- Fascinating panel discussion on configuration management from #osbridge 2009 http://bit.ly/amcsq #
- Twitter is too much over capacity to allow me to upload a profile picture. Very annoying. Why can't they just use gravatar? #
Matt Robinson
Nerding Out Since the Distant Future
- Finally figured out that ctrl+shift+eject will start the mac screensaver, at least in snow leapord. #
- For a better key combo for mac screensaver http://bit.ly/czGXjK #
I’m excited to say that I started a new job last week at Puppet Labs. This means I’m back to working with Ruby code (I don’t think I’ll miss Perl much), not going to be doing much web development and pumped to be working on an open source project. The development team is small and really smart, and it’s fascinating to see how things operate in a startup company that’s based on a widely used, mature code base with a lot of community involvement.
There’s a lot of new things to learn, and finally working on a Mac and retraining my fingers on where the control key is may be one of the hardest. Just kidding, although that has been more of my brain power this last week than I’d like. Some of the cool new areas I’m looking forward to exploring in Puppet include parsers (Puppet has it’s own language), client server models other than with a web browser and working with directed graphs (finally going to get a chance to use all that graph math from college).
I’ll miss my coworkers at Rentrak and wish them luck with their code. I’ll be going to Open Source Bridge next week, so I’ll see some of them there I assume.
- Took me a while to figure out that save-history.rb is broken in ruby 1.8.7 http://bit.ly/dD2kAq #
- ReadyNas copy to USB is SO much faster if in Frontview under System>Performance you 'Enable fast USB disk writes' #
- Saw some cool uses for SASS a the Ruby Brigade meeting last night #
- Tedious test cases with a ton of arithmatic are a pain in the ass to debug #
- Picasas 3.6 installs using wine under Ubuntu. Map locations don't work though http://bit.ly/14WzMU #
- Just found out today about the program sar for keep system statistics as part of the sysstat package. It's great #
I’ve run across Stack Overflow plenty of times in the last year or so while looking for answers, but until now I hadn’t been motivated to sign up and post questions and answers. I finally decided it might be a good thing to try out when I saw they had a jobs section, because presumably the company you’re applying to might be impressed with your participation on the website. So I signed up thinking I’d give it a try and quickly lose interest as I always have participating in message boards or IRC since I always found the signal to noise ratio to be very low.
However, the simple little reputation system they’ve implemented on Stack Overflow has kept me interested for a least a couple weeks – probably will for longer. The reputation points makes me feel like it’s a something of a game where I’m trying to improve my score. I’m just over 400 reputation, and have started to look around to see what silly little badges I might be able to easily earn. I’ve even put up one of their silly flair badges on this site for now. We’ll see how long that stays up.
In fact, I think the minor addition of these badges helps make the whole reputation system more fun than a lot of other web sites that do ‘points’ or ‘karma’ or something else to measure your participation. I’m specifically thinking of the Y Combinator Hacker News Site that has these points. I tried to get some for a while, but I feel like there’s too many people who just sit around posting links and spouting out useless comments all day to compete for mind share. Even stack overflow suffers from this a little bit, where often the first person to answer gets a ton of points even if a better answer comes along later. Overall though, the community feel is still really good and there’s a nice balance of users who have enough earned power to do things to organize the site, and users who just need an occasional question answered. I’ll have to remember this as resource when I get stuck on things.
Update – Jan 3 2010 – The initial fun has worn off some, partly because you have to be almost the first person to respond to questions to stand a chance of getting your answer accepted. I just don’t have the time to watch for new questions that frequently. What I will say is that there’s a treasure trove of great answers that I’ve been using as a resource more and more often. It’s hard to even come up with original questions to ask for points. Guess I need to start working on harder problems – or at least more obscure ones 
I’ve been using Flickr for quite a few years now because it’s a great website for photo sharing. Perhaps most importantly to me, it’s offered super cheap online storage – less than $25 for unlimited storage. However, offline I’ve been using Google’s Picasa software to do all my photo organization – tagging, captioning, touch ups, sorting into albums, and recently geotagging and face recognition. The one thing that I’ve really wanted was a great way to sync between Picasa and somewhere online – but for cheap. Google was charging $75 for 40GB, which is about how much photo data I have that I’d like to backup – way too much. Now it’s $20 for 80GB. Sweet. I’m in the process of uploading everything now.
Not only does Google’s Picasa Web Albums sync data between online and desktop, it syncs tags and captions. Now I can upload my photos and tag them from anywhere with an internet connection if I get the urge to organize. Then I can sync those changes back down.
So far the main thing I’m missing from Flickr is the post to blog feature. I’m finding a ton of plugins for Wordpress that supposedly help with this, but I just want one good one. I tried one already called Goldengate that used up all my PHP memory. No thanks. I tried another I don’t even remember already that was just terrible. I’m sure a good one is out there, and once I find it, I think I’ll be ready to switch over from Flickr completely.
I’d been wanting to take some computer science courses for a while now because after being out of school for five years, I miss it. Besides, my employer pays for a bit of the education costs. But it’s hard to find graduate level courses that are convenient times and locations. I stumbled across the OMSE program (Oregon Master of Software Engineering) from someone’s blog post that was linked to from an Ignite Portland web page, and saw that they offer online class for most of the courses, and convenient evening times for the face to face classes. Bingo.
I’m taking the first course, OMSE 500, Principles of Software Engineering, right now. The course is an overview of the rest of the program, and it’s helping me realize that software engineering is quite a different topic from computer science. The course is all discussion based about topics such as project management, system architecture, development methodologies and other high view topics, but we never actually look at code. I’m not sure if I like that or not yet. I wonder sometimes if I would get burned out on code if I worked a normal week coding, and then had classes where all I did was code on top of that. On the other hand I feel like the OMSE courses will prepare me more to be a project manager than a better programmer.
What I like best about the course so far is getting a lot of perspective and stories from the fellow students. A prerequisite for taking the classes is that you’ve been working in software development for a few years, so it’s interesting to hear about the real world problems that people face as opposed to the type of fellow students I had when I was finishing my undergrad where almost nobody had any real experience outside of homework assignments. It really drives home the point that with software being as ubiquitous as it is now, some of the biggest challenges in developing it are managing how programmers work with each other since there’s not much that is done by a single person anymore.
I plan to at least get the certificate, which is 5 courses and should take me a little over a year. The full masters program is 13 or so courses, but I’m not sure yet that I wouldn’t rather focus on more computer science courses. The biggest downside to the program is that it’s expensive – over $1500 for 3 credits. I can’t imagine paying that if work didn’t chip in for most of it. I suppose they charge a little extra since most people enrolled have their employers paying for it.