The Brothers’ Adventure Begins

Halfling brothers Sam and Tam Footlick had an adventurous childhood.  Sam was always the troublemaker, while Tam, the younger, was innocent and just.  Tam was a great mediator as well, which came in handy when Sam’s wiles failed him.

One year, a paladin of Pelor by the name of Sir Marin Agdarish was passing near their village.  As he saw the two young halflings he felt compelled to stop and speak with them.

Seeing great potential after just a few moments with them, he took them in as apprentices to his profession.  Under the tutelage of Sir Agdarish, Sam & Tam excelled in the fighting arts.  Their innate cunning made them adroit fighters.

As time passed during their training, Tam adapted to the more upfront style fighting taught by Agdarish.  His older brother, however, only took the lessons at face value.  Lessons of wielding the various implements became rules of thumb as he spent more time honing his natural abilities.  Sam was also noted for spending numerous nights working on Sir Agdarish’s footlockers, drawers, and cabinets under the concealment of darkness.

One summer’s eve, after a hard day of training, the two brothers were assaulted by a small scouting group of gnolls.  As the two beasts bared their fangs, preparing to feast on the siblings, Agdarish sprung into action.

Long, but calculated slices cut the foes down before the eyes of the two inexperienced teens.  In shock, their eyes grew wider as a sword tip plunged through Agdarish’s belly.  Blood oozed down his legs and tears began to well in his eyes.  His legs buckled under the weight of his slumping body.

Digging deep for strength, Marin Agdarish let out a mighty cry for help from Pelor.  A soft glow enveloped him and he stood tall to the surprise of his aggressor.

Sam & Tam witnessed their teacher’s final blow to the surprised gnoll flanker in all it’s glory.  Bathed in the white light, they felt comforted for a short while as the last gnoll was beheaded.

As the light faded from the noble paladin’s body, the two brothers came to him quickly and he breathed his final words.

“Had you another season of training, this would not have happened.  Pursue friends of honor and learn to defend yourselves.  Save those in need and do good in the name of Pelor.  Sam, guard your brother’s back.  Tam, never let your brother fall in battle before you.”

With his final breath Sir Marin Agdarish passed into the night.  The boys knew what needed to be done.  Sam felt more of a need for revenge, whereas Tam desired justice under all circumstances.  And now their true journey begins.

RailsConf 2008 Part 2 (Finally)

This is a total tangent off of my doings at RailsConf this year.  Before completely losing the topic, let me dump some closing thoughts out real quick.

It’s been several weeks since RailsConf 2008 ended.  As they say, fresh thoughts from short crams tend to fade fast from your memory if you don’t put them to use.  Well, I took notes, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about memorizing the sessions until I could implement what I learned.  I also apologize to anyone who expected me to email them right away after getting many business cards to expand my contacts in this world.

The last few sessions that I attended were pretty non-Rails, which is where I wanted to strengthen myself anyway.  I need more Ruby help and I got exactly that.  I also got to enjoy talking with people more this year.  That was my greatest achievement: Stepping out of my comfort zone and being social in real life.  It was great to not only put faces to the names that I have learned of online.

While at the conference, it’s harder to talk social life instead of shop, but once you get out of the bounds of the conference realm (like the expo area, or even more fun…the restaurant scene).  I only wish I had more time.  Meeting more people this year and having less than a week makes it more difficult to enjoy the interaction.  I was also on a more limited budget, so lunch out and about was not in my itinerary.

So yeah, social life and Ruby were the big moments for my time in Portland.  I think I’ll just re-iterate that Ezra’s talk on the cloud computing management tool (code named Vertebra?) was the cream of the crop.  I also enjoyed the time with Tom, James, and Scott (hobocentral.net), the KCRUG guys, who all seemed to enjoy the conference, and finding out that a buddy of mine from high school is in the Rails scene (at least to some degree).

Anyway, let’s stop this spiral of crazy thinking and move on to the funnier part.  Mind you “funny” is very, very subjective.

