http://www.rubick.com/blogger/ Jade's weblog OpenACS 5.0 Thu, 19 May 2011 20:40:07 GMT http://www.rubick.com/rss-support/images/openacs_logo_rss.gif http://www.rubick.com/blogger/ 126 48 http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33296 http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33296 At New Relic, we use Hudson to continuously run our test suite. When something breaks, we usually know exactly who broke it, and we fix it right away. Occasionally, however, the test is hard to fix, or the person is unavailable to fix it. Then things start piling up and it's difficult to tell when something broke. Also, sometime you get a regression and write a new test that duplicates the failed test, and you want to find out when it initially broke. The usual tool for finding when ... Thu, 19 May 2011 20:40:07 GMT Other http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33283 http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33283 This is useful if you want to modify your /etc/hosts to test how local code interacts with another production service. Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:23:38 GMT OpenACS http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33240 http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33240 I published my first gem this morning. It takes a two latitude longitude pairs and returns the English heading. For example: North, South, East, West. Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:35:23 GMT OpenACS http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33207 http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33207 I like to think that I do a good job with my resume. When I first started applying for jobs about a year ago, I wasn't that seriously looking, but I still was getting about a 25% response rate. Towards the end, I was getting a response from most every place I applied. I'll write later about why I think my resume gets a response when others don't. But today I want to talk about interviewing. I used to think I was an effective interviewee. I had some experience interviewing before, which gave... Sun, 21 Nov 2010 18:35:00 GMT OpenACS http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33206 http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33206 When you leave a job, solicit LinkedIn recommendations from your co-workers. It will be much harder to get them later. Also, be careful with your end date selection. Some places will extend your benefits to the end of the month, or not, depending on when the end date is. My recommendation is to give notice, but before you select the official date, talk with your HR person very carefully. This can be tricky, because often your end date is dictated by the date you'll start at the new positi... Sun, 21 Nov 2010 18:30:58 GMT OpenACS http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33190 http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33190 At work, we are trying to diagnose why a recent push seems to be causing server instability. We eliminated a number of possibilities, and fingers are pointing towards an infinite loop somewhere in the codebase. The tools we use don't really make this easy to diagnose. The server logs only write out after the request completes, so you don't know the URL that is causing the problem. And we get enough traffic that it's difficult to know exactly where the issue is. One possibility is to writ... Thu, 18 Nov 2010 22:09:44 GMT OpenACS http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33189 http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33189 This is where the ActiveModel refactoring is starting to bear fruit. This is a very cool idea: using git to persist objects in Rails. The best thing about this, as far as I can tell, is that your code base is always in sync with your "database". That's also the biggest disadvantage: how do you roll back a code change? Maybe they use git submodules? I'm curious what the performance implications will be like. I.e., how often are your objects actually committed? And how does this affect yo... Thu, 18 Nov 2010 18:06:00 GMT OpenACS http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33187 http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33187 One of the most annoying memes of late is the rockstar and ninja memes. I estimate that about 25% of the web programming jobs used the words rockstar or ninja to describe who they were looking for. I actually replied to one position saying that I was more of a sumo wrestler than a rockstar or ninja. They were pretty good humored about it. But it led me to wonder where these memes had come from, and why this was considered desirable. I came to the conclusion that what they were really... Sun, 14 Nov 2010 18:33:22 GMT OpenACS http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33186 http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33186 It sounds kind of "Indiana Jones"-ish, but I will be Jade at New Relic starting next month. New Relic offers a website as service product to monitor and diagnose performance issues in production websites. Their product is like a debugger for performance issues, but it's really something you have to see and use to see just how useful it is. They started out in the Ruby on Rails space, and seem to have dominated that niche quite well. They've now expanded into Java, PHP, and .NET as well... Sun, 14 Nov 2010 18:13:56 GMT OpenACS http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33185 http://www.rubick.com/blogger/one-entry?entry%5fid=33185 Doing something like this: submit_tag, :onclick => "this.disabled = true" Will cause the form to not be able to be submitted, except for in Firefox. Instead, use: submit_tag "Save", :disable_with => "Saved" What happens behind the scenes? Well, if you look at the source, it uses unobtrusive Javascript to work its magic: the rendered HTML says data-disable-with="Saved" For Prototype, this is the Javascript that is called: function disableFormElements(form) { form.selec... Sat, 13 Nov 2010 18:55:37 GMT OpenACS