ZenLinux Blog

Jared Spool, a founder of User Interface Engineering, will be speaking at the University of New Hampshire this coming Thursday, January 24. His topic is “What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?” Jared is a true guru of usability and this is a rare opportunity to see him present in this area. The meeting is being sponsored by the New Hampshire Usability Professionals Association (UPA). You must RSVP to attend because seats are limited. RSVP to info at nhupa dot org.

Be sure to swing by RMC Research in Portsmouth next Tuesday for the first NHRuby.org meeting of 2008. Nick Plante and I will be presenting on a couple of Rails-related topics. Nick will show you how to add OpenID goodness to your Rails app of choice, and I’ll be discussing the ins and outs of ActionMailer, which handles sending and receiving e-mail in Rails.

More details and directions to the meeting can be found, as usual, on the NHRuby wiki. We could really use some new guest speakers for upcoming meetings, so if you’re interested please drop me a line – scottruby at zenlinux dot com.

Vlad the Deployer is currently broken with rake v0.8. You can either downgrade the rake gem and stick with v0.7, or make the following change in the vlad gem’s lib/rake_remote_task.rb on line 108:

def execute(rake_t)

Thanks to Brian Palmer for this workaround. I hope the vlad crew will get around to another release soon.

Update: vlad 1.2.0 has been released and now works with both rake 0.8 and 0.7. Thanks guys!

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions (the geek in me can’t ignore how arbitrary the calendar system we’re using is), but I do have some goals for the calendar year related to cycling.

As I checked out my stats from riding in 2007, I’m really surprised. For my first year back on the bike (a year which started in mid-May, I might add), I rode over 1,600 miles, including my first century. I’d be happy just to repeat that!

But to give myself some goals to work toward, I would like to top 2k miles in 2008, and ride at least two centuries. I commuted to work by bike a couple dozen times last year, and I’d like to top that significantly.

Unfortunately my 2008 riding won’t be starting anytime soon, as New England is covered with plenty of snow right now. Over the next 24 hours we’re expected to get another foot of the white stuff in my neck of the woods. Well, at least I can enjoy my snowshoes…