This is possibly the funniest screenshots I’ve ever had the pleasure of sharing. After letting my last post brew for a day, I go to check comments in the Mephisto admin tool. First one is from a good friend and fellow humor enthusiast, Surj Patel. And then there’s the rest. Check it out:

(click to enlarge)

I just posted this ad on Craigslist… then realized I should give my blog readers first dibs on my services! Anyway, here’s how the ad reads:

My name is Rob Orsini and I’m a web developer living just north of San Francisco. I specialize in Ruby on Rails contracts and work on them remotely from my home office. My company is Tuple Shop, Inc.

I have 10 years of web development experience and close to 3 years of Rails experience. I’m the author of the Rails Cookbook (O’Reilly Media, 2007). I love designing databases and setting up rock-solid Linux servers in support of my web applications. To learn more about me, view my Linkedin profile here:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/3/710/810

or visit my blog:

http://blog.tupleshop.com/

If you have a project that you think I may be able to help you with, please send me an email with a short description of what it is you need done and we’ll talk.

Thanks,
Rob

Rob Orsini, Owner
Tuple Shop, Inc.
rob@tupleshop.com

Went looking for this script again just now. I’m putting here as an entry for faster reference. Nothing ground-breaking here, just a stupid-silly back-up script:

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cardero:~/bin pmcweb$ cat backup-pmc-site.sh 
#!/bin/sh

BACKUP_BASE=/users/home/pmcweb/backups
BACKUP_DIR=$BACKUP_BASE/pmcweb_`date +%m-%d-%Y`

if [ ! -e $BACKUP_DIR ]; then
    echo "making back-up directory:"
    echo "$BACKUP_DIR"
    /bin/mkdir $BACKUP_DIR
    echo "dumping database..."
    /usr/bin/mysqldump prn -u USER -P PASSWORD > $BACKUP_DIR/db-dump_`date +%m-%d-%Y`.sql
fi

# nuke back-ups older then 5 days:
find $BACKUP_BASE/pmcweb_* -ctime +5 -maxdepth 0 -print | xargs rm -rf

I don’t know why this took so long for me to find out about crontab “nicknames” but I figure if it’s news to me, then it may be to many others too.

You need a service to restart with your server. You’ve done this enough that you’re eyes roll when you `cd` into /etc/rc.d or whatever, to create and initialization script for your service. Init scripts are pretty damn handy to have around for whatever services you have. They provide a standardized way to stop, start, and restart your service.

Unfortunately, writing init scripts is a pain in the ass. Ancient Unix Rule: Anything that’s a pain in the ass will get put on the back burner in the near future. For now, you just want to make sure your damn service starts when the idiot down at the colo power cycles your rack.

Quick, use cron:

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-bash-3.00# crontab -l
@reboot cd /var/www/RAILS-APP/current; rm tmp/pids/mongrel.*.pid; mongrel_rails cluster::start

Done! Now either get back to work, or post a comment about your experience with restarting services and why this may or may not help you.

Here are more of these handy crontab short-cuts (from `man 5 crontab`):

These  special  time  specification  "nicknames"  are supported, which replace the 
5 initial time and date fields, and are prefixed by the '@' character:
@reboot    :    Run once, at startup.
@yearly    :    Run once a year, ie.  "0 0 1 1 *".
@annually  :    Run once a year, ie.  "0 0 1 1 *".
@monthly   :    Run once a month, ie. "0 0 1 * *".
@weekly    :    Run once a week, ie.  "0 0 * * 0".
@daily     :    Run once a day, ie.   "0 0 * * *".
@hourly    :    Run once an hour, ie. "0 * * * *".

For an agency to be this clumsy they must not be meeting much resistance.

FEMA was busted red-handed in the act of creating fake news about themselves. Here’s the story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsxE_2sTGJs

Fake news is generated all the time. Companies pay to have news stories fabricated. This is significant because:

When your media channels are owned by those in control and the content is totally deceptive, your democracy is essentially over. That’s not to say that American society will disintegrate. It’ll just turn into another kind of government. History shows that this evolution is inevitable.

Hmm, let’s see… Which type of government are things starting to look like?:

I vote for this one:

Totalitarian state: This is a country with only one political party. People are forced to do what the government tells them and may also be prevented from leaving the country.

There must several ways for transition from democracy to happen. One way must be to silently take over all major media channels to passively subdue the majority of the people.

Things are fairly far down the crapper at this point. If many more people were to recognize this publicly things might improve a little. To help, go here: http://www.prwatch.org/nofakenews

A great way to store vim plugins, for example, is to have a project called project called plugin and check it out into your~/.vim directory. You could make .vim a project, but I like the flexibility and control of having smaller pieces when I get set up on a new host.

The latest plugin I’m enjoying, by the way, is NerdTree . I’m working on a video demonstrating it, as a tool for Rails development. This is part of a larger project which will go public in about two weeks. The goal of that project: To optimize the process of learning something well.

If this guy knows this, then it must be true:

Warning: This could be a bit of a ramble.

Something flew by in #caboose today that brought up the question again of why you blog. Of course the reason is because we’re all obsessed with ourselves. If we value each other based on how little we think about ourselves—wait, then that’s really thinking of ourselves, isn’t it?

Anyway, the better issue is “how you blog.” For me, blogging is an exercise in pealing back my skin—no, not in a CSI, turbo over-produced, techno-exploratory frame sequence, sort of way—but just being inside out. I think I like blogs that are written this way the best. I think I want politicians to write blogs this way too.

The problem is that if politicians blogged this way, it might just get everyone to do it and that could get really democratic. This flows into an idea about thinking for yourself. At first, it sounds like something you conquered long ago and don’t need to think about anymore. That’s you, in the trap of ‘just going with the flow.’ Think for yourself. It’s hard work but you should do it.

