Are you kidding me, Saturn?

Posted by Daniel Tue, 01 May 2007 10:15:17 GMT

Are you kidding me, Saturn?: Somewhere at Saturn, someone had the idea of producing the least possible environmentally friendly “welcome” package and delivering it to their environmentally conscious customers in the least environmentally friendly delivery system imaginable. And someone else approved it, signed off on the budget and had a lot of people oversee it. Awesome. [Nice one. What a mess.]
Source: Attention Deficit David

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Good News and Bad

Posted by Daniel Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:19:16 GMT

I got together with an old friend, Jeff, with whom I worked at both ADI, where we met, and Yoyodyne. Both of those gigs were quite some time ago, but we’ve kept in touch.

In an odd touch, after not speaking for quite some time, I found out that Jeff has started to ride. Naturally, we spoke of plans to get together last September… which naturally never happened.

Because of a a fluke email, we were in touch again the other day and found that we had this Sunday free (in the morning), and promptly made plans to ride. We knocked out 30 miles along the North County trail riding from Eastview to Yorktown, caught up on all the personal and business news, and had a grand old time.

Things were going swimmingly well until I got home lugging my heavy bag up the stairs when I felt a painful twinge in my right knee. Oh No! Oh Yes! It’s time for the *other knee* to start acting up again. My knee stuff started with the left knee, about a year and half ago. I took it really easy, etc. and it healed… but even as it did the increased effort and the imbalance caused me to damage the right knee, and I’ve been working on getting that one healed ever since. Finally it seemed like I was making progress as I’ve been riding pain free, although there’s still some weakness. Now this.

I trying to keep a positive outlook since this tweak didn’t happen on the bike, and feels a bit different than previous, that it is a new and temporary thing. Walking around doesn’t hurt but stairs do. We’ll see how it feels tomorrow. I’m rather fed up with this knee stuff I must say, and I hope it doesn’t wreck my season.

Now back to RICE’ing my knee.

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Some Good Things

Posted by Daniel Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:54:24 GMT

Some Good Things: Anyway, yesterday we found out that the tumor in Susan’s hip is nasty and big enough that her hip’s in danger of fracturing; she needed to get on radiation pronto, in the hopes that we can shrink the tumor before her hip breaks. Cuz if the hip breaks, they have to operate to fix it, which would delay chemo. So we spent the morning getting Susan ready for that before I headed off to work. [It is with great sorrow that I read the difficulty facing these folks. I’ve had no chance to meet them, but I’ve often laughed at the writing, which includes family antics. I’ve learned that stats don’t count when it comes to cancer. Family friends who were written off 10 years ago are still with us and enjoying life. Most recently in the news, Roger Ebert displayed the incredible strength available to those who simply continue to do what they love to do. Roll your eye’s Roger, but you’ve joined the list cancer heros. To Susan & Eldon and family, may you be blessed with a speedy and complete recovery.]
Source: Fat Cyclist

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[PLUGIN RELEASE] ActsAsSecure

Posted by Daniel Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:05:00 GMT

[PLUGIN RELEASE] ActsAsSecure: Introduction

ActsAsSecure adds an ability to store ActiveRecord model’s fields encrypted in a DB. When a model is marked with acts_as_secure, the :binary type fields are recognized as needed to be stored encrypted. The plugin does before_save/after_save/after_find encryption/decryption thus making it transparent for a code using secured models.

The plugin supports a master key approach as well as individual records encryption keys. It does not contain any crypto provider but allows to plug in any external one as long as it supports encrypt/decrypt methods.

The fields are converted to a YAML form before encryption. After description they are restored via YAML.load. Since fields are stored encrypted, the find usage is very limited.[Keep ‘em coming…]
Source: Revolution On Rails

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Marketing time

Posted by Daniel Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:48:43 GMT

Marketing time: A contractor that prides himself on finishing every single job on the day it’s due, regardless of what it takes, is telling a powerful story, doing marketing that’s actually cheaper and more effective than advertising ever could be. [So true! Further, it ensures that you do not accept projects that you won’t care enough about to ensure that they are complete on time. There will always be issues around resources, scoping, less than clearly defined goals etc. So if you wish to live by this story, you have to be prepared to dig deep on each project. It is the sort of constraint that increases joy.]
Source: Seth’s Blog

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Flex:Open Source - Adobe Labs

Posted by Daniel Thu, 26 Apr 2007 14:11:00 GMT

Flex:Open Source - Adobe Labs: On April 26, Adobe announced strategic plans to move the development of Flex to an open source model. [A zig? Or a zag?]

