I received email from Deb Woods of Ingres this morning telling me that the Ingres C/Ruby driver and the Rails ActiveRecord adapter I wrote have both been made available.
Here's some more information in a blog posting and here's the actual page.
Hopefully they've made some improvements to my code in the last year or so. This was my first 'real' Ruby and Rails project, so I suspect the code has improved a bit since I sent it to Ingres. :) If memory serves, the code should all be under the GPL (but don't hold me to that... it's been a while.)
I know I haven't been at Cisco very long, but it became apparent that the position wasn't a good fit for me after a few months. Life is too short to waste any of it, so I've moved on and accepted a position at an exciting local startup.
I'll be starting at 6th Sense Analytics next week. If you haven't looked over there products, I'd encourage you to do so. Their products for automatically capturing what type of work people are doing, then determining product state (among many other things) is very cool.
I'm hesitant to describe too much because I haven't started working at 6th Sense yet, and I have a lot to learn about the tools, but here's a little.
Is everyone on the team writing new code? Do they traditionally need a week of testing and editing to get the new features stable? This tool will catch that. When everyone says "We're ready to Ship It!", this tool will provide a simple tool that can say "Actually, you need some time to let the code stabilize... it's still changing significantly every day. You'll be able to ship in two weeks if people stop pushing new code and clean up what's in place."
How much time does your team spend writing automated tests versus new code? Again, this can help you individually, or as a team, to realize you're out of sync with your team.
I've got a lot to learn about the 6th Sense tools, but I'm very excited about this new opportunity.
The one downside? I got lazy. Instead of submitting a talk to Ruby Conf, I let Cisco pay for it... since RubyConf is this weekend, I'm not going.
I probably could've just paid for it myself (Cisco's been very flexible), but I've had a few weekends at home in a row, and it's kind of nice. :) But I'll miss everyone at RubyConf. Blog a lot for me guys!
btw, I still get questions from people about Cisco writing software...(I thought they only made routers??) This was my group. Yes, there are teams at Cisco writing software. Some of it's very cool stuff too.
I saw this today on Reddit and had to pass it on.
Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s
There are two huge implications here. The first is that the Erlang club's emphasis on parallelizing your code is just as important as many think it is. Erlang wasn't used in this example as far as I know, but the reason this project is doing so well on a game console is the multiple cores are being used efficiently. If you can do that by hand, you're already set. If you can't, keep an eye on functional languages that can use multiple cores (and machines) more easily.
Second, we can start using our gaming consoles as tax deductions! ;) Just kidding! Unless you buy multiple PS3s, I don't think anyone will believe you.
Still, this has some interesting implications. How long before some startup is running their specialized server side code on PS3s? That alone might get someone free publicity.
I've had problems with my latest MacBook Pro freezing, and a number of friends have politely suggested it's my fault. :) (You gotta love my friends!)
However, I saw an article this morning that makes me feel better. Apparently it's a fairly wide spread video driver issue. I feel better because a video driver can be fixed.
New iMacs plagued by interface freezing issues
To be clear, the article is about the new iMacs, but I'm running the latest MacBook Pro. I've got the 4 gig capable version, so it's fairly recent.
Sometimes when I do a hard power down after a freeze, I can't restart. It just hangs during the boot screen. Booting in verbose mode (Apple + v) usually shows it hanging on the bluetooth bits, so I know it's not doing some sort of disk diagnostic. I've given it as long as 30 minutes to finish, and it never does.
Here's what I do to get everything happy again.
1) boot into single user mode (Apple + S during boot)
2) Follow the steps on the screen to repair disk, mount it, and continue booting
into single user mode. This takes a while. around 10 minutes for me.
3) type 'reboot'
Done. The nice GUI should now pop up.
Hopefully this'll save someone some time.
I haven't used it or looked closely at it, but I love the idea and I love the name!
No Software Heuristic for Implementability and Testability
