posts

One of the trends that I personally have noticed is the removal of the ability to comment from articles on blogs. I’m not sure which camp I’m in,  so I decided to preform an experiment. I turned off comments on the last few articles that I have posted, just to see how that makes me feel.

Over the last few months, I’ve done a few webinars. On was Running Production Apps on Heroku, and the other was Optimizing  Production Apps on Heroku. Below the fold I have the slides and video from the talks.

So, yesterday I read this. It echoed a lot of how I approach my inbox as a task list, and some of the ideas there pushed my inbox-fu to black belt levels. However I work in a different environment then Keith does, with a lot more customer facing email. I’ve merged Keith’s ideas with my workflow, and have come up with a gmail centric inbox-fu which is agile, powerful, and above all easy.

Footprints in the Sand …the Discordian version

I really hate this error. Skype is so unstable for me that I get little slowdowns and lock ups weekly, And about once a month I get this error after I’ve force killed it. I used to have to google it every time, drop to a command line and do a bunch of stuff. Well no more. Now there is a script to clean up after Skype’s mess! Skype - you can barrow this if you want. Just have it run when Skype is launching.

I’m going to move away from Feedburner, as I am no longer confident in it’s long term viability. This is thanks to Google shutting down reader and moving everything towards the walled garden that is Google Plus. So, if you are one of the two or three people that still follow this blog via RSS, you’ll want to move to the feed at https://greg.nokes.name/feed.xml instead of any other. I will not be shutting off the feedburner anytime soon but that day is coming.

One of the interesting things about using a tool like iTunes for a long time (over 5 years for me) is that you can build up a lot of metadata around your use of that tool. In iTunes there are really two pieces of metadata that are interesting to me - the number of times that I have skipped a song and the number of times that I have played a song. I’ve used the smart playlists feature for several years to surface interesting songs that have not been played in a while or other such neat stuff.

Today I wanted to find something - what were my most played songs? Well, there were a few in there that were not my favorite songs for sure. So I went ahead and added in a new search criteria - most played song that I had not skipped.

I have been using the term "Viking Coder" for a several years now. Honestly, it was a "equal and opposite" reaction to the rise of the Rockstar Ninja Samurai whatever in job descriptions. I don't play a guitar or dress in black PJ's. I am a tall person, and I like simple solutions to problems. And I an a least a little bit Scandinavian.

Some folks asked me what I meant by viking coders. So, with out further gnashing of teeth, here you go.

So you want to build yourself a custom heroku buildpack, and you want to do it the hard way? Look no further, for within lies insanity.

While hacking at my favorite tavern, I noted that I needed to update a gem file. When I tried, gem said that it had succeeded, but there were some odd little errors:

One of the cool things about what I do, is that I get exposed to some really interesting paradigms. One of the latest is the 12 factor app. It's an evolution of some of what I have thought in the past, and a radical departure in others.

So, I was updating ruby etc on my Lion box, and I ran into a few issues.

Today, I was blindsided by my 3 1/2 year old self. You see, when I was prying my 6 year old son off me, he was screaming “I don’t want to leave daddy!” and I was taken back to when I was 3 1/2. That is when, as far as I can recall, my mom and dad split. I really don’t remember what happened, but I was hit by a wave of emotion. From way back in the peanut gallery of my past selves. Abandonment, fear, pain, sadness. Uselessness. A feeling of things spiraling out of my control

One of the issues that I have run into several times is the securing of access to server farms. You generally end up with a ton of keys laying around and it gets really messy. At one of my past jobs, they had written a pretty killer tool that gave me the springboard for pssh. Pssh is cool because it knows what servers you have by interrogating the AWS APIs, what keys they need and even what their internal DNS name is in your cloud.

With the advent of low cost, high capacity storage solutions, and really easy SAN tools baked into most linux distros, a DIY SAN solution is a lot easier then it might seem.