humandoing software

Planning is not just guessing, it’s harmful guessing… 37 Signals has been around for 10 years, you know how long we usually worry about? Two weeks. Sometimes, when it really gets crazy, we worry about two months. We absolutely do not worry about what next year is going to look like.

I’m not always the hugest DHH fan (although, I am a Rails fan ) – but watch the lecture.

1. That can’t happen.
2. That doesn’t happen on my machine.
3. That shouldn’t happen.
4. Why does that happen?
5. Oh, I see.
6. How did that ever work?

This needs to be re-posted on the Interwebs every now and again, especially when you just finish having one of “those” moments.

This post has been sitting here as a Draft since September. Since I haven’t had the time to formulate my thoughts into family-friendly words, and since I can’t stand to see it sit here any longer, I’d like to summarize my findings ever so briefly.

Linksys WRT610N: Looks pretty. Admin interface is dated and aggravating. It had ongoing issues handing out IP addresses to my network attached printers, and after about 3 days, I wanted to smash it with a hammer (I returned it to Future Shop instead). Conclusion: FAIL.

D-Link DIR-825: Probably one of the most aggravating pieces of hardware I’ve ever had. Required constant reboots. The wireless range (especially of the 5GHz band) was so pitiful that it might as well not exist (or, optionally, you can cozy up to the router in the closet). That being said, even if you wanted to work right next to this thing in the closet – you’ll have to contend with the aggravating number of horrendously blue lights that could quite easily cause you to bleed out of your eyes. It was so aggravating, in fact, that I gave it away (I was too late to be able to return it). Conclusion: FAIL.

Apple Airport Extreme: This thing just works. I set it up once, and have since forgotten it even exists. It has never required a reboot, or any other babysitting since I bought it. Conclusion: WIN.

Here is a handy web tool for checking the validity of JSON. I’ve been generating a lot of funny custom JSON lately, and every now and again I get it wrong.

When jQuery gets ahold of invalid JSON data on a $.getJSON call, it fails silently, which can leave you with a head-scratcher, until you fix your broken JSON data.

The 2010 year has started off with a bang as Kareem and myself begin working on an awesome web booking calendar.

Debugging problems with logrotate (as in, logs not rotating) – this was plenty helpful:

logrotate -d -f /etc/logrotate.conf

After sitting on the code for JarIndexer for about 5 years, I finally got around to throwing it out to the world on GitHub.

I’m hoping a few people who use it decide to take it and run with it – or at least enjoy the open sourced version.

My wife and I love music. We listen to music all the time, and we like to listen to it all over the house. Our home came pre-wired for speakers when we bought it, but we never actually had speakers installed. After suffering through the pain that is the Apple Airport Express (sorry, Apple) – we finally decided that it was time for an early Christmas present, and had speakers installed throughout our place, and decided to go with Sonos stuff to power it.

I first heard of Sonos back in 2006 from none other than Joel Spolsky. His words in describing Sonos back then are pretty much the exact words that I would use to describe it 3 years later:

…laptops have lousy speakers, and I had been looking for a way to pump the music from the computer into other rooms of the house, so last January I finally got a Sonos system, which is probably the coolest piece of technology I’ve ever bought. Ever.

So what we’ve got ourselves here is 4 pairs of speakers installed in our place: Office, Master Bedroom, Living Room and Kitchen. All 4 pairs of speakers terminate at a central location, so it feels a little bit strange, but all 4 of the Sonos units I bought are all sitting right next to each other, even though each one is responsible for controlling a different set of speakers (or different ‘zone’) within the house. It doesn’t make any difference from a control perspective, since you can control everything wirelessly (is that even a word?) from either a Sonos Controller, the Sonos iPhone/iPod Touch App, or the desktop software.

So from there, you basically set up each player to be responsible for a specific “zone”. Here’s a partial screenshot of the Sonos Desktop Controller app:

You basically select whatever “zone” you want to play music in, and then choose what you want to play, and blammo – you have music. You can easily link/unlink zones in the event that you’d like a few zones to be playing the same thing.

I’d try to talk more about how cool it is, but the video on the Sonos site can probably do a better job, given that I’m recovering from a flu, and about as coherent as an illiterate monkey hopped up on too much Dayquil.

Presently upgrading to Snow Leopard, and this kicked me in the teeth. The latest Vlad gem is 2.0, but the documentation is still, um, rough (that’s being generous).

$ script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.2)
default formats are encoded in ISO-8859-1
>> require 'vlad'
=> ["Vlad"]
>> Vlad.load :app => :passenger, :scm => :git
MissingSourceFile: no such file to load -- vlad/git

Anyways, it turns out that as of Vlad 2.0, the git portion of Vlad (probably others as well) are separated out into their own gems.

To fix:

sudo gem install vlad-git

Thanks to Richard Hart, through whom I found the solution.

Once you have a mysql console / command line / prompt:

SET autocommit=0;

E.g.

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 53
Server version: 5.0.45 Source distribution
 
Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the buffer.
 
mysql> use your_db_here
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A
 
Database changed
mysql> SET autocommit=0;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)<strong></strong>