Tech, music, sports, and other stuff.
I installed Firefox 3 Beta 5. I've been running the Firefox 3 Beta for a while now, and it's been pretty solid. Well, it was less happy today. To paraphrase an episode of Buffy, it might not be fully-baked yet; it may still be cookie dough.
5 crashes in 3 hours. Maybe I should go back to Safari ...
I figured I'd log what I did when I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5.
First, I disabled some plugins I figured I wouldn't necessarily need post-upgrade. The two I disabled were Kramer, which grabs Technorati links back to the blog (newly built into the WordPress dashboard) and SpotMilk, a customized dashboard (which I wasn't even sure would work).
Then I upgraded.
So far, so good.
Poking around the settings, I decided to turn on the global Gravatar usage, rather than using the Gravatar plugin. That's a great idea, except my theme doesn't come with Gravatar support, so I'll need to use the built in functions.
Then my MacBook crashed for the second time today (I think it's Twitterrific, but we'll see). Awesomely, MarsEdit earned its keep by having autosaved my work. So back to it.
After poking around, I got the built-in functionality to work, but since it returns an entire image tag, and not just the URL to the avatar image, it's actually less useful to me than the plugin is. I turned the plugin back on. Good enough.
Next, I noticed the Mowser plugin had a new version. Perfect chance to try the new built-in plugin updating. Clicked the link and that was pretty much it -- the plugin was up-to-date. Nifty. You can see the Mowser-fied version of my site here. Not perfect, but pretty good work from a one ... two person company.
Took this as the opportunity to clean up my plugins page. Gone are the aforementioned Kramer and SpotMilk, along with the Hello Dolly and WP-flv plugin I'd installed a while ago.
Now, I wanted to turn some of my hard-coded plugin links into widget usage, to make switching themes easier. I started adding widgets to my left sidebar, expecting that I'd need to go disable them in the code. Nope! Nice, it must use a different bit of sidebar code when you use widgets. Very cool. This allows me to dump a couple more plugins (MyNetflix and a Last.fm one).
Also, turn off WP-Cache when you're testing, or you'll be annoyed out of your mind.
One missing widget: I was previously using the Google Shared Items widget, but now I'll just use the RSS feed for it. Let's see how that looks ... ugly. But, good enough for now. Maybe there's a WordPress widget for it. Wow, I'm digging the widgets. They make my life a whole lot easier. I should have tried this a long time ago. Even added a little About Me text widget.
Turning WP-Cache back on.
Finally, testing to see if MarsEdit can still post ... huzzah! Success. And with that, I'm done.
The other day at trivia (where we came in 4th out of 25 teams), there was a question about WKRP in Cincinnati, which I remembered, but no one else did. I mentioned to my teammates what may be the funniest sequence from any episode I can remember. Then I went on hulu.com, and lo! there it was.
I figured this was a good chance to try out the Hulu embedded clip thing. So, here's what I think is a damn funny 3 minutes from WKRP in Cincinnati.
(If this doesn't work, I'll fix it. Just trying to do the Hulu embed through MarsEdit.)
They're filming a movie near my office. It's affectionately referred to by IMDB as "Untitled Kevin James Comedy." I'm betting on it being a huge hit for a couple of reasons:
I smell a hit.
Anyway, they've apparently set up a production office right behind our building, and as I was walking over to talk to someone on the other side of the office, I saw some guy go zipping down a zip wire. I tried to get my camera in time, but missed any other awesome festivities. I did, however, take some awesome pictures of the amazing movie production set.
A ramp and a crane. No idea what they're for, but they're obviously super cool.
Some dudes and some metal stuff that looks like they're about to have a steel cage match.
What movie would be complete without a Segway scooter-thingy.
Sadly, I missed the casting call to be an extra, I think. But that's ok, I'm sure they'll grab me from the Apple Store and decide to make me a leading character, ideally with magic powers and a talking cat (who once tried to take over the world).
I wanna buy a new Mac app.
Things I'm considering:
Sell me on an app or a game. Maybe I'll buy it.
Always, Always, Always start your MySQL update query with the limit and the where clause, even if you've done the query a thousand times before.
The one time you screw it up, it will be on a Friday evening, when you're just trying to do one last thing for the day before you head home, and when most of the office has gone home.
Oh, and it'll be a database of 30 million DNS records and you'll manage to wipe them all out.
Yep, that's why I did last Friday. I was stupid and working too fast, and managed to hit the ' and Enter in quick succession, as they sit next to eat other on the keyboard. Caught my mistake when it wiped out "only" 13k records on the master database, but the query had already replicated out and managed to take out the slaves.
My saving grace is that we've got a couple of great folks in our sysadmin group, and they helped me get things back from a backup pretty quickly.
But yeah, that was scary. And not fun. Now I've been on both sides. I've helped people recover from a disaster ... and I've caused a huge disaster. Go me.
Late on Wednesday, I was asked in passing if I would mind basically being the guinea pig for a new training technique we're trying at work. We're growing pretty rapidly, so we're constantly bringing in new folks, folks who don't necessarily come from a web/hosting background (or sometimes even from an internet background). Putting aside for the moment whether or not that's a good thing, the goal is to do some formal "classes" where anyone can come attend an entry level class learning about DNS or mail or FTP or the web. These will be recorded and can be reviewed by anyone later on. We'll do some online tests and those who pass can then take the more advanced classes.
My topics were the aforementioned DNS and mail.
It's an interesting idea, if a bit idealistic. The idea has its own set of problems, but I was a) a bit excited that I got asked to do it, and b) optimistic that it would be at least a little more effective at getting folks up to speed than our current training, which sometimes assumes a base level of understanding and vocabulary.