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Joel: stick with Windows XP

Posted by Daniel Thu, 26 Apr 2007 13:10:22 GMT

Joel: stick with Windows XP: It is extremely frustrating how much you have to run in place just to keep where you were before with Microsoft’s products, where every recent release requires hacks, workarounds, and patches just to get to where you were before. I have started recommending to my friends that they stick with Windows XP, even on new computers, because the few new features on Vista just don’t justify the compatibility problems. [Join the crowd…]
Source: Joel on Software

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Hackety Hack: An Amazing Ruby Environment for Beginners

Posted by Daniel Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:35:53 GMT

Hackety Hack: An Amazing Ruby Environment for Beginners: Why The Lucky Stiff is set to guarantee himself a place in the Programming Hall of Fame with his new project, Hackety Hack, an uber-simple programming environment for kids, beginners, and amateur coders. It attempts to resolve a problem brought up in an old article of why’s, “The Little Coder’s Predicament”, which lamented the ability for kids to quickly get coding on modern platforms, unlike in the Commodore 64 days. [Lovely.]
Source: Ruby Inside

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Thoughts about large Cocoa projects

Posted by Daniel Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:48:00 GMT

Thoughts about large Cocoa projects: I call it the Research Barrier, when an app is big enough that the developer sometimes has to do research to figure things out. (“Research” just means reading the code and following some paths of execution, sometimes running in the debugger.) [ Some interesting thoughts. I certainly agree with the notes on listeners… I came across it just yesterday.]
Source: inessential.com

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Capistrano 2.0 Preview 1

Posted by Daniel Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:33:54 GMT

Capistrano 2.0 Preview 1:

Capistrano 2.0 Preview 1 is now available for installing and testing:

gem install -s http://gems.rubyonrails.com capistrano

(It’ll show up as version 1.99.0; the 1.99.x series will be used as the preview releases for 2.0)

Note, though, that it is not entirely backwards compatible with Capistrano 1.x, so you may need to massage your recipes a little to make them work smoothly under the new version. In order to make the upgrade process as smooth as possible, I’ve begun compiling a few documents to point out new features, gotchas, and upgrade paths:

http://www.capify.org/upgrade

Like Capistrano 2.0, the new www.capify.org website is still a bit rough in spots, and will see more documentation appearing over the next few weeks. If you have any feedback for either Capistrano 2.0 or the website, please join us on the Capistrano mailing list and make your voice heard!

[Nice.]
Source: Riding Rails

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Apple: A Romance - Buzz Andersen

Posted by Daniel Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:04:00 GMT

Apple: A Romance - Buzz Andersen: As a recent article about commuting in The New Yorker put it: “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”

[and the always popular]

“Second, I kept thinking back to Steve Jobs’ inspirational 2005 Stanford commencement address, and in particular the part where he talks about how he decides whether his life is on the right course: When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

[There’s plenty of opportunity for social connection on the trains if you care to try. I admit a lot of people are sleeping or walled off, but it’s not a requirement, and some have quite a bit of fun. Car commuting can be bad though. The second quote from Jobs is a great one… but my interpretation is that I try and uphold the values which are dear to me every day. And if I’m doing something that causes me to compromise on those values too many days in a row… then I need to change something. Great stuff.]

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Sharing models between two Rails applications using Piston

Posted by Daniel Fri, 20 Apr 2007 20:47:11 GMT

Sharing models between two Rails applications using Piston: I recently had to share specifications and models between two applications. Here’s how I did it: [Without having a moment to think about it… there must be other ways to accomplish this (in Rails) without Piston, and other Subversion trickery. No?]
Source: A Single Programmer’s Blog

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ActsAsPartitionable

Posted by Daniel Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:51:43 GMT

[PLUGIN RELEASE] ActsAsPartitionable: ActsAsPartitionable provides support for using multiple databases to support data partitioning schemes for existing models. This plugin allows models marked as acts_as_partitionable to specify database partitions to and explicit names to reference those partitions using existing models. As part of this plugin connection pooling is provided so that many different models may share the same database for partitions without forcing each partition model object to inherit from a common base class. [Giving back. Cool.]
Source: Revolution On Rails

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Everything Good is Bad For You

Posted by Daniel Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:56:17 GMT

Everything Good is Bad For You: Technology was supposed to let us solve these problems. But technology never solves things by itself. At bottom, it requires people to sit down and build tools that solve them. Which, as long as programmers are all competing to create the world’s most popular timewaster, it doesn’t seem like anyone is going to do. [Right on. Now what?]
Source: Aaron Swartz: The Weblog

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Joyent To Offer Open Source Version of Slingshot

Posted by Daniel Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:47:54 GMT

Joyent To Offer Open Source Version of Slingshot: When Slingshot ships, Joyent will use a dual license model similar to Trolltech, MySQL, and Sleepycat. Open Source and/or Free Slingshot will be open-sourced under the GPL and available to anyone with a publicly available service that is free (advertising is “ok”) running on the Rails platform. An example of this type of application is Twitter. You will be able to download the source-code of Slingshot, dig your fingers in, and work with it in any way you see fit. We are planning a number of initiatives in order to build a vibrant community around Slingshot and are currently working to get a number of open source Rails applications working on Slingshot. We have Radiant working, and we will release this as part of the SDK when we ship Slingshot to the world. [Cool.]
Source: Joyeur

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