Prepping for Glasgow
30 July 2005
Sounds Like Weird
30 July 2005
28 July 2005
I wasn’t going to mention Blinksale, but then Eric Meyer made me snarf my coffee this morning with this entry:
On the other hand, the visual design of Blinksale totally hurts my eyes. Those are some amazing shades of green, boys.
Why yes, they are amazing shades of green. I like bright colors more than most people, but the fluorescent chartreuse sidebar was a tad bright even for me.
I’m certainly glad that DHH commented on the whole thing. Ultimately, he’s right: having other people produce commercial rails app validates the usefulness of his work. Even if they do resemble Basecamp in some ways.
26 July 2005
It seems that I’ve been getting some comments that were quietly marked as spam by one of my over-zealous plugins. Nothing personal was meant by it; it even marked one of my own trackbacks to my own blog as spam. (How rude!)
While it’s better than it was (especially since moving to TextDrive, which has its own magic), I’m going to have to keep an eye on the database a bit better.
25 July 2005
Now that Midsummer is past, it’s time to futz with the blog theme again. For now, I’m using a variant of “White as Milk” — but I’m not entirely happy with it. For one thing, there’s no set colors for a tags, which leads to (peculiarly, given the theme’s title) a many-colored page.
I’ve fixed some of my annoyances with it, but there will be more changes.
24 July 2005
Oh, one quick review. Yesterday, I received my copy of “Defensive Design for the Web,” written by the 37 signals guys.
Man, it covers most of my pet peeves about poor web design, complete with examples of a site that violated the rule and one that did a better job.
24 July 2005
I had a long day planning for the next version of BayCon’s registration software. Yesterday, had a meeting with the database team.
My head is about to explode from all the info. Sometimes, when I’ve had one of those days, all my body wants to do is fall over asleep so it has time to index.
I have managed to get postgres installed on my machine (no thanks to fink) and working; now I just need a php that works with it for phppgadmin. Gosh, I haven’t compiled php since I was using Linux as my desktop OS. Alternatively, I could just use another tool, but there’s darn few for the Mac.
I’ve been working on my Javascript homework, but I’m just too tired to see the error in what I’m doing.
So I guess that means I’m going to sleep….
23 July 2005
Some women are in a bit of a tizzy about David Allen being appointed to the women’s studies department chair for UW. I’m not.
I’m opposed to women automatically getting jobs on the basis of their sex, just as I’m opposed to men automatically getting jobs. Pick the best candidate.
Earlier in his career, Allen was a nurse — a female-dominated profession — and became interested in feminism as a result. While that doesn’t mean that he’ll “get” everything that women go through, as an administrator, does he really have to?
I feel like he’s sort of my inverse: I’ve worked in a very male-dominated field, frequently as the only woman in my workgroup. We see the same kinds of issues, just from different sides.
In all, though, I think Priti Ramamurthy said it best:
“It marks changes in the field of women’s studies. The idea that women’s studies is only for and about women is no longer the case,” she said. “It’s moved to a focus on social construction, not just of women but also of masculinity, and the changing relationships between men and women, women and women, and men and men.”
19 July 2005
I called the phone company to make some account changes today, navigating through what seemed like the correct options. The automated phone system transferred me to a number that had been disconnected.
16 July 2005
So, I decided to install Tiger yesterday when I read a blog entry about a Backpack Dashboard widget. One of my problems had been backups: I keep my home directory on a UFS partition so that I can use rsync for it. However, I’d never figured out a way to effectively back up my / partition, which is HFS+.
Having recently signed up for del.icious, I discovered the answer through searching through “backup” tags. In short, the answer is rsyncx.
Voila, by 4 a.m., everything was backed up. I woke up at 10:30 and began my install. What with having the DVD installed slightly wonky the first time (and the install failing as a result), then having my Mac not want to start up again for a bit (it got cranky), things weren’t as smooth as I’d have hoped — but I did finally get it all installed.
By the time I got all the developer tools installed, the system updates installed, and so on, it was 4 p.m. So, for a fairly complex install, it took me 5-1/2 hours, not 1/2 hour. With an OC-3, a faster hard drive, a faster cpu, and a few gigs of ram, it probably would have gone faster. I just have a wee little iBook G4, though.
I’ve updated my ruby so that I can run rails directly from Tiger’s install of the language (in Panther, you had to do an install into /usr/local/bin and shadow the 1.6 install in /usr/bin).
Well, I’m off to play.
11 July 2005
As a native Californian, I can’t help but feel weirdly proud of Danny Way’s quest to jump the Great Wall of China — on a skateboard. He succeeded, too.