Monthly Archives: March 2009

Power Outage On UIUC Campus

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I was at Siebel Center today, hacking at some Rails code, when the entire building lost power.

And there goes the power at Siebel. Someone really doesn’t want me to get work done. (Link)

Little did I know, this was actually happening all over campus. I went around to take a few pictures on my iPhone. Yes, these are not very great pictures, but you get the point. I was going to post a map to go with these pictures, but UIUC’s site is down. Silly lack of offsite backups…

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Right outside of my apartment, you can see that Siebel center (left) has some emergency lighting, while NCSA (right), where I work, has completely lost power.

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The parking structure north of Siebel was barely lit.

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Driving around for a bit, I noticed that Grainger was also without power.

I drove around the engineering quad.

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Tennis courts. No lighting at all.

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On Wright Street, looking towards Grainger.

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It looked like the businesses on Green were okay.

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But the the rest of Green street going towards campus…

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MechE buildling? I think.

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Yeah, that’s the Union.

I really need a camcorder or a camera or something. Blah.

Realization

I got on Twinkle, an iPhone Twitter application that pulls tweets based on location, when I lost power while working at Siebel, and really couldn’t find all too many people chirping about what happened. I really don’t pay attention to local news either, other than knowing the weather forecasts, and so I was pretty much in the dark (wee! pun!) for a little while.

The realization was this: that this desire to stay on top of the blogosphere is moving into local news. I want to know if the bands I love are coming to play. I want to know if a power outage takes out (maybe) the entire campus. I want to know if a nuclear launch was detected near the Engineering Quad.

Of course, Twitter can definitely power this, but as with almost all social networking tools, its power to inform is directly proportional to the number of people using it… and frankly, there aren’t too many of us.

For GetMyTweets Users

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I needed a very very very simple Twitter plugin for wordpress, just to show my latest tweet. I found GetMyTweets to be just simple enough. Then I started to get some warnings, and reflexively hit the Google.

But to my surprise, doing a query on “getmytweets” on google got me this:

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I recently had a couple of warnings with the GetMyTweets wordpress plug-in. These weren’t the same warnings, but you’ll get the gist of it:

Warning: XMLReader::open()
 [function.XMLReader-open]: php_network_getaddresses:
 getaddrinfo failed:
 Name or service not known in
 /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 38

Warning: XMLReader::open(

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/joshkim.xml?count=1)

 [function.XMLReader-open]: failed to open stream:
 No such file or directory in /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 38

Warning: XMLReader::open() [function.XMLReader-open]:
 Unable to open source data in /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 38

Warning: XMLReader::read()
 [function.XMLReader-read]: Load Data before trying to read in
 /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 39

(Note to self: Fix <pre><code> later. Sorry about that, to everyone who got this post multiple times.)

Obviously, the problem is with being unable to grab the xml provided by Twitter. Due to it’s ridiculous open architecture, I don’t blame Twitter when it chokes now and then (and not as much as it did when the whole Fail Whale was in vogue). For now, I just decided to hide it. Just append the following at the top of getMyTweets.php, just like with any other PHP warnings.

ini_set("display_errors", 0);

I’m fine with this fix, because I made the title for “Recent Tweets” link up to my twitter page anyway.

Now back to Rails.

"Quitting" In August

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Something magical happened today.

I finalized my leave from my full-time position at NCSA. And how it happened was very offhand. I thought that I told my boss this late last year, but I guess at that time, I wasn’t very sure either. As a sidenote, it’s going to be weird writing a letter of resignation so far in advance.

It’s been on my mind for months, as to where I should go next after my lease runs out. Do I stay, or do I find somewhere else to be awesome in? I’ve also been toying with half-time, but found out even more how bad of an idea that is. (The vacation day payout at the end gets silly, and I won’t have any of that.)

So yeah, that’s it. I’ve been telling friends that this might happen, but now you all know: It is happening.

Why “Quitting” Is In Quotes

I’m quitting my full-time job, but I’m far from quitting anything else.

What the heck am I doing after August? Well, I hope to scrimp and save like a madman up until that point, making sure to at least leave with +$10K in the bizzank. I hope that the next step will be a bit clearer to me as I continue the good work.

How It Began

Just so everyone’s on the same page: I went to college here. After graduating, I did some freelancing while staying in town for a couple more months. Eventually, went home to Cincinnati, because there was very little reason to stay in town. Thankfully, I was hired by a web development firm up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After only about six weeks of being in that job, I got an offer from NCSA (I applied well in advance of the job in Minneapolis) and rolled back down here.

The perk that helped me make that decision was simple: the chance for an all-paid for MBA. I was fairly certain I wanted to go back to school. Of course, I wised up and asked myself why I would endure the same pain and suffering from not being able to do, even though it was free? (And no, I’m not knocking on anyone else who got an MBA. I just don’t feel like it would be of use to me. Who knows, maybe it’ll come bite me in the butt later.)

So with that, I decided that I needed to continue my efforts in making HanMeta a reality. Of course, that was started in Decmeber 2007 on paper, but it started back around when I graduated. I don’t think I really understood even the ramifications of the possibility of running a company. I think I just liked to go around telling people that I had a company.

And Now…

Well, it’s go time now. This year started off with quite the bang, learning more linux admin than I could handle (I mean this because I’m probably going to be outsourcing the infrastructure of whatever I write to Heroku), refocusing on what I want to do with the blog, and relearning Rails from the ground up.

With the acceptance to the Apple iPhone Developer Program (and with my $105.19, blah), I’m ready to do some coding for that platform also. I know that the iPhone platform fits into what I want to do, it’s just a question of what I want to do on it. Do I want to make a quick helpful app to fund the rest of HanMeta? I don’t know.

And as I continue my work at NCSA, I hope to hone the skillset I have now. I’m currently working with two other awesome developers (one of which who was a little too happy for me to quit ;-) NCSA’s getting hit with budget constraints, too, it seems, and I was more than happy that my move to quit was going to help someone else out in the process.) with our insane code update process, with a specific focus on the UI (the HTML/CSS/JavaScript). Finally, I can leave the realm of Sybase and DBArtisan. (If anywhere in the job description you see those two words, run. For me, ColdFusion is on that list, with a few others.)