I spent a few hours on the wrong side of that riddle recently.  

Most of the engineers here at OpenLogic work in some flavor of Linux on their development machines.  When I first received my laptop I attempted to join the crowd and install Ubuntu.  However, due to hardware issues with the video and wireless chipsets on the machine I got, I reluctantly decided to back out and go with the standard issue Windows XP and am still running that today.

This past week I joined a new project team working in Ruby on Rails.  Having been previously focused on Java projects, I had to install and configure a number of things to get up and running in the new development environment.  Part of that setup involved installing a MySQL instance used by the application.  

Once I had everything ready to roll, I wanted to run "rake test" to verify that all the tests passed.  Well, they didn't.  I realized that I initially set some things in the MySQL configuration to be too restrictive.  I'll spare you the details, as that's not the point of this blog post.  So, I reconfigured, based on the settings another developer had working in Windows.

I ran "rake test" again.  Things were looking better.  Tests were passing.  Feeling good.  Nope, boom, suddenly failures left and right.  I ran "rake test" again and got failures from the start.  The errors that were occurring repeatedly looked something like this:

ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: Mysql::Error: 

Can't create/write to file '#sql_1830_0.MYD' (Errcode: 17): SHOW FIELDS FROM tags

The file it was trying to write to was in the temp data directory under the MySQL installation.  I messed with file permissions.  I deleted the temp file and ran again.  Things started off well, but started failing again mid-stream.  I was trying my best to apply logic to the situation rather than jump to the typical re-install, reboot approach it's so tempting to take when things go wrong in a Windows environment.  I decided to peruse some Google search results a little deeper than I had at first.  Thankfully, I followed a link to a post on an Alfresco forum.  Obviously the issue I was dealing with had nothing to do with Alfresco, but was dealing with the same MySQL error.

There it was: "The problem is fixed now. Newer version of McAfee was protecting MySql temporary folder."

No way.  Could that really be it?  I am running McAfee…  I temporarily disabled the virus checker and ran "rake test" again…  Success.  All the tests passed.

Unbelievable.  I honestly don't know that I would have ever thought of that as the possible cause of the problem.  Let me just say I am thankful when people like Senthil follow up their posts with the solution they found, even when it wasn't one someone suggested in a reply.  Then again, if I hadn't found the solution, maybe this would have been the impetus to finally get Linux working on my laptop.  Then, afterall, I wouldn't have much need for a virus scanner anymore.

As I drove home from work last night in a snow storm that turned my 45-minute commute into a 2-hour-plus crawl, I had time for my mind to wander.  Still, the weather certainly wasn't far from my mind.  It might seem that, with near-zero temperatures and icy roads, the topic of global warming wouldn't be my first thought.  But, in this year of relentlessly snowy winter weather in the Denver-metro area, one could speculate that these effects could be linked in part to global warming.  Not to mention, here I was, in one of the thousands of fossil-fuel-burning vehicles trudging along on the highway.  

When I awoke this morning and saw the latest dire report on global warming from the world's leading scientists, my interest was once again piqued.  In a world still dominated by the price of a barrel of oil and controlled by big oil companies and oil-producing nations, the development of alternative energy sources seems slow to take hold despite the growing wealth of environmental concerns. 

So, I did some searching on the Internet and sure enough came across something called the Open Source Energy Network.  I'm not familiar with this site or the people behind it, but I do find it very interesting that some people in the energy space also recognize the power behind a community with a common goal.  It will be interesting to see if this concept of "open source energy" can be as effective and influential down the line as "open source software" is becoming in the software industry.  Without question, the energy industry is one also poised for change.