ZenLinux Blog

I am happy to report that our Rails Rumble application was indeed completed within the 48-hour time limit! We named the app A Well-Oiled Machine and you can try it here (Update: The Linode server made available to us during the contest is no longer active. I will need to re-deploy the app elsewhere in the near future). The app does require an OpenID account to log in – if you don’t have one I would recommend using myopenid.com.

I had a great time working with Jason and Jesse on this app, though I must give them credit for doing a lot of the heavy-lifting when it came to coding. My rusty Rails skills became evident pretty quickly, and I had to curtail the scope of what I worked on to make sure I didn’t turn into a bottleneck. That said, it was still a true team effort, and it felt good to immerse myself in the Rails world again.

2009 Rails Rumble Hackfest

The contest required the use of git for version control, and I am sold on this tool. It is fast and the workflow it promotes is much more sensible and flexible than subversion. Deployment remains a breeze with Passenger (mod_rails for apache) and vlad (a simpler deployment tool alternative to capistrano).

Friday night and Saturday we worked from my dining room, and on Sunday we made the trek out to Backspace for the final effort.

2009 Rails Rumble Hackfest at Backspace

It was an intense effort and the resulting app has a couple of rough edges, but we did accomplish what we set out to do, and I consider that a great achievement. Many of the Rumble contestants didn’t even end up with a working app. It was an honor to be able to work with Jason and Jesse on a project together, and I would jump at an opportunity to do this kind of thing again. Thanks guys for your outstanding effort and attitude!

This year I put a team together to participate in the Rails Rumble, a programming competition to create a web app using Ruby on Rails within a 48-hour time limit. In past years I’ve followed the event, but for various reasons not had the time to participate. This year I decided to jump right in, despite the fact that I’m nearly becoming rusty with my Ruby on Rails skills (my last app was written with Rails v1.2.6).

The Rails Rumble is a wonderful opportunity to embrace constraints, get together with some talented people to learn from each other and have a good time. We’re not aiming to win any of the competition categories, but simply to have an application that has some semblance of completeness by the end of the contest. No all-nighters for us this time.

Our web app will be a tool to help you track your vehicle’s maintenance schedule, and send you notifications by email when you’re due for service. While planning how the application would work, it’s been interesting to think of all the possibilities of what it could do, but then having to let go of most of them in the interests of having something simple enough to bang out in a weekend.

When we’re finished I’ll write up a summary post about the experience. But I already know this is the kind of thing I will never have regrets about doing.

From June 17 – 19 I attended the Open Source Bridge Conference in Portland. This was a relatively small, all-volunteer run event that really impressed me. The event was created in response to O’Reilly moving a couple of high-profile conferences out of Portland this year, including OSCon and RailsConf.

Open Source Bridge (OSB) focused on the use and development of open source software in many contexts. I really liked that several of the talks were on the theme of using open source in government and business, including making a living from working with open source software. Portland Mayor Sam Adams gave a one of the keynote talks, and I sincerely believe he “gets it” or at the very least wants to get it, and recognizes Portland’s unique positioning as a center for open source software developers to live and work.

I’ve been to a number of conferences before, from tiny ad-hoc “unconferences” such as BarCamp to huge O’Reilly ones such as RailsConf. I have to say OSB was one of the best events I’ve ever been to, and definitely trumps all of the other ones in terms of value. They focused on hosting the conference at a quality venue (the Oregon Convention Center) and had an outstanding 24-hour hacker lounge on the 23rd floor of the downtown Hilton. But to lower costs, they didn’t spend oodles on things that don’t really matter at events, such as catered lunches.

I am deeply grateful for the work of OSB’s organizers and am absolutely certain I’ll be back next year. I attended interesting and relevant sessions, got to meet some great people, and did so without having to spend several hundred dollars.

Here’s a video from the hacker lounge taken on the first night of the conference:

I promise not to make a habit of posting funny videos to my blog, but I thought this one was too good to pass up. Sometimes you laugh because it’s funny, and sometimes you laugh because it’s true:

I feel the need to spread this ssh tip that saves me from quite a bit of typing on a daily basis. I learned about it from Elliott’s OS X Tips and Tricks post on the Carsonified blog.

Add the following to your ~/.ssh/config file:

Host *
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p

Now when you ssh into a host, subsequent connections to that host use the same TCP socket, and don’t require authentication. This will be the case for as long as that initial connection stays open, and it works for sftp as well as ssh.

I realize another way of avoiding typing your password all the time is to use ssh keys, but I happen to work on embedded systems that get rebuilt very frequently and which I’m not able set up an ssh key as part of the build process. This technique allows me to log into the system once per session and not have to type the password over and over again.

Today I rode in the Worst Day of the Year bike ride, which supports the Portland Community Cycling Center. The ride is held every year in the middle of winter and typically involves adverse weather. Fortunately today the rain ended just before the ride started, and the sun even came out by the end of it.

Worst Day of the Year Ride - Waterfront

The ride is a great example of Portland’s quirkiness. Costumes are highly encouraged, and the ride has a fun and family-friendly atmosphere. There were lots of whoops and cheers among the 3,000 riders who participated in this year’s event.

Worst Day of the Year Ride - Bee Costumes

The ride ended with some excellent spinach lentil soup and bread from Laughing Planet. I didn’t ride with a costume this time, but I’m thinking it would be worthwhile for me to piece something together to keep handy.

My elation over living in Portland – literally a bicycling paradise in the United States – hasn’t subsided yet. As I ride through the city I can’t wipe the smile off my face from seeing all the other people out on bikes, and learning how progressive the transportation infrastructure is. For the benefit of my friends back East, here are a few videos I found on YouTube that describe what we have out here.

Of course Portland has bike lanes – over 100 miles of them – but you might be surprised to find that streets with bike lanes aren’t necessarily the safest way to get around by bike in the city. One of the most intriguing strategies the city has come up with is optimizing certain side roads as bicycle boulevards; streets where traffic flow is optimized for bicycles and pedestrians.

One of the coolest things about bike boulevards is how they’re such a win-win situation for the communities where they’re placed. Homeowners love having their street designated as a bike boulevard, as it makes the street safer and more family-friendly, and helps to raise home values.

When cycling around NH, I generally avoided routes with traffic lights on them whenever possible because of the difficulty or outright impossibility of tripping the traffic sensors to change the light. These kinds of intersections are also where plenty of crashes with cars can occur when a bike or car wants to turn. Portland actually has traffic sensors at many lights specifically designed to be triggered by bicycles, and in some cases, even dedicated lights for bicycle traffic:

…and to make tricky intersections safer for everyone, bike boxes (my apologies for the corny nature of this video):

All of this infrastructure costs very little as a percentage of the overall transportation budget in Portland, and the return on investment is huge. It reduces auto congestion and pollution, and helps Portland solidify its reputation as a sustainable and environmentally progressive city.

I’ll be continually smiling on my bike for some time, I’m sure. 🙂

A little over a week ago my family and I made a 4,200+ mile journey across the country to move from New Hampshire to Portland, Oregon. I had never done a cross-country drive before, and other than a snowy first day, things went exceptionally well.  Not wanting to take any chaces during the winter, we took a longer southern route and didn’t rush ourselves – the trip took nine days. Among the sites we took some time to see were the Painted Desert and Grand Canyon in Arizona, and the Sequoia National Park in California. We also stayed with some friends in Santa Fe, NM and spent an extra day there to explore the area.

New Mexico desert

The Grand Canyon

Mount Shasta

Having a GPS navigation system took a lot of the stress out of driving, and I’d highly recommend one. Major props to my Garmin Nuvi 305 and Honda Civic for being so reliable.