Monthly Archives: August 2007

Ch-check It Out

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Check-ch-check-check-check-ch-check it out

What-wha-what-what-what’s it all about

Work-wa-work-work-work-wa-work it out

Let’s turn this turn this party out

Sidenote: Indeed, this is the clean version.

This ditty has been stuck in my head for the past week. And there is no sign of stopping.

I guess in one sense, this song could just mean subversion checkouts. But that’d be too nerdy, and so I’ll stop there.

Another stanza of goodness:

Now remain calm no alarm

Cause my farm ain’t fat

So what’s up with that

I’ve got friends and family that i respect

When i think i’m too good

They put me in check

So believe when i say i’m no better than you

Except when i rap

So i guess it ain’t true

Like that y’all and you just don’t stop

Guaranteed to make your body rock

Just replace “rap” with “code”. This song is sick.

Netbeans vs TextMate

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After a day of not getting anything working in symfony (why do you hate me so… yeah, it’s a long story), I come home and… start with doing something that I really wouldn’t mind “wasting” hours and hours with: Rails.

And what could it be, but from my feeds I find this little “gem” (I need to implement a “pun count”, and I should keep a running tally in the sidebar): Netbeans THE best ruby on rails IDE. Of course, being the nerd I am, I read quickly and make a decision to see how good it really is.

I always thought that the choice for Rails development on the Mac was TextMate. But it’s always good to question your options from time to time. TextMate has a lot of glaring issues. Here’s the list from Life on Rails.

  • The indent key not being tab (it’s square bracket),

I’m not sure what he’s talking about here. When you hit the tab button on the keyboard, TextMate indents. However, when you want to indent a line from the middle, or indent multiple lines while selecting them, you do indeed use the keystroke “command + [" or "command + ]“. I didn’t think this was at all too annoying.

  • The project window (drawer) disappearing from time to time,

I have not yet have this happen, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

  • Dragging more folders into a project is like playing an 8-bit platform game: you have to be pixel perfect,

This issue, I don’t necessarily agree with. Maybe I’m just not getting the full picture.

  • The find really means find (as in you can’t see where the search results are, you literally have to scan the page to find what textmate has found – and it never seems to wrap searches for me).

Once again, not sure what he’s talking about.

Here’s a list of my gripes with TextMate.

  • Code folding only works if you yourself have made sure that you’ve indented your code properly. You can’t really go around and rely on TextMate to show you if you’ve properly closed your tags.
  • Either I’m missing something, or the “escape” key doesn’t actually do any code completion whatsoever. Looks like there are a couple bundles out there that enable this functionality (such as this one for PHP)… TextMate is indeed light.
  • Code highlighting is still broken. I still have it happen once in a while, be it HTML or Ruby. More of a minor annoyance here an there.
  • It doesn’t feel like a 1.0.

Oh, but don’t hate: TextMate is definitely a very useful tool. It just took me a little bit of time and effort to get used to it. Heck, I’m still not used to it. But in reality, there was a bit of mystery wrapped around hype before I tried out the product.

But in other news, I do agree with the post from Life on Rails: I won’t be using Eclipse on the Mac for a long while. Slow and clunky. Unwieldy. Next.

Netbeans seems very intriguing, other than the fact that it’s written in Java. Yes, I have some weird fight against Java (must be the years of pain brought to me by any piece of software ever written in… or the fact that it captures the “coporate software development world” or yadda yadda yadda). Don’t ask me to explain it to you just yet. One day, it’ll dawn on me, but at this point in time, I feel kinda weird talking about writing Ruby code in a Java IDE.

Regardless, it looks really polished. I haven’t had too long to play with it, but I think I might switch into this. Of course, I still need to get a little bit more in touch with TextMate before I give myself the final shove towards Netbeans… and I still have to weigh the options.

Here’s yet another post on the subject. Ruby/Rails IDE Comparison: Idea, Netbeans, RadRails

It’s going to be a long night. Which is going to be a nice segue (dang it, I spelled it segway again… you marketing peoples and your misspelling of words for easy marketability) for another personal post.