So, I decided I would try to do it as well as I could, and not wing it like I usually do. I train a good bit as part of my job. Project Managers at my company end up training the rest of the company on how our apps work when we're rolling them out. Candidly, that should be the Product Managers role (and in some cases, they do fill it), but it's just never really been the prerogative of the company to have Product Managers tasked with that requirement.
Regardless, I train a good bit, and I just wing it, which often leads to moments of "well, when we fix this bug, this will work this way ... for now, let's just *pretend* it worked." I'm not terribly fond of my public speaking skills, which include a lot of "umm" and "ahh" and "well", but I'm pretty proud of my ability to react on the fly and adjust when things aren't going well. I also introduce a lot of humor (well, attempts at humor) in an attempt to distract from my sometimes below par speaking skills and to help at least keep people engaged in what can be dry material.
(Note: by humor, I should mean referencing 80s TV shows, talking about how swirling your mouse makes things run faster, making pubs. I don't mean that I'm actually funny. I'm not.)
This time needed to be different. It needed to be a legitimately strong presentation, with structure and flow. Of course, I didn't have a whole lot of time to prep (given that I still needed to do my real job). I spent Wednesday night on the treadmill at the gym going through the basic premise of what I would do. I spent Friday morning writing some bulleted notes which I turned into a NeoOffice presentation.
The training started at 2pm and, other than talking a bit too fast, I think I pretty much nailed them. Since I had notes and a basic flow, I didn't spend much time wondering where I was going. I tied the mail presentation into DNS. I dropped out of the presentation to take people through a Terminal-based SMTP and POP session. I even threw in the good old AOL "You've Got Mail" sound. 2 hours of training, minimal screw ups, questions answered on the fly. I think for the first time in a very long time, I was actually not embarrassed by my speaking abilities or my attempts of humor to cover them up.
I'm kinda lucky to have such a varied job (programming, managing, training, documenting, and more).
Wow, this was a complete ego-stroke post here. I'll write about something more interesting next.
I've been meaning for a while to sort of document how I get stuff done at work. It was just over a year ago that I bought my MacBook Pro. Within a week or so, I started using it at work. Probably within the first month, I'd completely moved to my MacBook as my sole work machine. After a year, and particularly since the upgrade to Leopard, I've kind of worked out how I get stuff done.
Let's start with my environment.
The front wall of my office with pictures taken by a former co-worker. And, of course, the famous "Dwight" flasher flyer from "The Office"
The shelf behind me containing random stuff I've gotten from eating kid's meals and ice cream sundaes. And some Yankee Swap gifts. Oh, and I have some windows. That makes my life nicer.
My white board and busted ass bookshelf. And my cool VT light switch cover from Matt, and some random stuff I've collected and hung up.
The view of where I sit. I used to use that big ass monitor to do a dual-monitor display, but since I've been moving around so much each day, now it's just there to keep people from having a good look at me.
Finally, the MacBook Pro, my Motorola Q, my 30GB 5G IPod, my noise canceling head phones, and my phone that I don't ever answer or use. And yeah, that's Win2k running in Parallels. More on that in a bit.
So that's where I do my work.
My Mac is setup in a very particular way. The upgrade to Leopard with Spaces has made my life considerably easier. It's probably easiest to roll through how my Spaces are setup.
Space 1
This is where I use my browser, which is currently Firefox 3 Beta 3, and sometimes Safari 3.
Also running on this space is my "chat" clients. We use Jabber at work, which works nicely with Adium. I've also got Twitterrific running on this space.
Space 2
Here's where my Terminal lives, which is just the default Leopard terminal. Tabbed Terminals make me happy, particularly once I made the default tab switching hot keys to be Command+Left and Command+Right.
It's all command line and vim and mysql. Good times.
Space 3
Space 3 is where iCal and Mail live. Mail is just downloading my mail from Gmail. iCal is doing some cool stuff. I have most of my life in Google Calendar. iCal subscribes to my calendar feeds from GCal (including my work Outlook calendar--more on that in a second).
With all of my stuff in iCal, I then use the Missing Sync for Windows Mobile to sync my calendars to the previously mentioned Motorola Q (which also connects to my work Exchange server, so it's almost as a good as a Blackberry).
Space 4
It's the Windows space! I've got Win2k (don't ask, I had a license lying around) running in Parallels, in Full Screen mode. Parallels runs pretty much just so I can run Outlook (for work email and calendaring) and so I can occasionally test stuff in IE6.
My Outlook runs a plugin called SyncMyCal to sync my Outlook calendar off to Google Calendar (which then gets sync'd down to iCal, as previously described).
Other software that occasionally comes in handy:
That's how I get my work done. Anything else I should be using?
So, last week:
So not the best week. Topping it off, my poor girlfriend had all of her wisdom teeth out and has been in pain for the better part of 4 days.
Here's to Monday bringing on something better.
(For what it's worth, it isn't all bad. I went to a fun party, got to see the second half of the Celtics win over the Cavs, had a moral victory over a douchebag trying to cut me off in the garage, and got to spend a lot of time with the recovering girlfriend--including watching Blade Runner for the first time. And my car is in pretty good shape, all things being considered.)
Am I the only person getting pop-under ads from Digg? I don't think it's malware (it's on my Mac). I don't think it's another site (I've only got Gmail open).
I'm not getting it on every page load, but it's definitely happening. I'm guessing that it's being caused by a rogue ad that's getting brought it by the many ad services Digg uses.
I've only been getting it when I leave Digg up for a while. Lately, Digg pages never seem to complete loading--Firefox just spins and spins trying to load the last couple of elements of the page. I wonder if the two are correlated. Of course, after getting two ads in about 15 minutes, I haven't gotten another one since.