Surly.log

I have been flexing my PHP muscles a lot over the past month. Despite catching a ton of shit from Ruby friends I am very content with the code I am putting out and love my job. Just like any language it is easier to write crappy code than beautiful elegant code, but if you are thoughtful and apply good coding principles PHP isn’t the crap bucket most of the cool kids make it out to be.

Symfony, while providing an ok MVC framework, is tending to get in the way of a lot of progress and we spend hours trying to get around some of it quirks and foibles when we go outside of the generic CRUD type functionality. I don’t know if we will continue to use PHP and Symfony on future projects, but it has made development more rapid and only bites you in the ass when you try to “advanced” things with it. Akelos looks promising as an MVC framework for PHP and the ORM is a complete rip off of ActiveRecord. I suppose that is good and bad, but anything has to be better than Propel. Hopefully once 1.0 of our project launches I will have more play time to get cozy with Ruby again, but contrary to popular belief PHP only makes you want to gouge one eye out, not both.

The huge blow I took to my workflow with the loss of window-shading has now been fixed. I had given up hope, but on a whim I checked Unsanity’s site and they came through with a beta version that works on Leopard! I think I may cry I am so happy.

For that past few years I have never really blogged much here because most of my work life wasn’t something I really felt comfortable talking about in addition to the content being a little stale (who wants to hear about large scale job management and Perl?).

Things have changed a little today for me as I am moving on to a new gig with some interesting new challenges that I can’t wait to tackle. I should get to geek out here about what I am up to and some of the things I am working on. Most of what I will be working on for the next few months is mainly PHP based, but hopefully Ruby will creep more into my daily life as time goes on (once the gargantuan PHP project is done).

I will greatly miss all of the stellar folks at RMG. I wish it wasn’t time to move on as RMG has an amazing future in front of it and it has been an outstanding company to work for. The next few months should be very exciting, but I am assuming the will all be quite stressful. At least I get to work full time from home for a great firm with some amazing people all committed to building amazing products.

I finally upgraded to Leopard after not wanting to format my entire HD. You see back when I first got onto OS X I was annoyed that this worked: touch me; less ME

You see HFS+ Journaled is case insensitive. If you poke things you see that living in a Unix world doesn’t always mean you will be in a case sensitive Unix world. Oh the horror. I have shown this little surprise to many old and new Linux switchers and all seem to really dislike the fact that the file system wasn’t case sensitive. I am not sure why this is the case, but I to felt that way too, there is just something about not having a case sensitive file system that makes any Unix geek cringe. In day to day usage you would nevr notice, but I know of a few cases where companies tried to implement a big X-San setup and found that the case insensitivity of HFS+ makes some things like running a big mail server difficult. Thinking myself one of the old guard I re-formatted my system a few years ago to HFS+, but this time I clicked a flag to make in case sensitive. For a few months I was happy until I tried ot install Photoshop Elements. I tried for a week to get it installed and after a long phone conversation with Adobe muttered: “I bet it is my case sensitive file system.” The Adobe help desk was more than happy to get me off the phone and agreed. I have lived with running Photoshop via various USB keys and drives since and have suffered because of it. I have been trying to get some fun work done as of late and never like the chore of reinstalling my OS let alone formatting my drive, but I finally broke down and did it last weekend.

I am not mad I did it, but I am little annoyed. I lost WindowShader-X due to the upgrade and a replacement from Unsanity, or anyone else, doesn’t seem to be coming soon. I can’t express the importance of window shading in a gui environment for my workflow. Before I made the switch I had to be sure a Mac could meet my workflow needs without missing things like window shading and so I bought my wife a Mac first. After she got it I sat down for a night and tried to make OS X act as much like Enlightenment as possible. Overall I kind of found a middle ground that has worked really well for me since I made the switch. One of the key apps in my decision to switch was WindowShader-X. I will quit whining about it for now, but man Command-H really just doesn’t make me feel at home.

