i break stuff

too much chocolate

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:43:38 -0600

me: i think i ate too much dark chocolate today
ed: impossible
me: am i supposed to be hallucinating ?
ed: always
me: nevermind then, situation normal
ed: excellent....

my other blog

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:52:09 -0600

A few weeks ago, I started a blog at www.badgerhound.com for my tech musings. Lately, my interests seem more focused around startups and the state of tech in general, than hard-core sysadmin topics like building RPMs. For now, I’m enjoying having a separate place to vet those ideas. I don’t know if that means I won’t blog about anything technical over here, or if this will become the personal plus sysadmin blog. But, if you’re interested in my other musings, check out the other blog as well.

Cindy’s attempt to get me to read a Jane Austen novel.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:14:00 -0600

Cindy’s attempt to get me to read a Jane Austen novel.

Aviary at “World’s Largest” laundromat in...

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 10:54:09 -0500

Aviary at “World’s Largest” laundromat in Berwyn, IL. This place is seriously cool as far as laundromats go. Much of the water is heated from solar collectors on the roof.

posting to Tumblr from emacs

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:59:25 -0500

I’m now using Tumble, the emacs mode for posting to Tumblr. This post is mostly for me to test it out further, but I’m very impressed with it thus far.

Now, I just need to remember that the default syntax is markdown and we’ll get along great.

Installation was easy. I just installed the ELPA package and added somthing like this to my emacs config:

;; tumble - emacs tumblr mode
(require 'tumble)
(setq tumble-email "my@email.com")
(setq tumble-password "p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d")
(setq tumble-url "my.tumblr.com")

if my post is short, does it make it to twitter?

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:16:24 -0500

if my post is short, does it make it to twitter?

trying out tumblr

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:14:39 -0500

and testing twitter and facebook integration. test. test.

I haven’t played around too much yet, but I did spend some time importing my old blogger posts. I might throw the script up on github if I think it might be useful to someone else out there.

Photo

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:32:31 -0500

I can still read?!?!

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:30:00 -0500

So, I had jury duty the other day. Well, I didn’t get picked to sit on a jury, or even interviewed really. But, I did get to sit in a room for the better part of a day that I couldn’t leave.

Oddly, it’s been awesome. The chairs sucked, there was some super-surly South-sider, the men’s room light didn’t really work (might have been for the best), but I was able to re-read most of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Which means, that I can still read!

I’ve jumped into Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good by Sarah Lacy. I’m reading the kindle edition on my iPhone and so far it’s been pretty enjoyable. I really like being able to read wherever I am and not having to tote around the dead-tree version.

I can’t remember the last time I read a book for pleasure, so this is great. Hopefully, this will become a habit like when I was younger, but time will tell.

Hurray for blogger!

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:51:00 -0600

I don’t know how common knowledge this is, but the Blogger twitter account just left some great details about dealing with exports in a comment on Craig Burton’s blog. Add in the conversion tools here, and I’m a happy camper about being on the blogger service. Now, I just need to remember to export my data every so often, just in case.

rant: iPhone apps

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:16:00 -0600

Apple, the app store sucks. Yeah, it’s a brilliant innovation to have an app store for a smart phone, but I’m over that. You have a serious problem in that you’ve made it so trendy and cool to create iPhone apps, that damn near everyone is doing it.

As a result, there’s a total lack of quality in many of the apps. For free ones this isn’t that big a deal, because well if I get something for free, I’m not necessarily expecting it to rock up to 11. But, when I pay $10 for an app, I want it to freakin’ work flawlessly. You don’t have to agree with them, but here are my rants on the system as it stands today :

Comments and star ratings aren’t enough. I want to know the percent of the time the app crashes, the percent of the time the application gets uninstalled, and a bug tracker for each app in the store with statistics on time to fix bugs, etc.
I should be able to return a paid app through the store. If it sucks, I should have 24 hrs to get my money back via some official mechanism. Buying software should not be a gamble.
Allow bug fix updates to make it into the store faster. I keep seeing blog post after blog post about waiting for an updated version to show up in the app store. It’s a new platform and there will be bugs in software, you need to streamline the process to resolve those bugs for the users.
Fix the platform. There are precisely 2 hardware devices for these things. How hard should it be to make a stable application for it? I don’t know if it’s issues with the language, the OS, or sunspots, but I don’t care either. There’s no excuse for a memory leak in a user application on a hardware platform of 2 freaking devices.

I feel like this rant has lost some steam since the app that inspired it had an update today and is about eleventy billion percent more stable, now. (Outpost for the record) Well, at least, the NYTimes app is still crashy.

reminder: include created_at field on database tables

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:43:00 -0600

From now on, include a created_at or some other field on every table to make it easy to dump a subset of the database for testing, development.

reminder: convert rails foo.erb to foo.html.erb

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:27:00 -0600

To help with migrating old projects to rails 2.x conventions

why you need twitter

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:38:00 -0600

It seems that for better or worse, our world is increasingly dependent on small, bite-size communications. And, you probably suck at it. I’m sorry; maybe you’re too old, or too young, or you never got around to taking that creative writing class in college. It’s going to be okay, we’re all bad at something. Just watch me try to communicate with a large group in real life (IRL), and you’ll see what I mean.

Instant messenger, txting on phones, facebook chat, voicemail, IRC, telegrams. We all have to deal with communications mediums that have limits. Nowadays it seems you can’t go 10 minutes without seeing, or using IM, or txting (SMS if you’re old). Trying to cram a meaningful thought down to 160 characters is really tough. The youngins do it by abbreviating the hell out of everything. Some people split the thought into fragments, or worse only send a fragment of the thought. We all have to send corrections follow-ons.

“hey what’d you think?”
“My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.” (link)
“wh0 8 MY 54|\|DW1cH!?”
“question” - “i get an error” - “in my app” - “when I try to click on the button”

Now, some of those carry more meaning than others. The question, is whether they have enough to convey to the reader what the author meant. I’m not against using abbreviations, but you have to know your audience well enough to know if they’ll have to consult wikipedia just to translate it. It takes practice.

In the same way that blogging offers a way to practice other styles of writing, I think twitter offers a way to refine your short communication skills. There are plenty of other (probably better) reasons reasons to use twitter, but go sign up anyway. See, the trick to twitter is that you’re putting a message up the whole world can see, and it has to be short. Real short. 140 characters, short.

So, how do you fit a meaningful thought into 140 characters, and not sound like an idiot? You think about it for a minute or two before you send it. That’s something we’re probably not used to doing before we fire off an IM, or a txt to a friend. I think that if we consistently take that extra step of making sure what we’ve typed really, truly says what we mean, that we’ll all get better at this uber-concise world we live in.

So, head over to twitter, sign up, follow jasonrohwedder, add a couple more friends and see how it goes. You might hate it, you might love it, but hopefully you’ll be a little more deliberate before you send me a useless IM/txt/email. k thx bai!

more blogging on the go...

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 19:33:00 -0600

Trying this one out since iBlogger required a line-break option that would have required me to reformat most of my old entries.

That’s something I’d like to avoid.

Look ma’ a photo.

[photo was here, really]
— Post From My iPhone

Update: This was with the blogpress iphone app, (I think). It also seems the photo service that’s built in lost my photo at some point. That’s a bit disconcerting, but I haven’t had time to dig into it, and I’ve found that I don’t really blog from my iPhone much. Go figure.

blogging on the go...

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:54:00 -0600

This is a test blog entry from iBlogger. I hope it turns out pretty because the idea of typing up a new entry from far off locales turns me on!

iPhone and Google syncing Shangri-La

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:50:00 -0600

I love Google Apps. And it turns out, I’m really digging my new iPhone. Using the iPhone with Google is awwwwkward. What follows is my current solution for syncing contacts and calendars between my Google apps account, Addressbook, iCal and my iPhone. Getting email perfect might be a later post, if I ever figure that one out.

The main goals were to 1) sync my main Google Apps account contacts and 2) calendars with Addressbook and iCal respectively, and with the iPhone. And have 3) calendar entries be editable on the iPhone.

Some options I tried or at least considered:

Scenario 1: Addressbook on Leopard has the ability sync with Google, and thereby with the iPhone. It works, sort of. I couldn’t figure out what schedule this ran on, so it really only seemed to work if Addressbook was the source for everything. For edits from Google, it didn’t sync right away and when it did, sometimes I’d get these crazy boxy characters on my iPhone, even though Addressbook would display things just fine. Lame. There seems to be some formatting that Google does that Addressbook can deal with but the iPhone can’t. That and the unpredictable syncing wasn’t really working for me.

Scenario 2: iTunes has some settings to sync with Google. I didn’t try this, because I really wanted the Addressbook synced as well, and didn’t want to have to plug in my iPhone each time I needed the computer and Google to sync. I just thought I’d mention it to be fair.

Scenario 3: Switch to mobile me. This would be tempting, if I could use my domain(s) with mobile me.

Scenario 4: Use web service Soocial to do the syncing. I tried them really early on and had lots of duplicates in my Addressbook. I didn’t revisit them for this project but they may be a reasonable option.

Calendars: None of these options deal with calendar syncing, which I wanted as well. I saw something about read-only syncing via iCal directly. But, come on, I want to be able to edit my calendar on the iPhone. I want it all!

Google Suggested Contacts: Nothing deals with these right. Nothing. The issue is that Google won’t let you add a contact that’s in your Suggested Contacts area, which it infers from who you chat with and email. You’ll get conflict errors, at some point, just be prepared. It’s annoying, hopefully there will be a disable option for this one day.

And on to the solution I settled on…

I spent $25 for a year with Spanning Sync. Mainly it was the hope to sync both contacts and calendars that drew me. Oh, and the free trial helped. After a bit of messing around I settled on a method that seems to work for me so far, thanks very much to their forums and support staff. Here’s my best recollection of what I did ::

Back up your contacts in Google ( Left Rail -> Contacts -> Export )
Back up your contacts in Addressbook ( File -> Export -> Address Book Archive )
Pick one side to start from, update all your contacts there and delete the other side. I’d probably recommend Addressbook, but I think it’ll work either way. Make more backups. And a third time for fun, but don’t say “Beetlejuice”.
Install Spanning Sync, input your Google credentials, etc. There is 1 Absolutely Critical Option. When it asks you whether to use Google’s format for contacts, or Address Book’s format, you NEED to choose the Address Book format, or you’ll get more crazy boxy characters on your iphone and probably freak out, leaving me nasty comments on my blog.
Hopefully, there is no step 5. Do some testing, add a contact on one side, delete it, etc. Spanning Sync allows you the ability sync on demand and see the latest status from the menu bar, which is great for testing.

Now that you’re super satisfied with your contact and calendar syncing you can do me a favor and use my referral code to save $5 on your Spanning Sync purchase. Click here to save $5 on Spanning Sync!

Other bits:

Google has really small photos for it’s stuff and I didn’t like that for my iphone. You are able to tell Spanning Sync to disable syncing photos and either just not have photos, or use higher resolution ones in Address Book. ( more here )

Spanning Sync isn’t yet able to get around the very annoying Google Suggested Contacts issue. Hopefully just knowing it’s there will save you some headache where you aren’t frantically sending support and email with “OMG! Why am I getting conflict errors when I don’t see the contact in Google!” and sending over debugging dumps. ( They’re very responsive, btw. Thanks guys! )
There are some more competitors to Spanning Sync. At the time at least, they didn’t sync both contacts and calendars under Leopard. If you’re a fan of one, mention it in the comments and I’ll link to it up here for completeness and fairness.
Update: My good friend David uses NuevaSync. They do over-the-air somehow, which boggles my mind. But it sounds pretty slick. For me it would me using native Addressbook/iCal syncing to get stuff down to my mac. But, still looks like a great option if you don’t plug the iPhone in very often.

It’s been a while since I fully tested this, so let me know if I missed anything, made mistakes, etc and I’ll do my best to update the post.

Inspiring Woman Computer Science Pioneer

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:11:00 -0600

Google has a great blog post and YouTube video about Jean Bartik a true pioneer in the field of Computer Science. I hadn’t heard of Jean before today, but this video interview of her being inducted into the Computer History Museum is great, truly inspirational. For those that know me, you’d agree that I don’t use happy, warm, fuzzy terms like inspirational,well, ever. Seriously, go watch the video.

Born on a farm in Missouri, the sixth of seven children, Jean Jennings Bartik always went in search of adventure. Bartik majored in mathematics at Northwest Missouri State Teachers College (now Northwest Missouri State University). During her college years, WWII broke out, and in 1945, at age 20, Bartik answered the government’s call for women math majors to join a project in Philadelphia calculating ballistics firing tables for the artillery developed for the war effort. A new employee of the Army’s Ballistics Research Labs, she joined over 80 women calculating ballistics trajectories (differential calculus equations) by hand - her job title: “Computer”….

Yum bug in RH5.2

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:02:00 -0600

I’m still banging on hosting my first yum repository, so I’m by no means as knowledgeable with how it stores metadata, etc as I am with apt-get. But, I ran into an issue where I couldn’t get yum to recognize my packages right after adding them to the repository.

It turns out that yum caches metadata for some time period, an hour or so, which is abysmally long when you’re creating packages left and right. So, I tried sudo yum clean metadata which gave me an error that my repositry was listed more than once. It wasn’t. I checked. Many times.

It turns out Redhat Enterprise has a but in 5.2 that double lists it in the cached data. Great. Read about it here. Thankfully I did learn that yum clean all --noplugins seems to clear it up pretty well. I’m not sure what other data it clears though, but so far it’s doing what I want.

Mozy with external drives

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 17:35:00 -0600

It’s finally time to upgrade the external hard drive that hangs off the mac mini serving up our media media at home. While most of this isn’t really critical data I do back it up with Mozy, because, it’s cheap and easier than re-creating. So far, I’ve added the new drive, copied over all the old data with rsync and swapped names of the mounted drives. Mozy seems pretty happy with the operation so far. Although, if it breaks, anywhere obvious I’ll update this entry.

Update: So, the data on the new drive, but same name as old, seems to be intact and not needing a re-upload which is good. But, the data that I moved back onto the old drive, with a new name, seems like it needs to be re-uploaded. That’s kind of a bummer, I was really hoping it just worked exclusively on checksums that it had already uploaded to the service, but at least I don’t have to re-upload the lion’s share of the data.