So, I was talking on an IRC channel earlier today and realized that I like to emote a “bonk” to the head.  Much akin to the the monks from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

In turn, that caused me to think, “Writing Rails apps is as easy as hitting yourself in the head with a wood plank.”  If you’re not following, just ask yourself, “Who can hit themselves with a wooden plank, given the plank is in their possession?”  Okay, good.  That was easy!  Just like Rails!  There is a deeper philosophical meaning and honestly, I’d love to dive into that topic some day.  The only downside is that my comparison isn’t a perfect 1:1 mapping, but it sure is close.

So there you have it.

Bonk away.

RailsConf 2008 Interlude

Well, I just expelled a ton of creativity in the wrong place, and this reminds my why I normally write my entries in a text editor first.  Grrr.

Kent Beck’s keynote last night had a great story in there.  He describe technology as having four categories.  They were enthusiasts, early adopters, early majority, late majority.  They talk about how technology is picked up.  The latter two are significantly larger than the first two.

Now, I will give my (hopefully funny) analogy to bad RailsConf sessions.

The enthusiasts is that very small number of folks who try to sneak out, and could be confused with what session they are in, or maybe even need to use the facilities.  At this point, you probably don’t know that the talk is failing.

Enter the early adopters.  These guys are more in tune with their distaste for the talk.  They might have even just been skittish and seeing the enthusiasts take off, they jump the gun prematurely.  Let the snow ball begin.

Early majority is the key to failure.  When you have a roughly 30-45% drop in population maybe halfway through the talk.  I’d say it has failed to inform (or entertain) the masses.

Lastly, the late majority would be your truly interested listeners.  Maybe sprinkle in some polite listeners

RailsConf 2008 Part 1 (Quotes)

RailsConf this year has been a lot better for me than last year.  I’m actually talking to people…crazy, I know.  The talks have been hit-or-miss for me just like last year.  I think it still lacks the extra Lightning Rounds.  But enough of that.  Here’s some quotes that I really liked.  I’ll apologize now if they’re not exactly what was said, but I believe they still convey the points:

Developers can write documentation that is comprehensive, not comprehensible. –Jim Weirich

Programs that are hard to write should be hard to understand. –Jim Weirich

People like choices a lot better than actually having to choose. –DHH

While talking to Jim, we were discussing documentation and the end-user.  This discussion spurred his two quotes.  Lastly, anyone attending tonight’s keynote likely picked up on DHH’s (no I won’t spell his name out) quote.

I guess I could stop there, but I just wanted to add that Joel Spolsky of http://joelonsoftware.com/ did a fantastic job of getting the main conference started.  He was a hoot.  Let the Angelina Jolie jokes run freely now that he’s broken the ice.  And with that said, I’m headed to bed.

Ferrets Gone Wild

Sometimes, acts_as_ferret can get a bit squirrely. I’m talking about a helper in a Ruby on Rails application in case you’re lost. The problem I had was that my index was jacked up. So what do we need to do about it? Rebuild the index! It’s the only option that I know of right now.

Two options that I’m clued into:

1. Nuke indexes out of the index directory
2. Call the class method rebuild_index

So what I did first was option number one. I didn’t really like that, although it is definitely easy. But I don’t want everyone doing that option when the application is being maintained down the road. The I’m not sure how root access or file privileges are involved either, but I’m betting that number two is going to work for you if you’re an application maintainer.

I want a rake task for option two. We know that rake can use ruby, so let’s do it. In your application’s lib/tasks directory, create a .rake file. Let’s call it utils.rake. It’ll be useful later on if you have other utility-type tasks that you might want.

Inside this file put:

namespace :utils do
  namespace :ferret do
    desc "Rebuild the ferret indexes for Kodo and Podo"
    task :rebuild => :environment do
      [Kodo, Podo].each do |klass|
        puts “rebuilding the Ferret /#{RAILS_ENV}/ index for : #{klass}..”
        klass.rebuild_index
        puts ”  done.”
      end
    end
  end
end

Dar would be proud. The only real improvements might be to detect which models utilize acts_as_ferret and some error handling.

Indy 4

Indy, indy, indy, indy, indy, indy…

…I can’t wait. Like the masses of Indiana Jones fans who don’t really care about the quality. It’s another moment for us to enjoy another page in this character’s life.

