Journaling on estrip is easy and free. sign up here

Jim's Journal

jim
My Podcast Link

10/18/2008 20:04 #46182

Pseudo-Promotion
Category: work
I am now the head of Rails development at my work, so I'm coordinating 6 developers. Three new to Rails, and two who are new to the company, and myself. It's actually pretty awesome to be running the projects. I get to be the face of our development team to all the executives and our parent company in Boston.

It's not really a promotion in the sense of title change, more of a coordinator role (still spend 80% of my own time writing code), but it's going to be nice when I have my yearly review next April to be able to claim credit for how nice things are going.

The best part of the job? Saying no to stupid things before they are forced upon us.

image

We're digging into a ground-up rewrite of one of our core products, an evaluation tool for Physical Therapy students. It's going much smoother then I had anticipated, although two of the guys we thought we'd have had on the project months ago are only now able to lay down Visual Studio and Fox Pro and join us.

There are two other ongoing projects too, so 3 things to keep tabs on and moving forward, plus all the training. Training devs is nice - another way to shape the company culture and make sure that we're doing things the same way. They really like Ruby over Fox Pro - big surprise :)

Thank God for the ADD drugs. I'd be hanging myself otherwise.
jim - 10/19/08 10:07
Thanks everyone :)
janelle - 10/19/08 09:08
That's awesome, Jim. I'm glad working is going so well for you. You deserve it!
tinypliny - 10/18/08 22:55
Congratulations and good luck! Sounds like a lot of work though. :)
jim - 10/18/08 20:49
What I'd love is to run all our apps off of EC2. We have crazy spikey load but then nothing for months.

Like, our biggest product is a survey tool, and it sees greatest use at the end of every semester, but hardly any before then expect the school users setting things up.

But, then December/May we have 10 million page requests a day. Seems lame to have servers humming along all year for no reason.
jim - 10/18/08 20:41
Each of our servers is going to be cut up into a VM per core. The guy who is technically our server admin wants me to install x-windows on them all so that he can VNC in.

That's what the 'no' photo above is about :)

Servers should never have GUI's. He's a windows guy :(

paul - 10/18/08 20:39
Congratulations!

All of our servers are getting virtualized. They are moving toward a server farm setup because it is more energy and space efficient. At first I was iffy about it but the idea is pretty sweet. Then again we have hundreds of servers to start with.
jim - 10/18/08 20:18
Oh... plus we just budgeted in 10 servers for next year. ZOMG expensive.

I suggested we'll only needed 5 or 6, but my boss told me to double the request to be sure we could handle anything that arises.

10/16/2008 22:21 #46148

Episode 7?
Category: starwars
image

(source / more in the series: )
tinypliny - 10/18/08 09:10
I really miss the Indian squirrels (of all things!). They look like this chipmunk in the picture. Here these squirrels are too big and somewhat scary at times!!
james - 10/17/08 13:39
super cute
gardenmama - 10/17/08 11:22
I'm betting on the EWOK!

10/16/2008 09:15 #46139

McCain - Last Debate
Category: politics


What McCain said is not going to play well among independents. Virtually everyone thinks that there should always be exceptions for the mother's health. McCain was very dismissive and used air quotes.

Liberals say that a majority of Americans support abortion rights, and conservatives that a majority don't. The fine print in all that is that a majority support early abortions and oppose late abortions - so it's just how you phrase it in your campaign spots, I suppose.

Personally that's me, pretty much, I am OK with first trimester abortions, and progressively less at ease after that, and by the third trimester I think it's OK to heavily restrict abortions, as long as there are exceptions for rape/health. Which is pretty much what the Supreme Court has decided, right?

paul - 10/18/08 19:14
Like I said, I am pro-abortion. Only under the "extreme circumstances" of actually being able to care for the baby - should they not abort.
gardenmama - 10/16/08 20:02
I found him painfully dismissive on the health of the mother issue. That's a really hard one for me to wrap my head around. Of course, if the Supreme Court ever overturns Roe v Wade, that too would become a health of the mother issue for all women who couldn't afford to leave the country to go elsewhere for safe, legal abortion. Back to butchers, alleys, and coathangers, and young and poor women dying from hemmorage and infection - now there's a plan.
tinypliny - 10/16/08 10:09
Does McCain think "health of the mother" is some fictional roadblock to their party's crazy agenda? Good grief. This bloke doesn't even know what the heck he is talking about. :(
tinypliny - 10/16/08 10:03
Hehehe, I was around 1.2 kg (2.6 lb) when I was born, >1 month premature. People thought I was a a big rat when they looked at my incubator because I was apparently very hairy in addition to being small and ugly. Nothing much has changed even now. LOL
tinypliny - 10/16/08 09:57
Good to know they got medical advice on this one. Back home, the "viable" age is 20 weeks ((e:tinypliny,46006) ), nevermind that many babies dont't make it past 1-2 years because of malnutrition and poor care. :(
jim - 10/16/08 09:46
"Roe v. Wade centrally held that a mother may abort her pregnancy for any reason, up until the "point at which the fetus becomes ‘viable.’" The Court defined viable as being potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid. Viability usually occurs at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks." The Court also held that abortion after viability must be available when needed to protect a woman's health, which the Court defined broadly in the companion case of Doe v. Bolton. These rulings affected laws in 46 states."

- Summary of Roe v Wade ( :::link::: )
tinypliny - 10/16/08 09:42
That's the medical viewpoint as well. Has the supreme court ruled on this?

10/14/2008 19:16 #46116

POWERTHIRST
Category: internets

drew - 10/14/08 19:53
awesome.

10/14/2008 09:16 #46104

HAPPY APPLE DAY
Category: apple
Sources:





image

I'm hoping there is progresses towards my dream laptop, for purchase in 2010(?):

MacBook Air, 4gb RAM, 256gb SSD, Dual-DVI out - or better on any of those features.
paul - 10/16/08 13:11
Sony had the dual video card thing for a long time but I thought it was dumb because you had to log out to switch to the power saving one or back. Then Nvidia came out with one that could switch on the fly. Apparently, that is not the one in the new macbook pro. "In fact, it's been revealed that switching between the two GPUs on the MacBook Pro requires the user to log out of Mac OS X. Apparently, other implementations of NVIDIA's Hybrid SLI allows on-the-fly switching between GPUs, so it's not clear if this limitation in the MacBook Pro is a software or hardware issue." :::link:::
jim - 10/14/08 16:17
I pretty much HATE gloss screens. So there is that.

Don't worry James, just window shopping :)
james - 10/14/08 16:07
Damn right you are not looking for an upgrade.

How do you like that gloss finish on the screen?
jim - 10/14/08 09:54
The MBP have two graphics cards, one high power one for normal use, and one low power one for battery use. I think the 15" will also have the option for a higher resolution display, which would be sweet (if I were looking to upgrade, which I'm not).
paul - 10/14/08 09:49
outside of aestethics I cannot see an compelling advantage over the current line. Does it have bluray?

Written After

Written Before