Data Whittler

Ford Ranger Truck Sold

2009-09-25T08:19:44-06:00

Thanks for all your inquiries, but I sold my truck last night.

Selling My Truck

2009-09-23T01:34:00-06:00

Edit 9/25/09—My truck has already been sold.

If you are interested, I’m selling my truck – Ford Ranger 2001 2WD V6 Automatic. The rest of the details can be found here.

GNU Screen Redux

2009-05-11T09:57:24-06:00

A year or two ago, I had tried the popular command line window manager for POSIX systems, GNU Screen. It seemed like a great idea, but for my own purposes, it was more complex than I wanted.

With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 and a customized version of GNU screen, I found now that screen is much easier to use. I started screen again without knowing what the Ubuntu guys did and was pleasantly surprised how much they had simplified the interface. Here’s some great features I found nifty:

Choosing simple, clean themes for the interface
Easy configuration for setting up options on the interface
Reconnecting and switching windows is easy with simple function key commands

I remember having trouble making sure that either emacs or irssi could not recconnect properly when I first tried GNU Screen, but this was probably due to my own ignorance of how screen worked. Thankfully, I don’t seem to have any more problems with this revamped interface.

Way to go Canonical! You’ve improved my Ubuntu Server experience!

See ARS Technica – Ubuntu brings advanced Screen features to the masses for a screenshot.

And then I realized I was being a Jerk

2009-03-27T00:56:26-06:00

It’s funny how lack of sleep and stress can change one’s mood so quickly.

The other day I was alerted by my manager that I needed to make some adjustments to a website. Now, I had been working on this site for what seemed like ages and was not surprised that the adjustments seemed to be something that would push the deadline back even further. As I delved into the code, I felt like I was making significant progress in less time than I had anticipated. But then I hit the front page—I was getting frustrated about manipulating a simple DIV tag.

I cried out for help to another programmer as I did not want to deal with the problem and of course, my colleague responded with a simple “Why don’t you just move it outside this other DIV?” in a slight tone that said “Dude, you should know that”. At this point my fuse was about to to burn out and I was going to explode, “It’s just not that simple!”, but I managed to take out the exclamation point as I was saying it. His suggestion worked completely and I moved on.

After finishing this task, I realized I had been a jerk. When playing our daily game of foozeball, I smooth things over by making fun of a wild-haired, hysterical version of myself saying “It’s just not that simple!”. That worked too.

Anyway, I just thought about this little episode as I was updating my personal website. I was reading the copy and was alarmed at how bitter and aloof my copy had been and realized once again that I was coming off as super elitist jerk. Wow, way to go Angelo.

I attribute this to, as of late, my patience getting short due to last month of not getting much sleep because of working on late projects and helping take care of my new son during the night.

Moral: Don’t take out your lack of sleep on others, just go to sleep. You gotta hit your own reset button somehow.

Git handles my TODO List

2009-03-24T03:28:37-06:00

After juggling several TODO lists, I came up with the idea of trying to place everything into GIT and it seems to be much nicer than I had previously thought.

In addition to this, I’ve discovered using Emacs’ org-mode is an excellent way to manage these files. I get tables, spreadsheets, checkboxes and much more with a few keystrokes. I’m enjoying it.

Thoughts on Trains

2008-07-01T08:55:03-06:00

Every now and then I have to write something that gets my personal goals back on track. I’ve found that the train ride into work is a great time for me to reflect on things floating around my head before I begin the code grind at work. I’m mainly speaking of my projects that I develop in Ruby, but will probably have other aspirations written down as well.

There are a two specific projects that I wish to finish by the summers end. They are canyoucodebetter and a mud. I think the biggest thing that has been keeping me from working on them is time and fatigue. When I get home around 6:30 PM I’m ususally involved with my immediate family (my wife and daughter) until 9:30 PM. As you can imagine, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for my projects as I try to leave for work at 7:30 AM. Trying to squeeze 8 hours of sleep in there leaves me the small time of 9:30 PM to 11:30 PM. Unfortunately, by those times I’m so tired that I tend to stare blanky at my screen more than coding real value.

So the train ride is my way out. I don’t have to focus on anything but the laptop screen in front of me and making sure that I don’t crowd anyones personal space. I guess my only complaint about the train is the glare that the morning sun shines on my reflective screen.

Another thing about the train is that there seems to be public wifi spots at each stop. However, there is not enough time to connect to one and do anything useful before the train starts moving again. Bummer.

When I was Boston I fell in love with the public transit immediately. I would go down to the caverns where the trains would stop and pick up people. They reminded me of fast moving worms because of the way they would contort like an accordian in the tunnels underneath the city.

I would get on and hop off, go to the surface and I was in a new place. MIT? Sure. Harvard? No problem. It was great.

"Can You Code Better" Deployed

2008-06-04T00:25:45-06:00

So I rewrote my little project little by little last week and finally deployed tonight. It’s now available. There is basic functionality for user authentication, code submission, restful formats for xml, yaml, html, and plain text. I still have update and remove functions to be added, but will do that later on this week. If you have any comments or feature suggestions, please send me an email or leave a comment.

The blog is back

2008-04-28T08:35:15-06:00

Unfortunately, something happened to my old blog’s software that caused it to crash every time the server started, so I reinstalled my blog with the latest version of typo.

Pesky segmentation faults.

Thank You...

2008-04-27T22:32:18-06:00

To the person who left the much needed money and the kind note in my mailbox:

Thank You

Pictures of Boston

2008-04-27T22:31:18-06:00

Here’s a link to a Flickr gallery containing my photos of my first day in Boston.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11908617@N00/