Think about now if I next said only one of the following two things:

Something about how we all need to open up, and peace, and love; while burning incense.

or

Something about how our democracy is clearly over because those in power are almost totally complacent. And by “those” I mean the entire majority of people in America. Our only hope is to snap out of it and all think about what’s going on here: You’re taking over the world. And by “you’re” I mean me.

See how they have different rings to them? Which one do you like better?

This just in from a good friend of mine, Trish Gray, about someone very close to me:

Jackson Alexander Orsini was born at 4:18am PDT Wed, October 10th. He weighed in at 7 pounds, 11 ounces.

Mom, baby and siblings are all doing fine. Rob, on the other hand, is exhausted. :-)

Congratulations to the Orsini family!

Trish

We managed to snap a shot of the little bugger, right before he snaked our wallets and fled down the hallway in a wheelchair. Here’s Jackson, back when he was 4 minutes old:

I’m also pleased to announce the Tuple Shop, Inc. employee of the month! This month’s award goes to none other then Jackson Alexander Orsini, Tuple Shop HR Director. Good work on the new-hire Jackson!

For completeness, one more post on my new office setup.

“The Grid.” A fair amount of real estate. I feel I have plenty of room and more importantly, I love to look at these things which makes me want to sit down and work!

The star of this post is this “Ray” chair from RFM Seating. mattly (in #caboose) says it’s overkill, but I totally disagree. I guess I could live without the head rest, but it’s nice to have when reclining. Order your own from Steve Alexander – ergoguy.com.

The chair is fully adjustable and the best part is that all adjustments are easy to do while sitting in the chair. This, along with the adjustable keyboard tray in my earlier post, make it so you can find just the right position, or better yet, change positions through out the day.

Here’s a great view of the chair’s saddle:

I think that it for my ergo posts. I’m officially “dialed in.” Now, off to work…

Since I opted out of my full-time O’Reilly gig, I’ve really been able to focus on just a handful of projects. Actually, twice as many as I had at O’Reilly, so the key word must be focus.

Focus is used for what I call “going deep.” You have to go deep to really understand new concepts. Once you’ve learned something well, you abstract things with something like a mental DSL. Then, unless you’re lazy, you move on to the next thing to learn.

Without focus, this doesn’t happen at all for me. Or I learn things but they almost feel like bad habits.

Not that there’s anything wrong with O’Reilly, but part of why I left was because I was starting to feel lazy there. It didn’t matter how hard I worked, the tasks were just too small. Continually interrupted with short tasks, I was never able to really focus on something and go deep.

Another issue is something that I call “two gigantic interruptions, twice a day” or what is normally referred to as a commute. Even if you have a simple commute, you aren’t going deep when you know you have to pack up in an hour. (Now I’m blending into what a guy I call “the Tony Robbins of hackers” said the other day.)

Anyway, contracting let’s me focus. I feel smarter and get more work done because it’s more fun. And working smarter inevitably leads to better gigs, in my experience.

I just fired up this new office (spending 8-10 hours in it at a time) and had to get my ergo issues hashed out quickly and on the cheap.

I dismantled an old oak desk that O'Reilly gave away and just used the wood. The keyboard slider was about $170 from my father-in-law who sells ergo stuff (steve@ergoguy.com).

The keyboard is great. I've always though that Microsoft should throw in the towel on operating systems and focus on what they do well.

The trackball is just good enough. I especially like the hand position. I really do like the track ball, but it needs to be optical instead of based on 10 year old roller tech that breaks often. Unfortunately, there aren't many good mouse options for left handed people. I also like this one because I switch mouse hands every couple of years.

Armando Fox, of the UC Berkeley RAD lab, has put together about six hours of instructive Rails material that have been made available as a series of public webcasts (6 parts). Check it out:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=20854

I remember the RAD lab as my Dad's old stomping grounds. My cousin and I used to run around, trying not to break things, while my dad was working (likely stuffing punch cards into some room-sized computer).

Despite their history of making sufficiently destructive weapons, the RAD lab has always housed some pretty smart folks, doing very cool things. It's good to see that Rails is in their tool box these days.

A Chinese translation of my book is currently in the works. A few weeks ago I received a note from Liao Zhigang asking if I would say a few words to Chinese Rails developers. Here's what I came up with:

"The most I could ask of my Chinese translation would be for it to bring the developers of our two countries closer together. (We've seen Ruby do this between Japan and the United States.) The developers of the world need to work together. We need to set an example to our respective leaders showing them that we can build healthy worldwide communities that contribute to the greater good of humankind and the planet. The internet is our canvas, collective intelligence is our paint, and Rails is our paint brush.

You might ask, "How exactly can Rails make the world a better place?" I think that by focusing on people and the way they interact—their tendencies, strengths, and shortcomings—Rails and the practice of agile software development can make a significant impact in our lives.

For example, let's look at test driven development or TDD (which is fully supported by, and integrated into the Rails framework). TDD gets down to the bottom of how people actually design and write software. It's a practice that fully recognizes that writing bugs is human nature, as is fixing those bugs only to have them creep back into your system later, when you least expect it. By always writing tests, you ensure that fixed bugs stay fixed. Moreover, by writing tests first, you almost trick yourself into thinking about how your software needs to behave, before you start writing the code, which inherently leads to better design.

Tools that are honest about the human condition and both acknowledge our weaknesses and play to our strengths are ultimately what we need. I believe Rails is just such a tool. Let's use this tool and come together as a global community of developers, through the freedom of open source software, and make the world a better place.

(As an aside, I would love to visit China one day. Perhaps Rails can help me do that. :-)"