help first. I love this about Sun, which I guess makes me a good capitalist, if not a great capitalist.

Sun did not cheat, lie, or break the rule of law or decency. While we enjoyed breaking the rules of conventional wisdom and archaic business practice, and for sure loved to win in the market, we did so with a solid reputation for integrity. Nearly three decades of competing without a notable incident of our folks going off course morally or legally. Not all executives and big companies are bad. Really. There are good companies out there. Special thanks to all of my employees for this. I never had to hide the newspaper in shame from my children.

Sun was a financial success. We paid billions in taxes, salaries, purchases, leases, training, and even lawyers and accountants for devastatingly cumbersome SOX and legal compliance (oops, more classic digression). Long-term and smart investors made billions in SUNW. And our customers generated revenue and savings using our equipment in countless ways. Many employees started families, bought homes, and put them through school while working at Sun. Our revenues over 28 years exceeded $200B. Few companies make it to the F200. We did. Nice.

Sun employees had way more fun than any other company. By far. From our dress code (“You must!”) to beer busts to our April Fools’ pranks to SunRise to our quiet enjoyment at night of a long, hard, well-done day of work, no company enjoyed “work” more than Sun. Thanks to all of our employees past and present for making Sun such a blast.

I could go on for a long time reminiscing about the good and great stuff we did at Sun, but just allow me one last one. We shared. Not the greatest attribute for a capitalist. But one I could not change and was not willing to change about Sun while I was in charge. We shared in the success of Sun with our resellers. With our employees through stock options, SunShare, beer busts, and the like (for as long as Congress would allow) and through our efforts to keep as many of them on board for as long as possible during the inevitable down cycles. With our partners through the Java Community Process, through our open-source collaborations, and licensing strategies. With our customers through our commitments to low barriers to exit. Sun was never just about us. It was about we. And that may be a bit of the reason we are where we are today.

But I have few regrets (see Sinatra’s “My Way”) and will always look back at Sun and its gang with only pride. Enormous pride. You are the best this industry ever had, though few outside of Sun recognized it.

And what we are about will live on in Sparc, Solaris, Java, our products, and our spirit. Well past everyone’s recollections of what we did together. I will never forget, though.

Oracle is getting a crown jewel of the technology industry. They will do great things with Sun. Do your best to support them, and keep the Sun spirit alive and well in the industry. Our children will be better for it.

Thanks for the off-the-charts support to everyone who ever carried a Sun badge, used our products, or helped our company through the years.

And thanks to my wonderful wife, Susan, who gave this desperado (see Eagles) a chance to choose the Queen of Hearts before it was too late.

Someday, hopefully, you will all get to see or meet her and my other life’s works named Maverick, Dakota, Colt, and Scout. If you do, perhaps you will understand why I stepped back from the CEO role four years ago. And why I feel like the luckiest guy in the whole world.

My best to all of you, and remember:

Kick butt and have fun!

Scott

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now playing: Jay-Z – D. O. A. (Death of Auto-Tune) (video)

I have always been a proponent of the flat tax, but only Steve Forbes can make the argument so eloquently.

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now playing: Entourage Season 2 – My Maserati Does 185

It will be very interesting to see how the Democratic Senators go about running for reelection in November. Other than Speaker of the House Pelosi’s seat, the former Kennedy senate seat was the most secure seat for the Democratic party and they lost it in a landslide.

The next ten months leading up to the 2010 elections are going to be intense! We have another possible upset brewing here in Wisconsin with Terrence Wall‘s composed campaign against 18-year Senate verteran Russ Feingold.

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now playing: Engine Room – A Perfect Lie (Gabriel & Dresden Remix)