Archive for the ‘geek stuff’ Category

Face to Face in a Distributed Team

Posted: February 22, 2013 in geek stuff, work
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At work, we have a pretty distributed team. There are team members across the US, in Canada, the UK, the Czech Republic, and Israel. Even though we are spread out, the team interacts very well:

  • There are conversations via email, via IRC. Team members are good about communicating that way so everyone is in the name the room.
  • Collaboration tools like etherpad allows the team to edit documents as if they are in the same room.
  • Code sharing via git, github, etc allow for code reviews by peers across multiple time zones

All of this means that, although distributed, the team knows each other very well. They communicate often, and provide better code because of their collaboration.

A while ago, one one team, we started to use Google Hangouts for our Friday Scrum calls. As much as a pain as it was to get going the first week or two.. this has been a huge improvement for morale and general team dynamics. Being able to see folks faces, even if only for 10 minutes every week, really seems to bring the team together. Yes, it forces the remotees to wear pants onc a week. But, I think it provides a bit of that “being in the office” which the non remotees get just because of there they sit. I have spoken with other teams who are using this, and they all agree on the benefits.

So, for anyone with remote teams.. especially if you are using SCRUM  or another agile process. Look into Google Hangouts. I guarantee the team will appreciate it.

Latest Release of Candlepin

Posted: August 30, 2011 in candlepin, geek stuff, work
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We continue to use Scrum at work, and it is working very well. The team is able to work very independently, and very quickly. We continue to roll out new features every three weeks.

Version 0.4.11 is the latest release which adds partially subscribed logic, activation keys, and lots of additional features.

Please come on bye, and help out. You can find us at http://candlepinproject.org.

Adding Search to Rails Apps

Posted: July 11, 2011 in candlepin, geek stuff, work
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Good blog artcile on adding search to rails apps. Used in Foreman, soon to be used in Katello and Headpin.

http://scopedsearch.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/adding-search-to-an-activerecord-rails-model/

Great Summary of Using Foreman

Posted: June 27, 2011 in geek stuff, work
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This came across today, great summary of setting up and using The Foreman. http://engineering.yakaz.com/managing-an-infrastructure-datacenter-with-foreman-and-puppet.html

Project Katello: Open Source System Management

Posted: June 16, 2011 in candlepin, geek stuff, Uncategorized, work
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As a followup to the Candlepin Post.. we have just opened up the larger project for Open Source Systems Management. The project is called Katello. The name rhymes with Jello, so that should help. The goal of this project is to bring together Content Management, Subscription Management, and Configuration Management.

If you are interested in participating, we would love the help. Come on bye, check it out, and say hi!

Project Candlepin

Posted: June 7, 2011 in candlepin, geek stuff, work
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At work we have been doing alot of development around Software Subscriptions, and how to represent them to a machine as a collection of Entitlements (what a machine is entitled to have or do). It is a FOSS project which we have been working on it for a while, but have finally hung out an offical shingle. You can checkout the website at candlepinproject.org. The name is based on a place up near our offices in Westford. It is called the Bowladrome. The folks came up with the idea while bowling.

Tech wise, it is a pretty interesting project. Java Stateless App Server using Guice. It exposes a REST API provided by RESTEasy.  It has  Rails 3.0 front end, and some linux clients which are written in Python. All we are missing is Erlang and we would be all set.

Come on bye, check it out. The project is open and is being actively developed. If you work in and around software subscriptions we would be interested in your opinions.

 

Cool tech.. and you should tour your home town.

Posted: November 3, 2010 in geek stuff, just me, toys
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For our anniversary, my wife organized a tour of down town Raleigh. The cool this was that it was on a Segway with Triangle Segway. We went into this thinking how great it would be to try out the travel mode of the future, but we got alot more out of it.

First off, the technology is great. They are incredibly simple to ride. You feel comfortable immediately on them. I have never had a piece of technology meld so well with the activity you are doing. It feels natural to lean forward a bit to move. And when you think “Oh Sh*T”, your natural body motion make you stop. Very impressive.