Other than my window shading woes I have had 2 crashes but overall it has been pretty stable. I hope the crash issues get solved with the next rev, but needless to say a PowerBook is starting to feel a little dated and I can’t help but feel Apple is neglecting the processors they force fed the mac community for years. I am fully sold on the Intel platform for Apple and I love my Intel Mini, my work MBP, and my wifes Macbook, but I hear there are known issues that are going to be fixed with the G4 and Leopard in the next release due to crashing issues. Another bone I want to pick with Apple is with the system requirements. Easy googling will yield simple ways to get Leopard on an G4 800 based machine, but is lack of CoreImage support really a reason to say you won’t support a machine below a G4 867? Weak.

I will give Apple credit where it’s do and say my upgrade was simple. It was more complex than most and required a full backup all of which I did by hand to insure I didn’t take it in the biscuits from Apple. Baring the manual labor the upgrade was simple and things just worked as expected. No lame ass importing of profiles I just dragged and dropped what I needed from ~/Library, ~/Music, etc as well as reinstalling (heh I mean copying) apps like Textmate. So here I sit on Leopard no worse for ware, barring the minimizing of windows when I double click on the top bar. I need to poke and prod Time Machine, non macports Ruby, and spend more time with iPhoto 08. I plan to blog more in the near future as an upcoming trip has me excited and wanting to lead a public life for a week so others can live vicariously through my exploits in San Francisco. Many friends will be seen and much fun will be had.

We are without power and are going to be staying with my parents, who only live a few blocks away. We cruised around the neighborhood and took a few shots of some of the downed trees.

X-Mailer: ZuckMail [version 1.00]

I thought that was kind of funny. My next app I will put a clever X-Mailer in the header even if I don’t hack my own mailer.

Well, not for tonight anyway. It’s good a married someone on the same wave length as me and sees no need to wait to watch the new Futurama until Christmas.

I have always loved my Pentax DSLR. While it may feel a tad out of date I will always be a lover of the K mount and while I haven’t bought as much glass as I should of, I still will be a Pentax fan boy for a long time. It’s nice to see them bring some new models to the market sooner rather than later, but they still need to put out a wider variety of lenses and not lean so much on Sigma or Tamron.

I was thinking about eventually moving to a Canon or Nikon, but I will wait and see what Pentax, Sigma, and Tamron come out with over the next year before deciding. While there is a certain appeal to buying cheap, beautiful, and old k mount glass I see the need for some nice high quality lenses to hone my skills a little more and get some more out of my camera.

I didn’t think I would actually care what people are up to, but I started watching Hornbeck’s twitter and now I kinda got into it and went ahead and got Twitterrific. It’s not nearly as silly as I had long thought. We will see if I stay with it.

I went looking for a gamer icon last night for my Live account, and what did I find in the process? A Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo download! have always had a soft spot for this much loved puzzle classic and bought it without hesitation, and with even less hesitation got my ass handed to me in an online match. I actually bought a GBA SP strictly to get my hand on this very game a few years ago. I still play SPF on my GBA, but with the addition of a 360 version, especially because of the online play, I am in heaven. All I need now is a decent arcade stick and a crap load of practice. I wish I could get a wireless stick for the 360, but there doesn’t seem to be one out at this point. Perhaps I should hack my own.

I finally broke down and bought an XBOX 360 after playing COD4 at a friends house. For a long time I was a Microsoft hater, but in recent years I just decided I didn’t care anymore. I will use whatever product meets my needs regardless of who makes it. My Tux tat is shedding little tears as I write this.

I never really like the original Xbox. Sure it was neat and you could put Linux on it, but Halo just never really did it for me. As time has passed I have played a fair amount 360 games at my friends house and have a really good Gears rivalry going at the office. I got my fix that way for over a year until 2 Fridays ago. 2 Fridays ago I played COD4 online for the first time, and that evening I went to go buy a new console and 2 games. The online experience for COD4 is perfect and the game has a great system for keeping you interested even after 50+ hours of playing.

