ZenLinux Blog

Inspired by Kathy Sierra’s extremely insightful post The Asymptotic Twitter Curve, I’ve decided to stay unplugged from Instant Messaging for a full week. That would be until next Friday around 3:15 PM. It’s true that IM is the most frequent mental interruption I deal with daily. I’ll report on how this productivity experiment goes on this blog.

A person I work with whom I admire for his focus and drive makes a point of never using IM because of its interruptions. I have the feeling he’s onto something.

I’m rounding up people for the first Ruby/Ruby on Rails user group meeting in New Hampshire. We’re tentatively looking at meeting on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 from 7-9 PM at Morse Hall (Room 301) in Durham.

The meeting topic will be getting the group going, and I’ll be happy to share some of my favorite ruby/rails resources for development as well as following the (sub)culture. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you’re interested in attending – sgarman at zenlinux dot com.

My trusty Eclipse ergonomic computer monitor lamp bit the dust a few weeks ago (not the bulb, but the unit itself), so I decided to go hunting for a new desk lamp. Admittedly I’m picky about these kinds of things, so it took me several visits to various places before I found something I liked. I noticed that a lot of the lamps are halogen-based and have special bulbs. I didn’t think much of this and the one I liked happened to be this type. It had an adjustable dimmer knob so, I figured I was all set.

But when I finally turned the thing on at home, WOW, was it hot! The stream of light emanating from it felt like it was also capable of cooking whatever you placed underneath it. I hoped the dimmer knob would be the saving grace, but it didn’t help much in the heat department. It also caused the lamp to make an annoying buzzing sound when it wasn’t on full-brightness. Argh.

My home office is warm enough with all the computer gear and aquarium equipment I have, and I decided this lamp was just too much. If you’re looking for a dual-function light source and space heater, give a halogen lamp a shot. But mine is going back to the store and I’m getting one that takes normal incandescent bulbs (which I’ll replace with an energy-efficient compact flourescent to reduce heat even further).

I thought discussing my coding environment when working with Ruby on Rails might make for good blog fodder, so here it is:

• Ubuntu Edgy with the GNOME desktop
• Jedit programmer’s editor
• Jedit plugins ProjectViewer, Sidekick, RubyPlugin, and WhiteSpace
• Firefox v2
• Firefox extensions Firebug, Webdeveloper, and the DOM Inspector
• Subversion for source code version control
• bash shell

I have a dual-head monitor set up at home and give jedit one desktop area and share the remainder between Firefox and several terminal windows. My basic terminal setup includes the following:

• One terminal in the rails project working directory, to run rake or perform svn commits.
• One terminal running script/server.
• One terminal running tail -f log/development.log.
• One terminal running the mysql interpreter so I can poke at the database manually.

I’ve found this setup to be productive as I’m coding, particularly as I keep an eye on the logfile for ruby errors. Also, I keep a bookmark toolbar folder of frequently accessed web and rails development sites, including:

• The Rails API documentation
• A DevGuru CSS reference
• Prototype documentation from the Scriptaculous wiki
• The W3C HTML tutorial, for those times when I need to double-check my basic understanding of HTML

Since ruby is such a concise language, I actually spend the bulk of my time dealing with HTML/CSS issues. Firebug makes it easy to pick elements from a page and analyze their CSS styles or DOM location. Jedit has some nice intellicode-like auto-completion features for ruby, but it slows the editor down quite a bit and so I’ve got most of that turned off. The API docs are easy to use, and I often learn something new by reading them directly.

Not that I think this blog is going to get a large readership, but I decided to create a free Feedburner account and use them as my RSS aggregation service, so I can get some metrics on who actually bothers to subscribe to this feed. It’s also an example of a successful web2.0 service that I wanted to try out.

So add me to your RSS feedreader, you know you want to!

About a week ago I finished reading Jerry Kaplan’s Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure. It’s an old book from 1995 about the rise and fall of a pen computing company in the late 80’s called GO. I’ve seen references made to the book in various places, I think most recently on one of the stikkit development blog posts, and figured it would be a good “downtime” read between CampLev hacking sessions. I found the book entertaining and took away from it the perils of competing with industry behemoths (like Microsoft) and the fact that partnerships don’t always go so well (GO’s constant fighting with its “ally” IBM was just amazing).

Speaking of recent reads, I also devoured Steve Wozniak’s iWoz earlier in November. I recommend that one even more highly than Startup. Wozniak’s autobiography includes tales of his technical accomplishments early in life that reminded me of the atmosphere in Steven Levy’s Hackers, which is one of my favorite hacker culture books of all time. iWoz reads very much like how Woz speaks in real life; I found this somewhat amusing and it didn’t detract much from my enjoyment of the book.

So what’s on my reading stack now? Robert Hoekman, Jr. released a book last month titled Designing the Obvious which offers advice on how to create great interfaces for modern, rich web applications. Hoekman embraces a minimalist and pragmatic philosophy much like 37signals’ Getting Real. There are practical tips on writing use cases and other design elements that I hope will improve my design-fu. I’ve also gotten through a couple of chapters of Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while which discusses the phenomenon of ideas spreading like viruses and reaching large populations via tipping points.

Every so often I tell myself not to start any new books until my current reading stack is empty, but that never seems to happen. 🙂

It has been a long, long time since any blog updates, but I have comitted a handful of bugfixes to Thought2Action over the past couple of months. Just minor stuff like resetting the date picker to today’s date after entering a new task, etc.

In other news, I finally picked up David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. The GTD phenomenon has become very fad-like in tech culture, but as I’m reading the book I’m seeing it has some really good things to offer. The Franklin system is very top-down in it’s approach, and GTD is bottom-up. I hope to finish the book in the next week or two and consider how it may impact T2A.

With LinuxWorld Boston over, I’m catching up with all the things that piled up over the week. For some sanity I decided to do a bit more thought2action work, too. I’ve tweaked some cosmetic things that I found annoying, and added a really useful feature. The todo control link “Update Overdue Tasks” takes any incomplete todos that are overdue and makes them due today. Since I’m so ambitious and set out to do much more than I can accomplish on most given days, I have wanted this ability since I started using the app on a daily basis.