Hey, Star Wars Episode 1 wasn’t that bad. I’m not a Jar Jar fan, but there are moments in that film which I still like. So if Star Wars wasn’t a total ruinous mess, then neither will the Indiana Jones sequel be. Besides, this should be the last go for ol’ Ford.

I will boycott any Shia Lebeouf follow-up stories though. River Phoenix covered the prequel series on TV and I’m not asking for anything more than one last “hurrah” from Harrison Ford.

Square Peg, Round Hole

I normally don’t enjoy burgers (or sandwiches to be more general) where the meat doesn’t look at least somewhat befitting of the bun. Yeah, it’s fun to go to a home cookin’ restaurant and eat a pork tenderloin that is larger than the plate, yet sits between slices of a White Castle bun. It’s smashed meat, what do you expect in that case?

Wendy’s has square patties, and I don’t really care, they’re not too crazy with the 2-dimensional properties, they prefer to “wow” you with the girth on the z-axis.

Enter Burger King’s Steakhouse burger. It’s hilariously huge. Completely unfit for on-the-drive consumption. But overall, the flavor was fun…like the commercial where people are wrecking their cars to get one. They even make one with mashed potatoes on top. It’s madness I tell you! That’s not even the end of the insanity. It’s a square burger.

Okay, I can breathe now. I did enjoy it. It was fun to eat (as long as are sitting at a table). Rickshaw out!

Scent of a Winning Season

The Royals are officially 2-0 today.  The last time this happened was in 2003 which happens to be their last winning season.  I don’t want to get any hype going or jinx them, however, baseball is all about stats and these are stats that I can savor until tomorrow.  I should have done more homework to figure out how the Royals fair in day games since the Detroit series is all being played at noon.

Other interesting bits:

• Six games on the road to start the 2008 season, bleh, six less during the remaining 156 games I guess
• In the past decade, KC has had a fair number of 4-2 starts, none of which produced a winning season (this only proves that the first 6 games don’t mean much).  The ‘03 season started off 9-0
• Royals are strongest in June/July, which is a pretty general statement, I just glanced over the past 10 years because I thought August was their best, but it’s really more around the All-Star break/Draft
• DeJesus is hurt, but that’s going to give Gathright plenty of time to shine out in centerfield and strengthen their “G-Men” motif (Grudz, Gload, Gordon, Gathright, Guillen)

In closing, I just hope to enjoy a good season of growth with Hillman (the manager) and Yabuta  (pitcher) coming from Japan.  My expectations in order of best chance: “< 90 losses”, “.500 season”, “playoff spot/World Series(clumping for brevity)”.  All this despite the unsightly construction at my favorite venue in KC.

KC Royals がんばって!

Drift Racing Gone Awry

Since I didn’t plan this morning’s drifting adventure, there is not pre-accident footage. The leisurely drive to work started of great, and I even noted the damp conditions of the road prior to tackling this high end course. I get rolling around the suggested course speed of 35 miles per hour, but even that gentle canter was a bit much for my black beauty to handle.

If the puns are getting to be too much, then rest assured that I got my comeuppance. While I still don’t know the outcome of the car, I know that I survived. You can get some great post-crash information though, right here and here.

Other interesting stats:

• KCPD response ~ 1 hr 20 min (yeah, I had to wait a while, heh)
• Arby’s drive through ~ 5 min
• ER triage ~ 25 min
• CT scan + X-Ray ~ 10 min

I actually had 3 tow trucks before the police showed, dunno what to say about that stat since I wasn’t timing all that good stuff.  Sorry

Super Mario Galaxy

Well, as you all know, the Nintendo Wii has unleashed one of its first killer apps since release. That’s right: Super Mario Galaxy. We all saw it demonstrated at E3 back in the day. We all salivated in anticipation of its release. We all got rewarded earlier this week for our patience. Metacritic has got this thing pegged at the top of the Wii list and while I haven’t saved enough dough myself, the articles about it just keep the flames of desire going.

Oh yeah, be sure to check out Dillon’s review: http://blog.mygeeklife.net or more directly