I’ve suddenly realized that while I do really like my fulltime gig, I’m not getting paid for the insane amount of overtime I normally put in. I’m not asked to do this work, but I do as I get bored and hey, I really like to code.
So I logged onto workingwithrails.com and sent my resume out to a few prospective clients that allow telecommuting developers. Why the blog post? I don’t know, I guess I’m kind of excited about the process. I will be nice to use my craft on different problem domains for once.
I have been attending meetings with the Columbus Ruby Brigade for the last three months and this month’s meeting was about freelancing. One thing that member Joe O’Brien said stuck in my head. To paraphrase; “If you waited until you were sure you were the top expert in your field, you would never get started”.
I really respect Joe from afar as he’s a super bright guy with a solid history of experience. Wisdom is learning from others, so I’ve decided to throw my hat in the ring.
Wow, I’ve referenced myself 21 times in this post. My (22) high school English teacher is probably freaking out somewhere.
Oh man, how awesome is this. Nary two hours after releasing Scribd_fu, it is already featured on Scribd’s Resources page! I hope this will help to drum up usage of Scribd_fu across the Rails community.
I’m pleased to announce my latest plugin: Scribd_fu.
What it does:
Scribd_fu hides out in the shadows like a document converting ninja, just waiting to process your data into a convenient Flash format (like YouTube) with the help of the black majick of Scribd.com. Imagine imbedding huge documents right inline with your web UI, no downloading, no necessary programs on the client side to view your data. It’s pretty damned cool, and it works with Attachment_fu!
git is so fast that it makes me feel like I haven’t done much work. I used to wait so long for Subversion to checkin that I felt like I had accomplished something!
I’m more than slightly amused to announce the birth of a new Ruby on Rails plugin, Scribd_fu.
Scribd is basically the YouTube for Documents. It’s super awesome when you have a huge PDF that would take quite a tick to download; with this you can view your document in Flash format online, inline, and quick. Scribd_fu will allow you to seamlessly CRUD any document to a Scribd Document. The aim is to also feature full integration with the venerable Attachment_fu plugin. Scribd is a really great service with a ton of potential. It’s fast and reliable to boot.
If you’re a githubber, click that ‘watch’ tab and we’ll see where this goes!
With the latest firmware release for Apple’s Airport Extreme Base Station router comes the ability to use a connected USB drive as a Time Machine backup disk. I (and many others) have waited for this feature since Leopard’s release six months ago.
The big question is if it would work as expected. In my case, my Macbook easily found the drive and Time Machine recognized it. The initial backup (50G) took all night even with a supposed 100MB throughput. Subsequent backups were slow to complete, if they even started at all. Most of the time (80% or so), Time Machine would hang with “Preparing Backup”.
One other thing that slightly annoyed me was that Time Machine creates a sparse bundle image on the AirDisk containing your backups. I assume this is done as many people can potentially use the AirDisk for backups. This causes two mounts on your system instead of one. Not a huge deal, but it’s just one more thing that can fail. I don’t like things that can fail in a backup process, especially one that is designed to be so behind the scenes.
Right now, Time Machine is doing its initial backup again as a USB connected drive to my trusty Macbook. The AirDisk seems to still have some quirks that need to be ironed out.
Also of note, I suffered a hard drive crash last week and luckily I did have Time Machine backups. I have to say that restoring Leopard from Time Machine was effortless and it was also the very first time I’ve had a full restore of an operating system actually work in over a decade of Windows, Linux, and Mac usage!
Alright, this one is odd, but it works like a charm. I recently installed Safari 3.1 on my new MacBook and after a reboot I had no audio whatsoever (though the startup chime worked). When I messed with the sound via the keyboard buttons only a greyed out icon and a barred circle appeared. I also noticed a red LED inside my headphone jack (what the hell?)
The fix is to get a toothpick and stick it all the way into your headphone jack roll it around the edge of the jack until the light goes off. Yeah. I know. It really works though. I swear.
My audio was working again immediately without a reboot!
Finally. A politician that doesn’t feed on ignorance nor treats the people as children. Thank you Obama for finally speaking the truth.
I read somewhere once that governments used to sell hope and safety to its people instead of nightmares. I’d like to see the country rally around hope instead of the monsters in the closet.
I think my friends are starting a Darby-centric cult on MySpace. Suddenly they all use a Van Gogh painting as their avatar that is my creepy doppelgänger.
RESTful_ACL has moved from Google Code to GitHub! Why the move? Well, it’s basically due to git being the new black, and more fun than Subversion. I’m in the process of migrating all of my repositories.For anyone who hasn’t tried git yet, please do. It’s super simple yet really powerful. You can even import your existing Subversion repos to git by simply doing
git svn clone user@host:/path/to/repo
Try it! It won’t screw your existing SVN repo. Honest.So without further adieu, Here is RESTful_ACL’s new home and for the impatient, you can clone the repo via:
