To preface this, I will say that I love my 12″ PowerBook. I have never had a better computer. I have not had a single problem with it since the day that I got it. I do all sorts of work on it and it is like a part of me. I’ve never been able to say that about something that I owned, especially a computer. That is why it was so painful to go into an Apple store and be treated like I didn’t matter. More after the jump and the surprising twist at the end.
It’s been a whirlwind few weeks for me at my new job. I’ve met so many new people and have gotten involved in many different parts of the business. Orientation went by in a blur in the “bored” room. I got to hang out with 3 great people who were going through orientation too and run around Chicago during the immigration rally and get Giordano’s pizza.
I’m currently working in Madison, Wisconsin on a project doing Enterprise Testing which is much more fun than it sounds. Today, for instance, I was working on some ruby code (yay!) to automate a huge number of tests. I work with lots of great people and get to see how a truly large project gets done. It’s an amazing thing what the agile process does for development.
I’m getting used to the travel and all of the “joys” that go with it. Life as a consultant is good right now and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I hope to update more now that I have my poor PowerBook back from the grave.
This week’s law talks about being unpredictable and how it can work against those who would try to predict what you are going to do next.
This week’s law of power is a great one about scarcity. Most people know about supply and demand and can understand that things become more valuable when they are rare. Some however, don’t realize it takes rarity along with demand to make something (or someone) valuable. It is this subtlety that escapes some and is at the heart of this week’s law. More after the jump.
Having trouble with rails on OS X? Are you getting something like this message?
`require': No such file to load -- rubygems (LoadError)
Then the ruby binary may have been replaced on your machine by Apple in an update recently. The fix is just to remove Apple’s version in /usr/bin or to change your bash profile to load your version of ruby first.
I decided I needed a new front page to this place, so I went to work on something new. I didn’t exactly know what I wanted until I started putting something down on paper and forming some ideas. I finally came up with the design you see “here”:http://www.bitshaker.com and I am pretty happy with it. Read on after the jump on how I did it.
I’ve been sitting on this news for a while until the final paperwork came through, but now that the ink is drying on my contracts, I’m proud to announce that I will be working as a Business Analyst for ThoughtWorks. I start May 1st with orientation in the Chicago office and then I’ll be put on a project for one of our clients. Read on for more if you want to know why I chose ThoughtWorks and how I got to this point.
I took a break with these for a while, but now they are back. More on that in another post. This week, I talk about completely defeating an enemy so that they do not come back. More after the jump.
If you read this and you are running Typo, I hope it helps you. I am one of the Typo Gardeners at TypoGarden. Rails 1.1 just came out and it breaks some backwards compatibility and at this time, Typo breaks when it is run with it. There is an experimental branch of Typo that hopes to fix these issues, but for now, it would be wise either not to upgrade to Rails 1.1 unless you need it, or to run
rake freeze_edge REVISION=3303
in your Typo directory so that you freeze which version of Rails (1.0) you are running until something can be done. This is particularly relevant for people on shared hosts like TextDrive or Dreamhost. This has been a PSA. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.
There was a problem on my site for a while where certain categories on my Typo install were just redirecting to an old school listing of files like when there is no index page in a folder. It bugged me for a while, until I thought about how Rails does its routing of URLs. More after the jump.
Technorati Tags: lighttpd, typo, rubyonrails
This week’s law talks about knowing your rival. I recently used the same advice to make myself better for a position. More after the jump.
I’ve been mulling an idea around in my head for the past week. I can’t seem to sleep without thinking about it (which usually means I need to build something). Rails migrations are pretty easy to get your head around. They add all of the benefits of being able to keep database changes under version control and let you work with a team while doing it, among other things. Can we make creating these migrations even easier? How about a web app to create, modify, and manage migrations? I think that’s what I need to create, if only for my sanity, but hopefully it will be useful for someone else too.
This week’s law is great. I’ve always heard from people, “It’s better to catch flies with honey…” and, “A spoonful of sugar…” These sayings all get to the core of what people respond to: something sweet for them. More after the jump.
Prosper: Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can now lend money or request money in the form of a loan. You set the interest rate, you take the benefits. I think of it as P2P banking. I wish I had thought of it. I’ll be watching these guys with interest to see how they do. Makes me wonder what other “old” things can be made new again with P2P in front of it.
This week, the laws of power bring us a law about honesty and when to use it with your adversaries. More after the jump.
This week, I talk about making people dependent on you and the freedom that brings when you are the provider. More after the jump.
This week’s law of power may be a controversial one and it is one that I struggle with because I am the type of person who likes to care for people. The way that I apply it in my life and work is to think about what lifeguards are trained to do.
This week, I talk about something that comes up everywhere: office politics. If you work in an office, it will happen to you. More after the jump.
An article came across my news reader today and happened to click on it. I think a lot about design and where the user comes into play in a system, so this article intrigued me in a way it probably wasn’t meant to do. It is an article called NTFS Performance Hacks. I discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly after the jump.
Technorati Tags: windows