EDIT: Updated Link for NetBeans post.

The More I Look Into the Past…

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… the more I see the importance of what’s to come. And yet, it’s funny… I keep just staring into the past for more clues about the future.

I definitely had the case of the Tuesdays, if you get my drift. Things picked up at the end, but man, it just wasn’t a good day. Legacy code kills.

Just recently, I’ve been talking to a lot of people I’ve lost in contact with. I had mixed feelings whilst talking to them… a concoction of happiness and anger, intermixed with a twinge of bittersweetness.

My left wrist is definitely acting up. I feel like I should see a doctor lest I be crippled for life with carpel tunnel. And that wouldn’t bode too well with the career I have in everything Internet ever.

I’ve been voraciously reading up on the feeds. There are a few technical stories you should be on top of. Hopefully, my Google Reader feed is doing you guys a favor.

As with everything else that isn’t PHP or Symfony, I’ve not really had time to dive too deep into it. It might be because Rails was my first MVC framework or that Symfony is basically a not-so-perfect copy of Rails, but I feel pain every time I encounter a roadblock in programming in Symfony. Routing really annoying in Symfony, and the folders… they still annoy me. Maybe I’ll get used to it still.

I guess I should put something of interest with this post. I guess I’ll leave you with this picture from the Minnesota State Fair.

Deep Fried... Snickers Bar... on a STICK

Suffice to say, it was one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever digested. I’m glad I just got to nibble on it, at least… so I could still be alive to tell the tale.

Yeap. It’s another random post.

The World Needs More Drunken Blog Posts

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Sidenote: Get out while you still can.

As for me, I could probably pull off stupid honesty that comes only from having one too many bottles of alcohol without actually being drunk. It’s just a skill I have. Plus, I hear it’s cheaper.

What scares me most is that people read this thing. I don’t know who, but that’s what Google tells me. It’s like… one day I woke up and realized that this blog isn’t a one-to-specific-many, but instead it was a one-to-whoever-many. Someone should have paid more attention in Networking class, because I forgot that the Internet was incredibly amazing in this facility.

Alas, the number of personal posts took an uncontrollable dive, seeing as how I didn’t know what was safe to post. I would post about the normal day-to-day events, but nothing that really went too deep… the stuff that… you might not want to read. I even thought about making a separate public blog where I could really say what was on my mind, without people knowing who the writer was. Think Fake Steve Jobs, but if it actually was Jobs himself writing those ridiculous(ly hilarious) entries.

In the spare time I have (which is thankfully disappearing), I’ve been thinking on what makes friends… friends, and in a larger sense: relationships at ALL levels. I’m talking parents to children, lover to lover, friend to friend… now that I think about it, my studies could probably apply to Man and Pet.

Of course, seeing how this blog is supposed to have some kind of penchant towards technology, I haven’t completely ignored the use of technology in real-life relationships. (Forgive me, I almost typed the acronym ‘RL’.)

So this is the part of the post where things can get quite ugly. I could start throwing out some of the nuggets of wisdom I’ve collected over the multiple sessions of pondering. I could also start writing about the real-life proof I have of believing such and such.

It’s ALWAYS give AND take

No person on this Earth can always give and give and give. There’s always an ulterior motive, be it good or bad. Actually, most of the time, it’s freaking both. That’s what makes things oh so fun and complicated.

In the perfect vision of the world, there would also be an equality in the give and take. Not here in the real world. Someone’s always giving too much, while the other is happily taking. I’ll remind you, though, that I did not specify if the two parties are privy to the give and take.

The giving, to some people, is the taking.

And because of it, we have so many… oh so many relationships that really don’t make any sense. (Not making any sense isn’t a bad thing here.)

I’m kinda trying to figure this out, but is the goal really to get the exact amount of give and take from both sides? Heck, one shouldn’t even be worrying about the amount to begin with!

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie…

… he’ll start to question your motives and ask you, “Why did you give me a free cookie?”

