Sean’s Mental Walkabout

• The World Question Center 2008
  The Edge Annual Question — 2008

  When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
  When God changes your mind, that's faith.
  When facts change your mind, that's science.

  WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

  Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?"

• A design and usability blog: Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
  Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.
  —
  David Gelernter, Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology

  Seriously dead on

Popularity: 1% [?]

• The World Question Center 2008
  The Edge Annual Question — 2008

  When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
  When God changes your mind, that's faith.
  When facts change your mind, that's science.

  WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

  Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?"

• A design and usability blog: Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
  Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.
  —
  David Gelernter, Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology

  Seriously dead on

Popularity: 1% [?]

New Year’s resolutions are broken by Feb, and New Year’s predictions always seem to be a lot of chest beating.  However this year’s edge question made me stop and think.  What have you changed your mind about?  It’s a much more interesting year end round up, as it requires admitting you were wrong about things in the past.

So here is my list of what I changed my mind about in 2008, please throw on your own comments, or put up your own posts and send me a link.

• Facebook has no value.  I really did think this for a long time, then a couple of high school friends found me on it, and I realized how it really helps keep together groups that have long since seperated for time and space reasons.  Writing letters is still dead, but some new form of that is popping back up in facebook.
• Non fiction books aren’t interesting, and the cliff notes give you everything you need.  After the number of times that I’d heard about disruptive technologies
  I didn’t think I needed to actually read Innovator’s Dilemma, then I
  did, while visiting Nick in WV, and realized how wrong I was about that.  A lot of what was really interesting and useful in the book never turned up in the chatter and buzz words I’d heard out of people in reference to the book.  After that I proceeded to read: The World is Flat, Blink, Here Comes Everybody, and The Big Switch.  Every one of them had some very interesting insights that I’d not gotten in the elevator pitches… insights that helped reshape how I think about certain parts of the world.
• Java.  I really used to hate Java, then in 2008 I spent 2 semesters writing JavaME code for cell phone applications.  Java looked nearly elegant in that environment.  This got me even more positive about the Android platform, and hoping Sprint gets their Android phone out soon.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Damn, why isn’t this available as a poster.

Popularity: 1% [?]

• use Perl | Perl 5 now uses Git for version control
  In true open source style, Sam Vilain converted Perl's history from
  Perforce to Git. He did the work both in his spare time and in time
  donated by his employer, Catalyst IT. He spent more than a year building
  custom tools to transform 21 years of Perl history into the first
  ever unified repository of every single change to Perl. In addition
  to changes from Perforce, Sam patched together a comprehensive view
  of Perl's history incorporating publicly available snapshot releases,
  changes from historical mailing list archives and patch sets recovered
  from the hard drives of previous Perl release engineers.
• Context, Community, Creativity, Credibility, Cost « Mo Hax
  Really good post by Mo on virtual world value.

Popularity: 2% [?]

• pidgin-facebookchat - Google Code
  Nifty. This actually works pretty well from what I can tell.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I developed this pattern with mercurial, and have recently adapted it to work with git

Assumed

• You want your production application to be deployed at /data/site/myrailssite on your remote system
• You are running passenger for your rails applications (if you aren’t you should really take a look)

Setting up the production target

First, create a rails user on your production system.  This lets your rails app run under a different id than you, or your webserver.  Privilege isolation is a good thing.

Next, mkdir /data/site/myrailssite and chown rails /data/site/myrailssite.

Next, su - rails, and cd /data/site/myrailssite && git init

Next, chmod 755 .git/hooks/post-receive

And finally add the following lines to .git/hooks/post-receive.

export RAILS_ENV=production

DIR=`pwd | sed s/.git$//`

cd $DIR && git –git-dir=$DIR/.git –work-tree=$DIR reset –hard && rake db:migrate && touch tmp/restart.txt

Setting your source repo to push to production

On your source repository git remote add production ssh://rails@yourhostname/data/site/myrailssite.

Then, finally git push production master, and you are off.  On any future change the push to production will roll the git tree to the newest revision on master, kick off the migrations, and trigger a passenger restart.  This is a really handy pattern for making life really easy for deployment, and I’m rolling this through all my project sites as I slowly convert them from mercurial to git.

Popularity: 2% [?]

• HRIYC.ORG
  What's more awesome than ice yachts? nothing I can think of.

Popularity: 2% [?]

• A New Push to Turn Off the Lights in 2009 | Wired Science from Wired.com
  It would be great if more people would realize the money they waste on lighting, and the damage it does.
• fwp-conditions : Fahnestock Park snow alerts
  Snow conditions for the local park

Popularity: 4% [?]

My mom gave us this book over the holidays, and it’s incredible.  We’re part of both the Poughkeepsie Farm Project and the Winter Sun CSA.  This means that right now we’ve got lots of bags of root vegetables and squash.  Beets, Potatoes, Rutabagas, Turnips, Sweet Potatoes, Acorn Squash, Butternut Squash, Hubbard Squash.  Last winter we never quite got into the groove on the winter vegetables, so a lot of them went to waste.

But not this year.  In the 5 days since we’ve had this book Susan’s made 2 recipes: a beet, turnip, squash, an onion roast mixed with goat cheese and pasta; sweet potato wedges.  Both were great.  As we flipped through this book nearly every page has something that you are just dying to try.  My mom didn’t let the book out of her sight in Vermont until she managed to copy out a few recipes for herself.

So, if you are trying to figure out how to use vegetables in some new and tasty ways, especially ones you don’t normally cook, I can highly suggest this book.

Popularity: 4% [?]