Spoken

Posted by Daniel Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:53:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:47:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:30:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Wed, 15 Aug 2007 23:27:00 GMT

Steve: As with any great product, there have been several things that make it special — the idea, our product owner, the process, etc. The most important to me though is the Team.

Luke: Ript lets you tear stuff off the web just like you tear something out of a magazine. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Wendy: For the past year, our team at Oxygen has been working on several projects. Most of which are internal, providing tools for the Oh! channel to operate. One of them, Ript, is something completely different.

Posted by Daniel Mon, 16 Jul 2007 17:01:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:06:00 GMT

Posted by Daniel Tue, 19 Jun 2007 01:09:00 GMT

Father's day becomes more special every year that Noah is with us. He's just an incredible being.

But that's not my point (smile)

I was planning this...

Due to mechanical difficulty I only made to the top of that peak. Then I turned around and went home. I admit that some of that hill I walked, again, but I got futher than ever before, in harder gearing, and I'll try and ride it enough this summer to get all the way. through it.

Really good news: no knee pain. I finally was running out of cardio and muscle rather running into pain. I feel fitness in my future. So while the ride was shorter than I had planned, and missed out the lovely scenery by the lake and the wonderfully winding backside decent I did manage to get some more climbing in and that's what I'm really hoping to work on now that my knees seem to be allowing it. Onward!

Posted by Daniel Wed, 13 Jun 2007 16:56:00 GMT

So I’ve been working o my knee and getting stronger every week and all has been good with my riding. All this was leading up to a ride with Seth which I had planned for soonish.

I did the Alpine Approach last week, though I didn’t know I was going to because the folks I rode with called it something else. So while there was some pain, I rode more of 9W and the park than I had ever done before regardless of knee condition, which told me that I was doing good and should keep moving. Plus, I rode again Thursday and was pain free, so I figured things really were progressing.

Jenni planned some climbing for today and I figured what the heck. Oddly enough, the truly killer hill isn’t on the elevation chart she posted (see above) since it isn’t on Long Meadow but on the road we needed to ride to get to there. (The very first lie in cycling is “This is the last hill”.) It wasn’t that bad on the way in, but after all the climbing on Long Meadow it was something on the way back. Of course, I did enjoy the 47MPH downside on the way in… it’s not as fast coming back out.

Anyway, I’m really happy about my progress, and while I broke no speed records going up those climbs… they were mostly pain free and a definite improvement for me fitness-wise and knee-wise. Yay me.

No here’s the ugly part Seth. I’m going to be working full time starting next week until about September is looks like. We’ve waited for a long time to get together, I guess it is going to have to wait just a bit longer. Sorry.

My next task is figuring out how to continue to increase my fitness while working full time. It’ll be a new trick for me for sure. Wish me luck.

As an aside my meds have been cut to 50% in one case and 25% in another. Just another sign of increasing health. Little steps, little steps.

PS: For all those reading along, Seth wouldn’t harm a fly as far as I know, never mind actually do me harm. Just soes ya know, and don’t get the wrong idea about the title.

Posted by Daniel Tue, 05 Jun 2007 12:38:00 GMT

So I finally managed to get out the woods for a ride. The bike handled well, but it needs some dialing. I managed to get stuck behind a someone totally new to the sport… I tried to help, but there’s nothing but experience that teaches you that controlled speed is your friend, I guess. Going slow causes one to get stuck by rocks that you’d otherwise roll over or around and er, um, fall. (Not that could happen to me, ahem :~)

My knees held up ( though they felt a bit grainy the next day). I’m going to call that a success however. And the “cross-training” nature of mountain biking (compared to road riding it’s far less mechanically repetitive, more upper body, and a more upright position) uses different muscles, so I felt it in my butt climbing, and arms and shoulders descending. I expect that this will all help my reach for fitness now that my knees seem to be finally settling down.

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 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 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.