markwalling.org Blog Posts

Updated redacted_ignore

2010-02-14T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve updated redacted_ignore.pl to print messages as MSGLEVEL_CLIENTCRAP, and pushed it to Github. SelfishMan has also updated the script to print with a dark grey color. Combined with the CLIENTCRAP change, this script is becoming awesome.

View the commit here, and the project is here.

Coffee Shipment Came

2010-02-06T00:00:00-05:00

Who doesn't love cat pictures?

You could survive for 38 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor!

2010-01-31T00:00:00-05:00

Sorry, but this was awesome.

Created by Oatmeal

How to view someones IP address and connection speed!

2010-01-31T00:00:00-05:00

Classic.

Auto-Translation FTW

2010-01-28T00:00:00-05:00

Hehe… our code now has leet speak!

# vim:ft=perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Acme::LeetSpeak;

open INFILE, "messages.properties" or die $!;
open OUTFILE, ">messages_leet.properties" or die $!;

while(<INFILE>) {
    my $line = $_;
    my ($key, $eng_val) = split /=/, $line;
    my $leet_val = leet($eng_val);
    print OUTFILE $key . "=" . $leet_val;
}
close INFILE;
close OUTFILE;

High time for an update (Kindle, Blog software, and Websites)

2010-01-24T00:00:00-05:00

So much to talk about…

Kindle Update

For Christmas, Catherine gave me a Kindle. I love it. The first book I purchased on Christmas Day was The Best of 2600. It seemed to take forever to get through that book, but when you consider that the hard cover is 888 pages, I think it went pretty well. Since I do most of my reading in bed (without my contacts in), I love the fact that I can make the text size huge, but then use a normal size when I can see again.

Once I finished 2600, I purchased Coders at Work and User Interface Design for Programmers. I read a few chapters of the former, and am flying through the latter. It is really making me want to go though my UI’s I make for work and think about them a little more.

Blog Software

I was catching up on my RSS feeds, and saw this post about using hyde to generate a blog, in the spirit of Jekyll. An excuse to not use memory is always a good idea. I played with it a bit yesterday, but couldn’t get it to generate a blog the way I wanted. Oh well, I’ll keep running this on Django.

New Projects

My fire department’s website is done! I purchased the domain a couple months ago, and we decided to go live for our banquet a couple weeks ago. Its written on top of Django (surprised?), and has a bunch of cool features, like tracking OSHA hours, attendance, event calendars, and a member portal.

Its available at http://rexfordfire.org/

Agile Development at Work

At work, a group that we have a relationship with is using Agile, and told us a bit about their operations. We’re in the progress of starting a new project, and decided to try and apply Agile to it.

We started with 2 week iterations, and a 15 minute Scrum at the end of each day. We successfully finished our first iteration on Friday, and there was a general consensus that all went well.

Support Software

This other group uses Rally, which is licensed, and our company has notoriously slow purchasing procedures, so we decided against this. I already had an underused Trac instance running on our development support server. I combined it with the Timing and Estimation Plugin and Scrum Burndown Plugin.

mmm cake

2010-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

mmm cake, originally uploaded by markwwalling.

Its vegan too! (not that I really care)

Now that's how you play beer pong

2009-12-11T00:00:00-05:00

Now that's how you play beer pong, originally uploaded by markwwalling.

Yeah, I jinxed it. (More Haystack Woes)

2009-12-05T00:00:00-05:00

I can now build the index, but when I try to search from the view, the runfcgi process flies towards 400MB+ RES. I think I’m going to shelve this for now, and move on to other pending projects.

I still want to make this work, just not this weekend.

I don't want to jinx it... (Haystack works!)

2009-12-05T00:00:00-05:00

I don’t want to jinx it, but as I type this, Haystack is successfully indexing with Solr.

My issues with Solr were my fault. I forgot to tell Solr about my schema. I’m still not sure what I broke with Woosh though.

I owe Daniel a big thanks for finding my last ramble and encouraging me to keep trying.