davemclain.com

I’ve spent maybe 4-6 hours trying to get Ruby on Rails running on Apache, using mod_fcgid under Ubuntu Dapper Drake and I was about ready to kill someone. I’d edited apache.conf, the site confiuration, mod files, .htaccess files ruby files, pretty much everthing in /var/www and /etc/apache2. The problem? I owned the files in the Rails application instead of the www user. Bah!!!

#!/usr/bin/env perl
while (<>) {
  if ( /([^,]*),(Incoming|”[^"]*”),([^,]*),([-0-9]*),[^.]*,([0-9]+),[^,]*,[^,]*,[^,]*/ ) {
                $phone = $4;
                $date  = "$1 $3";
                $minutes = $5;
                if ($2 =~ /ncoming/i){
                        $inc = 1;
                } else {
                        $inc = 0;
                }
                $phone =~ s/[^0-9]//g;
                $date =~ m!([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+) ([0-9]+):([0-9]+) (AM|PM)!;
                $mo = sprintf(”%02d”,$1);
                $dy = sprintf(”%02d”,$2);
                $yr = $3;
                $hr = $4;
                $mn = $5;
                $hf = $6;
                if ($hf == “PM” && $hr < 12) {
                        $hr += 12;
                } elsif ($hf == "AM" && $hr == 12) {
                        $hr = 0;
                }
                $hr = sprintf("%02d",$hr);
                print "INSERT INTO calls (person_number, time, duration, incoming) VALUES ($phone, TIMESTAMP '$yr-$mo-$dy $hr:$mn:00', $minutes, $inc);
"
  }
}


This post would be more appropriately titled “Thank you Mr. Reardon” but it’s funnier with Aarthy’s last name. HEB is the best grocery store i’ve ever seen. It blends cheap, quality and good shopping experience in one great package that deserves it’s slogan “Here Everything’s Better”. Seattle is comparatively a wasteland of poor selection, outrageous pricing and questionable service. One fantastic HEB feature is it’s lack of a club card, aka shopper tracking device. The prices at Safeway without the use of the club card border on the criminal, but the use of the card brings it down to a level that I percieve as better than starvation or another day of Wendy’s. So, i’ve memorized Jim’s number so that I get the discount. This has the side effect that when I pay they always say “Thank you, Mr. Reardon” at the end of the transaction. Or in the case of one particularly bad case of data entry Aarthy took over resulting in the title.

Life has picked up. I’m coding and it makes me happy. This will probably result in less side projects (trying to configure zedd as a router, coding my phone call database, writing address parsers in visual basic) but overall higher quality of life. I just have to avoid being distracted by the Game. The Game is a series of puzzles whose answers lead to other puzzles with the end result of me not producting anything for Microsoft as well as inducing acute obsessive compulsive disorder and long sessions staring at Time Magazine looking for patterns at the behest of Ed Harris. I’d take a picture of my Nash style corkboard, covered in disparate clues and perhaps a few not-clues, but its apparently against company policy to take pictures inside company buildings. Lame.

Tarang, Ben and I went down to Capitol Hill on saturday with a few other people and had some sushi and eventually hit a bar in Capitol Hill. As we were driving around Capitol Hill trying to find a parking spot we noticed something was a little off. We then realized that what was off was the girl:guy ratio and that the Gay pride parade had been that day. We ended up just chilling in a bar and having like one drink since Tarang needed to wake up early for a World Cup match the next day. Next door to the bar we were at was a S&M bar.

Lost is completely insane. I need more. Season 3 cannot possibly start soon enough. I’m officially watching 2 shows now: Scrubs and Lost. I’ve also become a social 24 watcher. With a roommate who wants to be able to watch sports (even if that sport is soccer) and a value proposition for the XBOX 360 that looks more and more enticing i may just cave and purchase a TV.

I want to start a company. There’s nearly a dozen people who have mentioned a desire to start a business with me, several who have heavilly discussed the possibilty and a couple who actually have though the end result of the final group is somewhere between highly puzzling and near-complete failure. My near constant exposure to Microsoft’s CRM platform has given me a bit of tunnel vision, but in that i can definitely see a platform that could be highly leveraged in a number of different areas especially given .