As we went to buy the 360, and Cooking Momma to give the Wii some love, my wife wrinkled her nose at the though of bringing a Microsoft product into our very Mac household. I suppose I would have cared a few years ago, but this is a product that Microsoft has just nailed. Up one side and down the other. I could go on for hours about all the things Microsoft got right with the 360 and Xbox Live, but I will spare you my new fanboy rhetoric.

I haven’t really played a FPS seriously for a long time. I play the occasional game of Tremulous, which is a great open source Quake 3 based strategy/FPS, but COD4 has really brought me back into being a gamer. It’s nice to be playing again, but it has made some of my work obligations slide a little more than they should have over the last week. It’s a good thing my wife was out of town this weekend so I could log a few more hours than usual.

I took about 30 minutes today and moved the 4 rails sites I run on this server over to Mongrel clusters instead of FastCGI. In addition I turned off Lighty and got Nginx up and running. Overall the config was pretty simple and I liked how it came together. I had planned to just switch to Nginx and us FastCGI, but at the last minute switched over to using Mongrel clusters. It was a great idea and I think I am seeing much better performance overall than I would using FastCGI, Nginx is especially fast with static content. I would like to see a little bit better memory usage over all the clusters, but that is mainly due to the bloat of one of the apps I run.

What got me motivated today was the idea of starting a new blog that will cover a drastically different topic area and won’t be development or sysadmin related. I think I will use Mephisto with it and once I get the Haml template together I will talk about it some more. While I know I don’t have many visitors I plan to talk about some of the interesting stuff I am doing and will be covering some of it at next week’s OK.rb meeting in the coming weeks.

As always the OK.rb monthly meeting was fun. We were suppose to do a hack fest, but it ended up being a lot of mini conversations. Its nice to see the relationships building in our small group and maybe even some good collaboration in the future.

Next months meeting will be a return to the normal 2-3 presentation format with the obligatory 30 minutes of chatting (usually its an hours worth though). As always I can’t wait.

RefreshOKC is next Tuesday and I should be there as well. Its great to OKC spreading its wings a bit (Tulsa too!).

I have been getting out a lot more doing what I call research for my latest project. I have a bad track record of never working on some of the interesting ideas I tend kick around in my head. Some were good and some were bad, but in between the day job and family life its hard to stay passionate about anything that will require more than a modicum of work. My current project involves lots of fishing which makes it blend well with one of my greatest passions, fly fishing.

Its been said many times on various sites that any idea that you can stay passionate about for several months it may be an idea worth pursuing. What started out as a quick hack to keep myself informed of the status of the Lower Illinois tailwater, soon grew into a vast array of features and tools to make fishing more interesting and will allow those with a passion for fly fishing to connect with others. I suppose its the same pitch at a different market, but it is one that is out of the feedback loop of the circles I generally try to keep a pulse on.

While I am not getting out as much as i would have liked, i have been getting increasing opportunities to go out with my GPS and camera to hunt for various fishing opportunities in my area. I am mainly focusing in on the new trend of carp fishing, but alas I have seen no carp in several outings. Not wanting to use fake data during my development I enticed some feisty red ears with a bugger. It was simple, but rewarding and has lead me to conclude it’s a good time to take the project seriously.

The site is called tofish.info, but I won’t talk about it too much at this point. Hopefully glimpses will be coming soon as the plumbing is almost complete.

After not having gone to an OK.rb function in a while I got back into the swing of things. We had several presenters in a lightning talk format, all of which were interesting. I was able to fly by the seat of my pants with my BackgroundDRb talk as I didn’t get a chance to work on any slides before hand. Haml is looking more and more like a path I should be going down, atleast for my own projects. I can’t wait for the next meeting, maybe next time I will get to talk about Merb some.

Thanks to James I even got a signed copy of his Textmate book. Its a good thing I have the PDF because I would hate to tarnish my mint author signed copy.