Microsoft Announces the Abandonment
18 December 2005
I do love it when software companies stop shipping software, y’know?
In the Airport Again
17 December 2005
Acts as Chunky Bacon
13 December 2005
Ruby on Rails 1.0 is out, along with the new and improved web site. One of the things I like most is the featuring of Why the Lucky Stiff’s Poignant Guide.
Chunky bacon!
sudo gem update rails –include-dependencies
Hotel Rooms
08 December 2005
This is a first for me. I’m sitting in my hotel room, listening to a rather rhythmic sound, when I realize it’s not as perfectly synchronized as I first thought. It’s a tap group, upstairs. How many times have you had tap dancers upstairs? They’ve obviously practiced the piece, but as it gets harder, there’s some loss of synchronization. At least five people, perhaps as many as 15, are tapping the night away. I can barely hear the music.
Kind of makes me miss tap class, actually. I had a very demented tap teacher once upon a time. She’d do things like choreograph waltzes (Blue Danube). There are some pieces I still can’t see without seeing (and hearing) a room full of people doing a bunch of tap moves.
Fun with Subversion
05 December 2005
So, this morning I did an ‘svn up’ on a project before I went to breakfast, then went off onto the other side of the hotel property to do some work and schmooze.
Later, I got this error:
$ svn up<br></br>svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/reposname/!svn/vcc/default'<br></br>svn: REPORT of '/svn/reposname/!svn/vcc/default': 400 Bad Request (http://domain.com)<br></br>
See, I hadn’t changed anything, and svn up on some other domains worked — which made the problem significantly harder to debug, actually.
Ultimately, the problem was simply a blocked port. Thanks to Daniel for figuring it out while I still had some hair remaining.
The Clearing of the Decks
04 December 2005
I realized I haven’t been writing too much about Ruby on Rails lately, but there’s been a grand flurry of activity.
At one point, I had nine Ruby on Rails projects in the air, which was driving me crazy because I can’t wrap my brain around that many projects (four really is about my limit).
Recently, two were finished, one is in a limited deployment until I get the next feature set going, one was deemed irrelevant, and two others were combined into a single application.
Currently, I’ve got six, including the one in limited deployment, including a new small job from a client.
So, if you haven’t heard from me and think I don’t love you, that’s not it. I’m just slammed.
Scruffums
02 December 2005
The other day, someone pointed out that they’d never seen a picture of Scruffy. Well, I have to admit that he generally posts them on his own weblog, so I typically don’t bother posting them here.
For those of you who haven’t seen him, here’s the Scruffmeister guarding his catnip:
Loscon, the Rest
02 December 2005
Saturday night, I decided to don my corset and hit the party floor. After all, there was the Baen Sidhe Toga Party, and while I was neither a banshee nor sporting a toga, I was published by Baen, the sponsor of the party — and I had the book to prove it.
One guy in the party was already way too drunk, running into people, whapping balloons into people. Every time one landed in my direction, I’d dunk it into the corner. At one point, his too-drunk cohort asked, “Who invited you?”
“My publisher,” I replied. It felt good, I admit it.
After some more time talking to people, I left for parties further afield, winding up in the Westercon 60 party. At that point, I managed to talk with a potential client about his site, for which I finalized the deal the following day.
Sunday, I got to see the final panel with Tim Powers, with Steven Brust crashing the party. David Gerrold was in fine form, and everyone talked about rejection and writers. I have to admit, it was a great panel to end with because it really did give people hope. I’ll have to remember that when scheduling writing panels in the future.
Loscon, the Arrival
25 November 2005
We arrived just before midnight Thursday at the LAX Airport Marriott, only to find the lobby unusually devoid of the typical hangers-on.
Friday, I spent most of the day at the fan table. Because I’d changed my hair color and glasses since most of them had last seen me, a surprising percentage of people I’ve known for years and years and years and years didn’t recognize me. Disguise is such a wonderful thing.
Fannish coincidences being what they are, I wound up sitting next to the person I’d heard about on Sunday, a female software engineer in San Diego looking for a job.
I didn’t actually get to any panels Friday, but I did manage to get to the tail end of the ice cream social, where I saw Writer Guest of Honor Steven Brust wearing an “Oh so Steven Brust” t-shirt: “I’m out of bed, I’m dressed, what more do you want?”
Other t-shirts spotted included Steve Savitzky’s Cthulhu t-shirt, which reminded me of Nate’s true calling, and a friend’s “Morale will decline until the floggings improve” shirt.
Commit Message Contest
23 November 2005
Sometimes, it’s not enough to have a cool project. You just want to go that extra mile. TextDrive did with their StrongSpace project, where they had a contest for the best commit messages.
Way better than my last svn commit message, which happened to be: “Trying to get the frelling convention name in the right frelling place.”