Spoken

Posted by Daniel Wed, 30 May 2007 20:59:13 GMT

Posted by Daniel Wed, 30 May 2007 20:25:00 GMT

Despite my right knee still giving me minor fits, I felt it was time to up the ante.

At the end of last cycling season I did a few 50 milers, and then the weather turned and I was busy with work and I never caught a nice day in the winter. I was trying to make them routine.

Despite more of a layoff this winter than I’d hoped, I’ve kinda picked up where I left off more or less. I still have weight to lose that I gained in the early spring after valiant weight flogging through the winter. And, my knees are still not 100%. But they’re closer than they’ve been in a long time. So I’m not rushing, but I’m trying to bring them along and get them healed.

Today’s ride started in Piermont headed toward Ridgewood, NJ (about 15 miles) looping toward Suffern and back (about 20). After the second bit of hill climbing I’ve done this season (hills and bad knees are not a happy combo) I decided to hang with my friend Jenni while she added some miles to her “I’m going to RAGBRAI and I better ride account” on a pleasant path, rather than ride a few more hills back to Piermont. She gave me a lift when we were done.

We started out a little cold, but the day warmed up beautifully. Considering I’ve only had a couple of weeks to ride, I’ve been struggling to drop weight, and I’m down to one problem on one knee, and it’s not yet June and I just clocked my first 1/2C… I’d say the cycling season is promising to be a good one.

Soon I’ll be ready for Seth to ride circles around me. :~)

Posted by Daniel Wed, 30 May 2007 20:08:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Tue, 29 May 2007 13:34:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Tue, 29 May 2007 12:21:00 GMT

A couple of quotes from this article on Bo Jackson. I found the first quote from Jordan especially true.

Bo Jackson was always grouchily unimpressed with himself. Michael Jordan thought that was part of Bo’s magic. “Neither of us is very easily amazed,” Jordan told Newsweek in those days when he and Bo were the two greatest athletes in the world. “You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”

“What do you think of Bo Jackson?” a reporter asked, well, Bo Jackson.

“I’ve known this guy for years,” Bo said of Bo. “And nothing he does fazes me.”

Posted by Daniel Fri, 25 May 2007 21:40:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Tue, 22 May 2007 21:34:08 GMT

Posted by Daniel Tue, 22 May 2007 18:42:00 GMT

Release It! by Michael T. Nygard is filled with “from the trenches” advice and stories of the sorts of things that all of us who have deployed software run into. Issues of “scale” and “availability” tend to be business issues of immediate impact and are often ill considered in the design and redesign of software. More here.

Posted by Daniel Thu, 17 May 2007 16:33:40 GMT

[Still waiting for a notice that they shipped this…]

Posted by Daniel Thu, 17 May 2007 16:30:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Thu, 17 May 2007 13:37:45 GMT

Posted by Daniel Wed, 16 May 2007 22:14:00 GMT

There’s some Rails things that I can’t seem to remember… because I often don’t think about them until first deployment. Here’s a few.

rake rails:freeze:gems (moves and unpacks Rails and it's gems into vendor)
rake rails:unfreeze (reverses the above)
rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_1-0-0 (freezes to a specific version, modify the tag to suit)
rake rails:freeze:edge(freezes you to the latest version in the repository (usually unreleased))

Next we have the same routine for any other Gems you might need:

'gem unpack ???????' while in your vendor folder.

Replace the ? with the name of the gem you wish to unpack.

Having done that… you’ll need to add something like this to your environment file:

 config.load_paths += %W( #{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/???????/lib )

Then you can ‘require’ your gem in your controllers or libs etc.

All the “freezing” is about ensuring that the version that you’ve tested is the version your application uses in production. Much deployment peace is found here. I tell you three times.

Posted by Daniel Wed, 16 May 2007 20:34:43 GMT

A long time ago I started writing code because I needed solutions for *my* problems. Not thirty other problems which made it difficult for me to get stuff done. I like getting stuff done.

Ruby continues to attract me after nearly 4 years. I’m amused at how little Ruby I’ve actually written. It’s the nature of the problems I solve with it, in combination with the incredible power of it’s terseness and well written libraries.

For example, a client has data in a MySQL database. The app that put it there seems to have gone missing in a move, and until recently the data was not required. As these things go, it went from “huh?” to “sound the alarms” in short order. My solution to their emergency? Roughly equivelant to:

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_record'


ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
        :adapter => 'mysql',
            :host => '127.0.0.1',
            :database => 'something')

class User <ActiveRecord::Base; end

User.find(:all).each do |f|
  puts "#{f.name}'s email address is #{f.email}"
end

Sure, someone wrote a lot of smart stuff that I relied on… but isn’t that always the case? Well, it is for me. But that’s very little code to set up an ORM and return a useful object.

I recently worked with a C# implementation of the Active Record pattern and was amazed at how much more code (and config) there was involved in getting the same result. That’s not a knock on C# or even the implementation, but it seems that it is in the nature of Rubyists (and Ruby) to produce such minimalist design. I enjoy that.

Posted by Daniel Tue, 15 May 2007 15:02:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Mon, 14 May 2007 16:04:13 GMT