Most businesses/organizations have processes that could be greatly improved by the correct application of software, but finding those opportunities seems to require a not insignificant amount of domain specific knowledge. And gaining that knowledge practically necessitate spending time doing something that is noticably not software development. Am I prepared to write a great software package that mines invoice data at a food distributor and predictively orders from manufacturers decreasing inventory costs if it means spending a couple years working at a food distribution company? It’s easy to write software when somebody gives you requirements (assuming the person knows what they want and isn’t insane in how long they expect it to take) but then you’re a contractor at best or an employee at worst.

 This post ended prematurely by my roommate leaving our apartment unlocked for the last 9 hours.

There’s something that just boosts your job satisfaction when you get to have grilled salmon with mango salsa, pasta alfredo and steamed broccolli for lunch for 6 bucks. The only things that would have made that meal better would be some white wine and a clear nose (i’ve got a bit of a head cold.

In German the word “doch” is used to answer negative questions in the affirmative. For example Hast du kein Geld?(Don’t you have any money?) to which one could reply “Doch!” if they in fact do have money. Other languages have similar constructs, but English is stuck with the comparatively limited yes and no. Negative questions are thus cause for more confusion. I’ve always been in the habit of replying with yes when i agree with the negative statement, for example in April I would respond to the question “You’re not 21 until May?” with “yes” or “that’s right”. I thought this was standard, but i was just in a conversation where i asked “You’re not 21 til March?” to which the reply was “nope” to indicate that she will in fact be 20 until March. Generally we avoid the confusion by providing a clarifying statement right afterwards or by not even saying yes or no and instead jumping straight to a full sentence, but how would you answer the question “You’re not ${you.age + 1} until ${you.birthday.month}?”

No party at BillG’s for me. Only interns with grad dates in the next academic year got invited. Oh well, he’s retiring anyway.

Nothing makes you do a little dance and simultaneously plot the downfall of the Federal government (hello to my new friends at the Carnivore program) as payday. Starting on May 23rd disqualified me from receiving a paycheck at the end of May, so today i’m getting paid for 3.5 weeks of work, apparently 4 of those days i was working for the federal government (i’ll get a lot of that back next april) and another day was spent working for the Social Security system  (which i’ll definitely never see again).

This looks really cool. The big brother implications on the second page are pretty crazy, but what a crazy business opportunity as well.

Wired News: GNU Radio Opens an Unseen World

I’m starting my fourth week here at Microsoft. Allegedly one of these days they’re actually going to pay me. Apparently all the interns who started May 23rd barely missed the cutoff for getting paid at the end of May, so there’s a rather substantial paycheck in my immediate future. This has naturally made me start thinking about various upgrades.

There is of course bluebeast, the computer i built in my senior year of high school that hasn’t booted since sophomore year. It doesn’t even post, suggesting at the very least a motherboard problem. It’s got a gig and a half of DDR ram and 400GB of hard drive space so i figure it’s worth buying a new mobo/cpu combo to see if i can’t turn it into a media box to drive the 5.1 system that languished in my room this last year.
ASUS K8N-E (NForce 3 250Gb based)
AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Those aren’t exactly an upgrade (the box has an ASUS NForce2 board and an Athlon 1800+) but the point isn’t to turn it into a modern game platform, but rather to get it back in a running state.
 
Also making the list for potentially unwise spending is the Sennheiser 280 Pro, blogging about it makes its extravagance more apparent to me, but still, i can’t help but look at that and think “ooh, those would be much more comfortable than this phillips piece of crap i’m wearing now” after which i get into an argument with myself as to just how egregious the grammar violations of that thought were. Anyway, it has been pointed out to me, that those would also look ridiculous around my neck, which is where my headphones currently end up, given my penchant for not wearing a backpack (i actually bring my backpack to work every day, how weird is that)

What if your homepage changed? Would you notice? What if you didn’t notice and upon finally realizing it you investigated and found that it had changed on October 24th of last year? That’s how i feel.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/06/07

The ESRB apparently have somebody who is “with it”. Hiring the authors of Penny Arcade to make awareness materials targeted at gamers is absolutely genius. I would guess that half the people reading this are outraged that the Hot Coffee mod even exists and the other half are ticked about the anti-gamer, anti-free speech and largely ignorant backlash. Wherever you fall on the “spectrum” i hope you can appreciate the awesomeness of leveraging Penny Arcade to raise awareness of the ESRB ratings on video games.

This post authored in Performancing. The real reason i now have a wordpress blog