thoughts to blog

This might sound like I’m bragging… but I just want the internet and my dear readers to embrace me in my celebration.

I’ve never been a heavy guy and in fact, during high school I was rail thin. Let’s take a look at my weight progression. I wish it were illustrated but thankfully I don’t take pictures well.

To give you a perspective, I’m 5’ 11” tall… and have been the same height since high school.

Time line:

1999 - Graduated from Highschool at 135 lbs. Too thin.

2001 - Halfway done with College. 150 lbs

2002 - Graduated from College. 175 - 180 lbs. Yes, I gained nearly 50 lbs during college.

Winter / Spring 2007 - Peaked at 194 lbs

Present - A healthy 177 lbs as of this morning.

177 lbs!!!!, that’s nearly 20 lbs of weight loss this summer alone. My original goal of the summer was to hit 180, with a “Holy Shit” goal of 175lbs. I’m practically there!

How did I accomplish this goal? Changing my eating habits. Zero lower tier fast food (McDonalds, Burger King, etc)… cut out as much greasy food as I can… and size down my portions. Becca had a lot to do with this… Thank you for helping me.

Gotta love salads. Amazing what you can do by just changing a few things about your diet.

Now this is quite funny…

• Guy takes bag of M&Ms…


• Guy tests strength of M&Ms…


• Guy finds the most fit M&M and sends it to M&M Mars for breeding purposes


• Guy gets coupon for a free 1/2 lb bag of M&Ms

too freaking funny

So just as I post about RM-Image, I started playing around with FiveRun’s RM-Manage… I’m in love.

RM-Manage is a server / application management suite that aims to help out people in the Ruby on Rails world.

We’ve been playing with our demo account all morning and I did some digging.

Essentially the idea is… install a monitor process, store your metrics in json, upload it to RM-Manage system, and view the reports online. The best part is that it’s all automated and transparent.

They accomplish the metrics system by hijacking the collection points on your classes. Save, update, create, destroy, find, etc on ActiveRecord. There could be some performance risks associated with this…

It can also manage system statistics and other processes. Disk space issues, CPU usage, MySQL uptime, etc. Pretty freaking amazing the amount of data it collects.

With built in notification it’s definitely a winner… now to figure out their pricing scheme. Bad move. Make your prices easily available.

Here’s a quick screencap:

Since RailsConf 2007 there has been a focus on what exactly should be the perfect Ruby on Rails stack… err which pieces of software do you need to have installed to have a production application running on Ruby on Rails.

There’s lots of decisions to be made when it comes to what to use. Do I use Apache or lighty or nginx? Do I use HAProxy or Pen or Pound? JRuby or Ruby or Rubinius? ImageScience or RMagick? MySQL or Postgres? You get the idea.

Two companies out there have taken an initiative in this space:

ThoughtWorks Studios offers RubyWorks

and

FiveRuns offers RM-Install

Both of which take the approach that a full ruby on rails stack should be easy to install… while RubyWorks utilizes the systems package management suite to update such packages…

The differences? RubyWorks is purely focused on the application layer of things: HAProxy, Monit, Mongrel and includes an interesting service based architecture for daemon control. RM-Install goes a step further and installs MySQL 5.0, ImageMagick + RMagick (::shudders::), Apache, Subversion, Rake, OpenSSL, and SQLLite… clearly going for the front-to-end setup.

Personally… for my VPS image that runs this site… and for my Parallels images I chose RubyWorks as I often have the other services installed somewhere else or they are easy enough to install on my own. Plus with the advantage of the package manager to update my software when I choose. Installation is a breeze, almost nearly 3 commands… one to get the encryption key, one to update your package manager, and one to install… and it’s up and running. Damn those ThoughtWorks people are smart!

For the layered approach, I could easily see the RubyWorks being the way to go… but for single application server based applications, RM-Install might be the better choice. The bad part is that it’s a 115mb+ install and its just a simple zip file with all of the binaries for the products… They claim it’s so that it won’t interfere with any other “ruby + rails” installation on a system… hmm…

Least I not forget… deprec… a system to bootstrap a rails stack piggybacking off of capistrano… not bad either.

At any rate, if you’re looking at a quick way to get things going… here are two more options! Get out there and give Rails a shot, you won’t regret it.

This is what I got when I went to: http://tv.nasa.gov looking for the Shuttle landing…

When it should have been: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

:: shrugs ::

Post inspired by: Kindohm - I am a Hacker

A few weeks back I posted about moving my email servers to google cause it was free… well I got bit by the bug again and posted my C# examples up on Google Code.

I have a very bland project page for EvolveStuff, which is my genetic algorithm framework in C# that I talked about a few times and have posted links to before…

Google gives you a nice svn repository, wiki, and issue tracking service for free… so I said, why not.

At any rate, poke around at http://evolvestuff.googlecode.com and download the code…

I’ll probably put up a general repository for my play code at http://developstuff.googlecode.com

Weird Al’s Trapped in a Drive Thru parody of R. Kelly’s Trapped in a Closet joint… hilarious!

There I was, reading today’s USA Today and I found an interesting article: Kindness took this ‘Nobody’ Across the USA

It’s about some weird show about a dude who travels the entire US on $5 and the kindness of good natured people.

What was interesting was this particular interview question:

Q: So, let's cut to the chase. Where are the friendliest people in America?

A: They're in a small town in Illinois called Galesburg. That's where they all live. I arrived from Chicago, and I ended up staying the night with this guy and his family. The following day they took me to breakfast and concocted a plan to get me a $110 train ticket to Denver. He collected $2 here and $2 there. I was in shock.

Good Ol’ Galesburg, IL… leading the way as being the nicest! The only reason I caught this as surprising is because I come from that area… and I’m heading down there this weekend, so it is totally relevant…

:: shrugs ::

The Pragmatic Programmer(s) suggest learning a new language every year… when I was in college, it seemed that I was learning 2 or 3 languages a year: Scheme, Lisp, Ada, Fortran, C, IBM ASM, C++, Java, and MUMPS. The list kept growing… and since I’ve been out of college, I’ve picked up C# and Ruby.

I’m falling behind. So what’s the solution?

Time to learn Erlang… and guess what, the Pragmatic Programmers LLC has a book: Programming Erlang.

Wow, that was a mouthful. But yeah, it feels nice to go back to functional programming… double tail recursion, currying, and highly scalable parallel processing… all built into the language. Tastey.

So you might ask, let’s see some code!

qsort([]) -> [];
qsort([Pivot|T]) ->
    qsort([X || X <- T, X < Pivot])
    ++ [Pivot] ++
    qsort([X || X <- T, X >= Pivot]).

In which you would call it like this:

> L=[20,6,2,9,27,100,78,39,65,81,14].
[20,6,2,9,27,100,78,39,65,81,14]
> qsort(L).
[2,6,9,14,20,27,39,65,78,81,100]

There it is… the quick sort algorithm… Wow, quite impressive eh? I thought so…

Just wanted to let everyone know (through various internet communication channels) that I’m ok.

For those who, for some odd reason, haven’t seen the news… the I35W Bridge collapsed last night just after 6pm

Yes… I was downtown at the time and actually headed towards Uptown, just a few miles away… but I, nor anyone I know, was on or near the bridge at that time…

Thanks to everyone who called, sent text messages, or emailed me to check up on me…

Update

Here are some more crazy pictures… gives me chills.

Last Update

Video of it collapsing