The company put together a great tour. I learned more about our city in one hour than I have in the entire 5 years we have been here. I am not a history buff, but I appreciated the stories and the diggs on UNC. I kept thinking during the tour how everyone should take a tour of where the live, to really appreciate the nuances of their home town.

Here is a photo of us at one of our stops. We had an option to stop and stretch our legs, or to zip around and drag race each other. I won :)

Never have I appreciated RPMS more

Posted: October 29, 2010 in geek stuff
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Dinner is over, and my wife is out picking up our son from basketball tryouts (he did not make it.. bummer). I tell my daughter that I have a surprise. You see.. we have just gotten a new Garmin and it allows you to record your own voices. I assume they learned finally from TomTom.

Anyways.. it only runs on XP SP2 or higher, but I have an old XP machine running in a VM so I figure I am fine. I boot it up, expecting to install and go. Nope… the program does not start. I figure, I can figure this out. I spend 15 minutes trying to remember where the event viewer is.. and then spend 3 hours trying to figure out where the heck I can get assembly VC80.CRT. The answer, of course, is that it is in the dotnet 2.0 redistribution from roughly 2006. I know.. obvious.

I will admit.. I really wished I had rpms at that moment.

– bk

Birthday Skydiving

Posted: July 15, 2010 in geek stuff, just me
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When Jenny was a youngling, she read a National Geographic Magazine that talked about indor skydiving. This month was Jenny’s birthday, and when I was talking to some friends they mentioned an Indoor Skydiving Place near us in Raeford, NC. They said it was fun, so I figured it would be a great birthday idea. The name of the place is Paraclete XP I called them up, and come to find out they could handle all ages. So, I called up my parents and they were willing to go. This past Tuesday Jenny, myself, the kids, and the grandparents all headed down to Raeford for Jenny’s Birthday.

This place is fabulous.

We headed down after work, and got there 45 minutes early. We were met by some friendly folks, and told to head up. There we saw the wind tunnel with 3 folks doing all types of fancy tricks. They were floating upside down, doing flips, and shooting themselves up 30 feet in the air. The tunnel was all glass, so we got to watch and see how cool it would be.

We then met Selwyn, our instructor. He was a Jamaican Dude with a Welsh Name. He was very friendly, and did a great job with both the kids and a the adults. He took us down to watch a goofy video, and then gave us some basic instructions about how to hold out bodies, and how to know when he wanted us to straighten our legs and bend them. He did a great job with the kids making sure they understood. Then we went to get dressed in our flight clothes. Let me say, we looked cool:

We then went in to fly. It was more physical than I thought it would be, but much easier to get control. Kudos to our instructor Selwyn who always seemed to know what we needed to do and did a great job communicating alot of information without talking. We were in 90-120 miles of wind, so you could not hear very much. But he did a great job.

All and all, we did good. Jenny did great on her first flight:

And both kids did great on their flights:

And for the proof that all ages can do it, here is my father in flight:

By the time it was over, we had all done 2 flights of 2 minutes each. This was more than enough time. We were able to get up to about 12 feet on our own and to do basic moves. At the end, the instructor asked us if we wanted to fly to the roof. He promised there was nothing we needed to do, and nothing we could do cause any issue. Needless to say, looking into a tunnel and seeing your wife shoot to the roof at 120 miles per hour is pretty wierd.

For folks in the Raleigh area, this is a great time. I highly recommend it!

Do not use private if you write frameworks

Posted: June 24, 2010 in candlepin, geek stuff, work
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If you write a framework, please do not use private. You may think that you know how I am going to use it. I promise, if it works as it should I will not try and override the basic functionality. However, if I am looking at the code to know it is private then I have a use case you did not expect.

My current example is rails active resource. This is a great framework if you are planning to use it to talk to another rails app. If your url does not end in .json then you have to override / reimplement many high level methods because of one or two private methods.

I know they teach you this in school. I know it makes you feel smart. Stop it. Private methods makes your frameworks less usable and less extensible.

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