EdgeCloud

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It’s interesting how the blogging world leads to a greater self examination, whether it be in what you have to say or how you say it. While twisting Nathan’s arm to start blogging it occurs to me what a difference pair blogging might make here. Nathan started out blogging using drupal as did I, but I’ve been using WordPress for a while as well now and have been blogging pretty solidly (politics, family, life) for a while now. The blog here though brings all that to a different level because now we can “pair blog”, bounce ideas and debate things. Gabe and Tycho at Penny Arcade have perfected this and we’re not nearly as wicked funny (unless you put a few rounds of Guinness in us) and I can barely do napkin driven design so don’t get me started on how awesome their art work is. Still, the community of ideas are where things are allowed to find themselves and in the midst of individuals who are passionate about their work (as well as the philosophical and psychological underpinnings) you have a situation where the beauty of creativity can thrive. Such is that which we are working to create with EdgeCloud.

And, as you can see Nathan is a nut. His passions extend beyond general computer geekery to mechanical geekery and even sail boating. I look forward to battling wits with him on and offline as EdgeCloud grows and, hopefully, succeeds. Game on!

And if you’re wondering what it is the heck we are doing (besides some general consulting work) then I hope you’ll grab our RSS feed and keep track of our progress as we work towards bringing our internal projects forward.

Addendum: As far as pair blogging or team blogging is concerned I don’t mean to leave out some of the great team blogging that’s going on out there (besides PA). The ThoughtWorks guys, for example, feed off each other very well. And Blue Flavor has a blog where each in their organization takes part. (And of course there are many more great ones out there!) The community aspect of blogging is intriguing, leading to more than a diary…it leads to a dialogue, debate and discovery.

Day in, day out, all I hear is “why haven’t you blogged yet?” Well, here I am, Rick! Happy? Blogalicious.

Anyhow, enough ribbing on ol’ Rick. He’s about 40 posts ahead of me, so I can’t really talk. Speaking of talking, though, what am I to write about? That’s what I kept asking him and he didn’t really care. And so, my first post is prolly going to ramble. I apologize in advance, and will accept chastizing with a repayment of only thrice. You’re welcome. That’s my Special First-Post Deal.

So EdgeCloud, huh? Man, what a roller coaster ride. Laws, regulations, accounting, customers. Products, late nights, cokes and laughs. And still more to learn. Looking back, it’s hard to believe how far we’ve come. Looking forward, it’s daunting to think how far we’ve yet to go. So many plans, hopes and dreams. And yet, only 24 hours in a day. Of which, sleeping, eating and working “the day job” take up a substantial part. Leaving precious few hours to hack at EdgeCloud.

And of course, to maintain our sanity we still have to relax with hobbies, families and other distractions. For example, music. I have music playing probably 90% of the time I’m awake. I listen to most everything.. Techno’s my favorite, by far. But I listen to rock, jazz, classical, opera ( occasionally ), swing; just about everything.. Right now I’m enjoying some Nat King Cole. You ever heard “Mr Cole Won’t Rock and Roll”? Great song. Very tongue in cheek. Check it out sometime. Oh, and I have to make a confession. *deep breath* I love ’80s music. Erasure? Duran Duran? Oh HELL yes, and many, many more groups. There will be posts dedicated to such things in the future. I’ll try and preface them with a warning and disclaimer for you Non-Believers.

Then I have a “few” projects. I’m sure over time you’ll hear about them, but the one I’ve been working on recently is my old Subaru. I picked up this ancient Subaru XT Turbo for $350 a few months ago. 1986. Oh yes - 20 years old. It was running when I got it - but sadly the drive home was too much - oil pump seized up and ate one of the timing belts. Anyhow, I’ve been rebuilding it and have some preliminary pics and descriptions up here. Just got her running again earlier this week, so hopefully I’ll be cruising in the Death Star soon! ( When I update that site with exterior and interior shots of the car, you’ll see why I call it the Death Star )

Wordy! I can get long winded once wound up. Kinda like those toys, I guess. On that note, I sign off. I’ll be better about this blogging thing, both in quantity *and* quality.

Cheers

Stop sloppy thinking. Use E-prime.

This Coworking thing is interesting. Not one for Austin yet. Hrmm…

1. RailsConf Planet
2. Foreign Keys and examining the drinking of the DHH Kool-Aid
3. Link Out to Josh Susser who’s working on the same problem domain
4. Rails Plugin for foreign keys
5. A last link out on an STI issue

And that’s from one (count ‘em, one) article on the railsconf log. (And, yes, the particular issue above is something near and dear to my heart - I happen to think referential integrity is a Good Thing™ though I think a willigness to debate the common wisdom is good.) I have lots to go there as there’s just tons of info to absorb from everyone who took part at RailsConf this year. Thanks to every one of those folks for sharing as it is invaluable to those of us who weren’t able to click the submit button fast enough for signup. I’m looking forward to finding more gems…

I haven’t had a chance to attend a BarCamp just yet. Tracy sent me a text message on Saturday night to let me know that he was attending BarCampSF. It’s one thing to have this stuff blogged about and entirely another to have your friends show up in the flickr photostream of none other than Tara Hunt herself. *Wow* I definitely look forward to him blogging more about the experience and many thanks to him for reminding me about barcamp as BarCampAustin is coming up in a couple of months. I’m so there…

Nathan needs one of these for his cat, Bear. That cat looks ready for a spot in the Gladiator sequel

If you are pulling your hair out with Parallels because the mouse is jerky, stuttering, or otherwise not smooth when you are inside Windows VM then you’ll want to install the Parallels Tools (go to VM -> Install Parallel Tools). You have to have the VM in question running. Once you click this and continue then it’ll automatically start up an installation process inside of Windows, an InstallShield Wizard process, where it will install the Tools for you in Windows. Among other things (like fixing the silly mouse issue) it also allows you to have a shared folder to push files back and forth between systems. It actually took a little bit of googling to figure out that this was the fix. I’m surprised that it’s not an issue that is more openly discussed because without it, your Windows VM can be a pita. (I thought previously it was just because the software was in beta, but once it went gold I knew there had to be something else afoot). Mystery solved and all is right with the world again. And btw, if you don’t have a copy yet and you are running an Intel Mac, then hop on over and buy it. It’s worth every penny.

The Locomotive project on Mac OS X promises to deliver a fully self-contained, easy to install, dmg for installation of Rails on Mac OS X. What’s interesting is this piece:

Simultaneously run multiple versions of Rails, each of which may be configured with different libraries, gems, or web servers. Locomotive uses “Bundles”, each of which is a self-contained installation of Ruby, Rails, and all the necessary support software and libraries (as well as many useful optional tools!).

I think that’s great, especially if you need to run different projects under different environments - this makes it that much easier on the mac.

The enthusiasm from the Locomotive site is well-founded - it is easy to install (drag and drop like any other Mac App) and works out of the box without a problem. I was able to do a local svn co of a project and point Locomotive to it without a problem. One tip though: if you can’t get it to start out of the box and you aren’t doing a new rails project locally but instead are checking out an existing project from a repository somewhere then check your permissions. It could be that you don’t have the appropriate permissions on the project in question. That will save you 5-10 minutes of pulling out your hair.

Locomotive is a Universal Binary.