The Practice of Programming Programmers are, in essence, problem solvers. They live to solve problems. When they identify a problem that needs solving, they cannot resist the temptation to study it, poke and prod it, and get to know it intimately. They then start considering solutions. At this point, the programmer is not often thinking…
Category: Ruby
LinuxLaboratory woes, Drupal -> Django?
Ugh… So, today I tried browsing to one of my sites, linuxlaboratory.org, and found a 403 “Forbidden” error. Calling support, they said it was a “billing issue”. Well, I pay my bills, and I haven’t received any new credit cards, so I’m not sure what that’s about. Further, they haven’t contacted me in any way…
I’m Offering Pro-Bono Consulting
I started my company about a year ago, but I’ve been doing consulting for a long time. In fact, my first job in the IT industry was working for a consulting firm. Before that, starting as far back as grade school, I was involved in a lot of volunteer civic and community service activities. I…
OSCON Day 2: Launching a Startup in 3 Hours
Launching a Startup in 3 Hours was a great talk given by Andrew Hyde (of techstars.org) and Gavin Doughtie (of Google). Both of the speakers are heavily involved in the recent trend of doing “Startup Weekends”, and techstars.org is an organization that hosts startup weekends all around the US (and I think internationally as well…
OSCON Evening 1 Begins, and More Portland Tips
The evening plans didn’t wait for talks to be done. The IRC channel (#oscon on irc.freenode.net) was alive with talk of prospects for dinner and drinks after the conference. I myself was torn between a group going out for Lebanese and another going to Henry’s, but opted to go with my buddies from home to…
OSCON Day 1 Comes to a Close
I think I have pictures of most of the basic parts of the conference at my OSCON Flickr set, and I thoroughly enjoyed day 1 of the conference. Of course, while *day* 1 is over, *night* 1 has yet to even begin. There are lots of BoF sessions, and maybe even more smaller meetups going…
Cloud computing hype overload
I’ve been working with what I used to call “utility computing” tools for about 6-9 months. However, for about the past 2 months, I’ve been seeing the term “cloud computing” all over the place, and there is so much buzz surrounding it that it’s reaching that magical point best described using Alan Greenspan’s words: “Irrational…
This is how I want all project web sites to look…
My brain has a set of rules that software project websites get tested against. Each time a project site fails to comply with a rule, I get ever-so-slightly more annoyed, and ever-so-slightly less likely to use the software in question (if there are alternatives, this is even maybe not so “slightly”). I thought I’d list…
Plug-ins: isn’t there a better way?
If there’s one thing that bothers me about using a ready-made solution like wordpress for my blog, it’s plug-ins. I hate software plug-ins. The first question every support engineer for any software product that supports plugins asks in response to a trouble report is “are you using any plugins?” And when you say “yep, I’m…
O’Reilly OSCON… and Brew Fest!
I’m going to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) again this year. I went in 2006 as well, and had a blast, in addition to learning quite a bit, and meeting tons of people whom I’ve been acquainted with online for a long time. That was 2 years ago. Since then I’ve been acquainted with…