Ran into a mildly perplexing problem while trying to install the mysql2 gem under Ubuntu 11.04 today. As will sometimes happen when Ruby gems require compilation of native binaries to run on your system, there is an unspoken dependency requirement of certain development libraries….

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So I just read Zed Shaw’s new post about health concerns for programmers and it sparked a new notion that I was able to quickly follow through on. In his post he describes the bad habits and neglectful behavior common to programmers that can lead to health problems, mild and severe.

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This is more for my reference than anything else, though I hope anyone who is as stymied as I was when searching for phrases like “force fsck on reboot” and “force disk check next startup” benefit from this.

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