It’s not wrong to ask questions. If that was the case, I’d be… uh… [INSERT METAPHOR HERE].

But sometimes, the existence of the questions mark the beginning of something not so pleasant. In my case, when the number of questions surpass the number of answers, I find that something’s definitely not right. And I think this is the same way with most of the excessive thinkers out there.

(forgive && forget) != true

(forgive || forget) == true

The English word “and” doesn’t have the same definition as the boolean “&”. Let me explain a bit further.

“To forget” in this case isn’t like forgetting your keys. You know of the existence of the keys. You just misplaced them. No, in this instance, it’s like forgetting that you even live at the apartment to which the key belongs to.

The human ability to forget is extremely important. It makes things, once again, oh so fun and complicated. Also, the human inability to be perfect provides us the same fun and complication, which in turn requires… forgiveness.

“To forgive” means to recognize the fault, dealing with the consequences, and remembering like it was yesterday, the fault. “To forget”, therefore, cannot actually be a part of forgiveness. That makes no sense.

But after thinking (MORE?!), maybe the person who made this statement was talking about the order in which issues are dealt with. You forgive yourself, him, her, whoever: Then you forget whatever the issue was in the first place.

But even then, I don’t feel it’s the correct way to go about it. Sure, the sting of whatever was dealt subsides with time (trust me, it does… time and a little bit of distance from yourself or from others), but forgetting that it happened? Isn’t that kinda like cheating yourself?

So What I’m Really Trying to Say Is

I need to stop thinking… well, no. I would no longer be.

I need to stop thinking about silly things… well, no. It’s not silly.

I need to start thinking about things useful. But that requires defining what is useful. So thus starts the circular.

Wow, I’m going insane. Yeap. That’s what I wanted to write. I needed to deflate before I pass out from my day at the Minnesota State Fair.

The Minnesota State Fair Is…

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Insane. I’m quite tired from it that it’s probably going to help the next post I’m working on. Oh, it’s a doozy.

And yes, I know it’s been like a week since I posted. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten how to blog.

And thanks to Raj, the gods of Google have finally made me #2. Thank goodness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson – Write it on your heart

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Write it on your heart

that every day is the best day in the year.

He is rich who owns the day,

and no one owns the day

who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.

You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt, crept in.

Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a

new day;

begin it well and serenely,

with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations,

to waste a moment on the yesterdays…

I opened up a book by Emerson on accident today. I never really thought about poetry being anything useful outside of the 10th grade English classes. How silly of me.

Wow, in reference to the last post… dang.

Two Random Strangeness with Symfony

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Folder Structure

Okay, I’ll look past the Action/Modules/Template garbage (why didn’t they just leave it Controller/Model/View). But what is the deal with all these folders? Someone please tell me why I have to traverse through this to get to the action.

projectname/apps/appname/modules/modulename/actions/

Things are kinda similar to Rails, but… things are just enough to be a little bit annoying at the beginning.

http://yoursite.com/asdf_dev.php/action/module

What a strange routing scheme. It’s true, though, that the _dev.php makes the application run in the development environment (which is really well done), but a .php file before the folders… It just looks so weird.

Okay, that’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll have more as I dive deeper into one of the best and most popular PHP framework. I definitely need to buff up my PHP skills in the coming days to properly be ready for the code maintenance I’ll be doing at work.

Life's a Journey

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Cuz if it was a destination, I’d be completely lost. But the state of being lost is sometimes quite freeing.

Of course, I would love to cut to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”… Yeah, I can’t get it out of my head either. It’s such a great song.

Where I've Been

Sidenote: I got surprised about the $3M buyout of the “Where I’ve Been” by TripAdvisor. Yeap, turns out it’s nothing.

After 17… seventeen years in the states… these are the states I’ve touched (and one province from going over Niagara Falls). You know, I’ve done a huge circle.

For the 80th time, I am currently employed at MoCo, Inc. in sunny-right-now-but-it’ll-snow-soon-enough Minneapolis, Minnesota. Today concluded my first week of a full-time job. Tiring, but definitely something new.

