Jared’s Blog

You may have noticed a lack of posting in the last several weeks from yours truely. I have been putting in extreme hours at work. The good news is we finally launched our Ruby on Rails based site on Monday. For a team of 3 guys, 2 of whom started the project without knowing a lick of Ruby, we managed to crank out a solid app in 9 months.

This launch is especially exciting for me as I did pretty much all of the visual design. There’s a ton of work to be done and I best be getting back to it.

TheHoneymoon.com Check it out!

Being the good Mac fanboy, I was anxiously awaiting Apple’s announcement today. With a title like “The beat goes on,” you knew it was going to be new iPods. Having just taken it all in, I have some reactions.

Well the word is out and so are the new iPods. New colors for Shuffles. Blah. New “fatty” nano. Don’t care. New iPod “Classic.” Interesting, nice price point. iPod Touch. I was hanging on every word until they got to the size, 8GB and 16GB. Wifi enabled. Sweet! Wifi iTunes Store. Also sweet! Starbucks partnership. *silence*

I was all ready to go to the Apple Store after work to buy me a new iPod Touch until I found out they were only going up to 16GB. I can’t live with 16GB. I’m the kind of person who likes to be able to hear a song on a whim. The only way to do that is to carry my whole collection around with me. I reached the point where I could no longer fit all my music on my 60GB iPod not long ago. I deal with it by only putting the stuff I listen to somewhat often on it. That reduced collection is somewhere between 25-30GB. Why couldn’t you have made a 32GB version, Apple? Charge me $499 for it. Everything else about it is sweet, but if you have a device that’s supposed to hold my music, video, and photos, it’s going to need to be larger than 16GB.

Yesterday, I came in to work just like any other day. While checking some bugs out, I went to load the staging version of our site. Lo and behold, the site was down. No big deal, I thought, maybe Apache died and needs to be restarted. I’d been messing with the Apache configs quite heavily last week, and so I just assumed that was what caused the problem.

I brought up my console and typed in the ssh command to which there was no response. The server is located in my building, so I walked over to see what the deal was. The server was still running, so I gave it a restart. Though Linux is known for being rock solid, you’d be amazed at the problems a restart will solve. Well, it finished restarting and still no connection.

After poking around some more, I discovered the server wasn’t even online. I couldn’t ping out. I tried disabling the firewall for awhile, no luck. I tried changing the DNS to OpenDNS, still nothing. Finally, I walked over to the IT admin’s office and asked him if there had been any changes over the weekend. Of course his reply was a “Yes…”

It seems that over the weekend, they decided to switch the IP block they had. And it wasn’t like a subnet changed, the entire block was different. A change like this doesn’t just happen. There needs to be planning done so that server configurations can be changed, DNS needs time to propagate, people need to be notified. Apparently, I wasn’t on that “to notify” list. I was told “we tried to find you on Friday, but we couldn’t.” Bullshit. I was in the office all day on Friday and the IT admin even came in to our office earlier in the day.

I spent the first half of my day yesterday dealing with getting our staging server up and running. All that really needed to be done was to change a few config files. A task I could’ve easily prepared for last weekend and finished in minutes yesterday had I known in advance. That kind of inconsiderate behavior is unprofessional and it really pissed me off.

A week or so ago, I noticed the power cord for my laptop was becoming increasingly sensitive. If it wasn’t at just the right angle, it wouldn’t charge. Knowing my laptop was out of warranty (I thought it was 90 days, but I guess it is a full year) and with a replacement costing $80, I dealt with it. Sunday, I plugged in the adapter and went back to working on my desktop. I looked over an noticed it wasn’t charging. I reached for the cord to try and fiddle with it to get the magic angle again and immediately became alarmed at how hot it had become. I quickly unplugged it from the laptop and the wall as to not start a fire or damage the laptop. After I did this, I noticed there was a small hole in the plastic coating of the cord and it had partially melted.

Rick, Kristi, and I were planning on going to see Superbad (so hilarious!) at the mall and so we left a little early to stop by the Apple store. Once there, I was informed by an employee that I needed to make an appointment to see someone at the Genius Bar and that their next appointment was right in the middle of our movie time. The nice thing is you can schedule appointments online at any time. I got one set up for 1:30 the following day at the Apple store a few miles from work.

At work the next day, my laptop lasted for about an hour before the battery was pretty much drained, so I was forced to use my old Linux desktop machine. Man is it slow compared to my Macbook Pro. After spending about 2 hours just getting the thing updated to where I could start programming, I tried to get some work done. The results were less than amazing to say the least.

I never realized how much more efficient I am on my Mac. I have to give credit to the excellent text editor, Textmate. I felt crippled without it. All it’s little bundles and keyboard shortcuts add up not only a much more enjoyable programming experience, but a more productive one as well.

