Blizzcon Day -2

Where: In the air, care of Southwest
Listening to: The Slip, Nine Inch Nails

Nothing like the need for a rant to motivate one to blog. -And a few hours to kill without an Internet connection. (Thank you WordPress app for offline composition!)

I barely use my MacBook these days except on weekends when the local gang gets together to play on Saturdays. I pulled it out last night to charge the battery and update a few things and found that it didn’t think that there was a battery. WTF? (LOL at the iPhone automagically making those uppercase.) Restarting, cold boot, zap pram, resetting the power management… Nothing helped. As is often the case for computer trouble, a quick google search confirmed that I am not alone. This is apparently not an uncommon occurance. These ‘smart’ batteries apparently aren’t so smart. They go into a low power mode once they run too low on juice and sometimes they won’t come back out. Awesome. Seriously, who designs a laptop battery that can brick itself when it runs out of juice. It’s a (:$&;)-$:;!! battery for ;@)”)&$/&;@@ sales! Running out of power is part of the operational parameters, don’t ya think? Jerks. Hopefully Anthony and I can find an Apple store nearby so I can get it exchanged.

Blizzcon opens on Friday. We’ll pick up our badges and goodie bags tomorrow early to beat the crowds and see what else presents itself. I’m unsure how many people from my Dalaran guild might be there, though I know several people from my new guild on Draka will. Hopefully we can meet up to put faces to the toon/voice. -Always a fun surpise.

Hopefully this flight to Sacramento is continuing on to LAX or I screwed up…

…

-Whew, it is.

2:50p: Hello LA!

My favorite tools: LaunchBar

LaunchBar Screenshot

A few of my friends will recognize LaunchBar immediately. LaunchBar is one of those tools that I have used for many years and have come to depend upon. The idea behind LaunchBar is quite simple. You press command+space, type a few characters and bam! you have what you want. It indexes specific areas of your system for different types of items (such as songs, applications, documents..) but is totally configurable if the defaults don’t meet your needs. Yes, it’s similar to Apple’s built in Spotlight searching (the chicken in this case), but is so much faster and capable.

There are many basic examples. I bring up the search bar, type and hold ‘w’ and World of Warcraft starts. M is Mail, F is Firefox. If I need a quick calculator, all I need to do is start typing a number and it goes into calculator mode. Every day for work I have many terminal windows open, within which I use ssh to connect to our servers. Instead of launching terminal and typing in the ssh command, I have a small terminal script which I open with a quick command and all I need to do is enter my password.

Today I found something new that totally made me appreciate LaunchBar anew. I was having one of those moments where I couldn’t remember a word, ‘modest’ in this case. I proceeded to try to find it by way of the thesaurus. Thinking of opening the built in thesaurus on the system, I typed ‘thes’ and found that I was prompted to enter a word. Apparently LaunchBar has a search template named ‘thesaurus’. It took my word and opened up the Mirriam-Webster site with the search. Wow. Awesome stuff.

There are apparently a lot of ways that it can help speed things up that I haven’t discovered yet. The usage tips page has a lot of examples of things that you can do. Like the fact that there’s a similar shortcut for the unix ‘man’ command. Sweet!

iPhonified at Last!

I finally have rid myself of the bondage of my Treo 600, which was purchased oh so long ago together with Jen. I limped along for much longer than perhaps I should have, even uncharacteristically foregoing the original iPhone in favor of the eventual 2nd generation.

Even better is the free WordPress app, which makes posting to the blog terribly simple and ultra convenient. Look for more posts in the future. -Especially now that I’m getting out for fun things like the kayaking this past weekend. (What a blast!)

To the left is a quick screenshot of my current page 1 of apps. Couple of winners there, in my opinion. The real fun stuff is on page 2, however.

Hey Jen, check out my snazzy CSS wizadry!

RailsConf

A few highlights from my first day at RailsConf:

• Getting up at 3 for a 6am flight sucks. I already knew this. I really didn’t need the reminder.
• The cabbie that carted me back from my recent Petco shopping spree told me to call him for the ride to the aiport. Not only did he remember, but he was outside waiting before I even called.
• Plane is taxiing out to take off, but we pull out of line and sit there for a few minutes. We end up going back to the terminal because a computer died that we needed for the flight + weather. Uhh… Not feeling inspired!
• Portland light rail is pretty nice and also a quick, direct to the convention center
• First session choices all kinda sucked, so I went for the ‘entrepreneur’ session, which was *packed*. So packed, late in the session the fire marshal came by and cleaned everyone out that wasn’t sitting.
• Yelowpages.com session about their wholesale rewrite from Java-based to Rails-based site was very cool. They’re completely rails, 2.5 million searches a day, less than 20k lines of code, 5 or less devs doing the coding work. Was very interesting to hear a first-hand account of the project.

Learning Hurts

I love learning new things. I enjoy the feeling of accomplishment of figuring out how to do something and solving a problem. I wish it wasn’t so painful sometimes, though. I think I spent two hours this morning figuring this one out…

I’ve been writing a simple script to dump data, some of which is a code/index that represents one of several possible strings, which are also stored in the database. Following some work that has been done previously, I set up an hash (an associative array composed of key/value pairs) to hold the strings for inclusion in the data to be written to file. But it wasn’t working. “Gee, why wasn’t it working?” Well, I’ll tell you why. Because of ‘ ‘. “What?” The space. The empty space between those two quotes. The database was returning a two character string ( ‘ 1′, ‘ 2′, etc…) and the strings in the hash were inserted with keys ’1′, ’2′, and so on. Two hours to figure out that I needed to tweak the data from my query. Of course, I’ve since figured how I could have coded that into the query and avoided the extra work in the first place. Hmph.

Yeah, Christmas and stuff. I hope everyone had a good one. There’s a few people I still have yet to call and say ‘Hi, I’m alive!’ but I promise I’ll get to you. (Sorry Aunt Lill!) I had a good visit with mom in Tennessee where I was unexpectedly removed from my online life completely for three days. (No Starbucks or other internet cafes!) Mom even suffered through a grueling cave tour with me, which was very cool. It’s amazing to see the area since they removed the highway over the gap since the tunnel was opened, which allowed the entire area to be restored to it’s natural state. I remember ‘back in the day’ when we went to that same cave, which was right on the side of the highway, which ran along the side of the mountain –across from which was a sizable store with knickknacks and stuff. All gone and one wouldn’t guess without prior knowledge. Very awesome.

Travel early and on Christmas day wasn’t bad at all and I was happy to make it back and find Cleo and Cosmo watching the Twilight Zone marathon on Sci-Fi. It’s ironic to me that I survived my travels without picking up any bugs, only to catch a cold from friends here during new years. Thanks.