Thankfully, I was able to find two nice roommates with a house about 4 miles north of my job. Let me take you back to some of the happenings that led up to this.

The Hunt

After finding out that there would be some kind of relocation assistance from the company, I left Amir’s place in Madison, Wisconsin for the second time and headed up.

The journey was yet another 6 hours of driving. There was a nice 6 hour drive from Champaign to get to Madison. Plus the 4 hours it took to get there from Cincinnati. If I ever wanted to go back home this route… it would take me a full day’s drive. At least, I’ll get to visit some people on the way back down.

There were a couple of places I found through Craigslist. I found a group of buildings that were owned by this lovely management group, but wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods. I wanted to live as close to the city as possible, probably because I had this really Romantic notion of the “city”. Of course, I don’t really do too much of that to begin with, so I don’t know why I was fooling myself.

Another place was about 30 minutes West of the city, lodged in between the millions of lakes here in Minnesota. Rent was cheap… but location wasn’t too good.

All throughout this time, I was getting situated in the city… soon finding out that the streets of Minneapolis is crazy. The numbering system for the streets are a little bit more sane than St. Paul (they tell me that city was designed by drunk Irishmen), but naming streets as numbers followed by a “Street” or “Avenue” which were also followed by a compass heading (1st Ave N & 1st St N… it doesn’t help that the abbreviation of street is the same as the “st” following the 1…) wasn’t too helpful either. I just went ahead and said screw it to the numbers, and went off of the streets that had names… like Hennepin and Washington.

Streets of Minneapolis

Right. So I ended up ending the search at this very suburban city called Columbia Heights.

The Job

It’s a nice small company, just like how I like them. Quickly, I learned the names of all my coworkers in the web development department. Going out to lunch everyday with them really helped in this process. I think I’m going to keep doing that… even though previous budget would freak out.

The building has a great view of Minneapolis, even though I have to stand from my cubicle to see it. I’m growing to like cubicles, as long as they’re low like these: They definitely create pockets of productivity now and then.

I like what we’re working on, and that we’re developing things in the B2C side. I also like how I’m learning more and more of the stuff that I believe in.

Closing

Looks like this might be pretty good for a while. I don’t know for how long… it could be short, it could be long… but it’s fine the way things are.

Kinda. You’ll see what I mean in the next posts to come.

The Only Positive Thing You'll Hear Me Say About Facebook

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Reducing the value of the word “friend”, horrible app spam, the questionable profit generation through advertisements (Where’s the $$$?), that random corner of whitespace on the upper right hand corner after the new version… Lots of issues I have with Facebook. But one thing’s for certain: It helps people to keep contact with those that they’ve naturally forgotten.

I’m not talking about the hurtful breakups or the friends you’ve turned out to hate (besides, you’ve probably unfriended them or you’ve cancelled your account): I’m talking about the random people you met at that one random day and shared that random moment.

And because of this gigantic database of networks, you could one day run into that person again. In RL! OP OP OP!

Sidenote: Sorry for the non-WoW players, for that last sentence will be fallen onto deaf ears… deaf eyes… blind eyes? Moving on…

It’s most interesting when you’re staring at a relationship that’s bound to just end up nowhere. I have to call a reference to Austin Powers; the scene where the henchman was facing certain doom as the steamroller was inching towards him as the camera kept cutting back and forth between his cries for help and Austin’s best efforts to get him out of the way. You know that realization is coming… but when?

Facebook to the rescue. Whether the reason be due to geographical differences too far to be reached by a simple car drive or just missing each other due to different schedules, you can actually have a continuing conversation, with no regards to time or location (through their own messaging system or the wall or status updates or annoying app spam or whatever). (I would say ex tempore, but silly English language changed the meaning of that phrase. Jerks.) It’s like an easier-to-use answering machine.

If this post sounded a little happy, I’m sorry. I’m normally not like this. The funny thing is this post was brought on because of my being sad, but… isn’t it wonderful where life takes you?