As 1:30 rolled around, I took my seat at the Genius Bar. The store was packed and the Genius Bar was obviously behind schedule as I sat around for a good 15 minutes before anyone called my name. Eventually, a Genius, Dave, came over and called my name. He explained that he’d seen the melting power cords before. The cause seems to be when the cord gets bent at an extreme angle and breaks a small wire inside the cord. After some trouble pulling up my info (it was due to the purchase being made under my boss’s name), he replaced the adapter without any further questions. I thanked Dave for his help and was on my way back to being an efficient, Mac loving, web developer for the rest of the day.

I first learned of the Ruby Users of Minnesota (RUM) through the Rails Pragmatic Studio that I took last December. I thought it would be a good place to pick up some new ideas and skills once I got more comfortable with Ruby and Rails. Soon afterward, I began working with James, who regularly attended the monthly meetings. There were many times I would hear “you would fit in well with the guys at RUM” or “some of the guys at the last RUM meeting were talking about that.”  I always told myself that I should check it out, but I’d always forget about when the meeting was or I’d have something else going on that night.

Well, last month I finally decided I was going to make it to the meeting no matter what and I’m glad I went. I found the new location, the Acadia Cafe in downtown (or is it uptown?), with relative ease and took a seat in the auditorium style room. I probably should’ve sat closer to the middle of the room but the anti-social in me took over and made sat in the back of the room.

As the first presentation began, I thought to myself how weird and nerdy the casual cafe goer would think we were. There’s a bunch of people all staring at laptops and talking about writing code. Only the LAN parties we used to hold back in college rivaled the dork level in that room. Anyway, the first presentation immediately grabbed my attention. I had seen HAML before and didn’t think much of it. However, it’s CSS equivalent, SASS, was completely new to me and I think I had a little nerdgasm right there in my seat. Consequently, I haven’t done anything with it since, but I no doubt will.

The next presentation was on telecommuting/telecomputing. It was actually more of a discussion on the pros and cons. I’m a big fan of working from home and in my situation, I find there are little cons. Our other developer telecommutes 100% of the time, so my contact with him is through email and IM anyway. When I’m in the office, I usually put headphones on, and program away on my laptop; a task I can easily do anywhere there is an Internet connection. I also find that when I work from home, I am more productive. I can just put some loud music on, get buried on my project, and focus for long periods of time without being interrupted. A lot of the cons discussed in the meeting centered around project-specific metrics such as number of developers, distance of developers from each other, and language/locale difficulties. None of these are problems for me, so I only gave it half my attention.

The final two presentations were demos of projects. The first, FanChatter.com, was kind of cool, but I don’t think it’s anything I would use. The other, Lean-To.com, a project management app, was also of little interest to me.

As I said, I was relatively anti-social during most of the night, but I did end up talking to one gentleman in between presentations. Dave was just getting started with Rails and was having trouble getting his database data into his view pages. Drawing on my TA experiences, I tried to instruct him as best I could, but I have a feeling a lot was lost in translation. However, I gave him my card and invited him to email me if he had any questions. Maybe he did get it, because I haven’t heard from him yet.

I’m looking forward to the next meeting and whatever people come up with to present. The meetings are open to presentations by anyone, so maybe I can demo The Honeymoon once we finish it.

Pownce is the newest site from Kevin Rose. Normally I’m behind everything Kevin does because he’s a geek like me. We share that common dork wavelength. But I’ve encountered a number of things that bug me about Pownce already.

First of all is the whole AIR thing. I don’t want to download AIR. Can’t Flash already run on the desktop outside of the browser? I remember E-cards from Streetwise working like that back in the day. What I’m really saying is AIR is too new and doesn’t yet have that killer application that makes me want to download it. Sorry Pownce.

Some other Web 2.0 shoe-ins are missing as well. Where’s my RSS feeds? I should at least be able to subscribe to a feed of all the notifications that come in. I’m also a little puzzled why Daniel Burka didn’t take the 30 seconds it’d take him to create a favicon. They are such an important branding tool. I guess they must all be Safari users.

It annoys me that there is a premium paid service. While it’s certainly within his right to charge for a premium service, something about it feels dirty. I’ve always thought of Kevin as a dork first and a businessman later. Digg Pro accounts coming soon?

In the grand scheme of things, Pownce is just Twitter (but without the heavy focus on mobiles) or Jaiku (without the feed aggregation). Surely these are features that could be added, but it always looks better to be the innovator. This seems to be what the Pownce team is aiming for with their 10MB (100MB for paid users) file sharing and events services. It will be interesting if to see if Pownce is nearly as successful as Digg. The news market was a crowded place when Digg came on the scene and social IM is looking more and more crowded every day.

Update: Thanks to a Digg story, I was able to get an RSS feed of my public posts on Pownce. Now you can find my pownces(?) in Jaiku.