johnbarrytech.com

I was laid off of a job last year. It was my first lay-off and I felt it was completely unjustified. (I think there’s fat in the org but it wasn’t in the developer pool)

Anyhow, I heard through the grapevine that they finally implemented one of my suggestions for source code control, Subversion. I’d claimed it as an achievement on my first performance review, and was admonished for it.

I fought for it the entire time I was there, and wrote a proposal to my boss explaining how we could save thousands in licensing and support fees, adopt best practices, etc.
I guess they implemented it a little while after I left.
Good for them!

I’d just like to throw out the suggestion for anyone stuck in Windows world to look into AutoHotkey.
I’ve combined it with python to create some on-the-fly scripts that autopopulate test-plans at work.

But it’s the little things that make it useful immediately. I have a Lenovo ThinkPad at my job. Great little laptop, but the F1 key is where the escape key is on a regular keyboard.
This is a huge problem in vi; my muscle memory goes right to the location and hits “help” instead of changing modes almost constantly.
That’s where AutoHotkey comes in – I remap F1 to Escape when I’m in a gVim window.
I don’t even notice and if I really needed to, I can always :help

The other nice snippet is this one:
Copy/Paste

It flips copy/paste around – Ctrl + V now pastes sans formatting; if you want formatting you Ctrl + Shift + V
Unbelievably useful.

Haven’t updated in a while since I’m at a new job. Everything I’ve been building is too specific to share (trade secrets, business process-related) so I haven’t.
Hopefully I get some generic stuff in the future.

I’ve installed Apache, installed ruby on rails.
Ruby on Rails works fine on the weBRICK server, but it’s not working on the apache server, just giving me a 500 Internal Server Error.
Better check the logs.
ls -ltr ~/www/myApp/log/

Lo and behold, production server’s the most recently modified!
Check its log, see stuff like:

Status: 500 Internal Server Error
Could not find table ’sessions’

This has gotten me three times using the Ubuntu Community Documentation. It’s in there, but it’s not formatted as an instruction.
Relevant text:

murb: I had to add RailsEnv development as well to get around the ‘no route found to match “/rails/info/properties” with {:method=>:get}’ warning… (can someone elaborate on why?) apparently this is because /info/properties is buggy and no longer supported: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/161924

(emphasis mine)

I added RailsEnv development to my httpd.conf, bounced apache, and everything started firing away smooth as silk.

Should have been “The sky is falling!”
It does pay to keep your passwords separate, distinct, and difficult and use a tool to manage them.

If you’re using twitter, there’s a fair likelihood your password was compromised. It’s on Twitter’s Main Site.

They’re recommending changing your Twitter password, which means that anything using a combination of the same Username/Pass or your email password is the same, I’d change it immediately.Tech Crunch has more.

New design.

Ruby coming soon.