A Different Kind of Experience

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Very few people like going to the doctor, myself included. So you can imagine my frustration when I found myself needing to making a doctor's appointment this week. I expected to have an appointment at an inconvenient time, sit in a stuffy waiting room with old magazines for an hour, only to be followed by sitting in a stuffy exam room for another hour. We've all been there.

Thankfully, I happened to look into Zoomcare's website, mostly on a whim. It sounded good, so I figured I'd make an appointment and see how it went. Turns out it went well. Very well. I made an appointment at 9:30am for 11am, and got an email back almost immediately that I was confirmed for said time. I showed up at 10:55am, waited for literally 1 minute, and left with a prescription in hand by 11:07am. 

They have earned themselves a happy new customer.

gem install punch for drop-dead easy time tracking

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While at cabooseconf last month, I found out about one of the coolest time tracking tools ever: punch. (Thanks to cardiod from OG)

According to its own description, it's a

k.i.s.s. tool for tracking the hours spent on various projects. it supports logging hours under a project name, adding notes about work done during that period, and several very simple reporting tools that operate over a window of time.

I find this to be a much easier method of tracking time than many alternatives, including the zillions of time tracking/billing web 2.0 sites. In fact, an hour or two of hacking could leave someone with a pretty decent time tracking AND invoicing tool.

And wouldn't ya know it, it's as simple as gem install punch.

OmniFocus Hack - the mobile list

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For those of you who use OmniFocus and won't be getting an iphone, this one could really come in handy. It's a ruby script that talks to OmniFocus via OSA, grabs all the items in a given context, then writes them as poorly-formed html over ssh to a predefined destination. Cheap and dirty, but it's the quickest way I've found to get stuff like this available anywhere, especially in a mobile phone browser.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'

require 'rbosa'

require 'net/ssh'

of = OSA.app 'OmniFocus'

shopping_list = of.default_document.contexts.collect { |x| x if x.name == 'Errands' }.compact.first.contexts.collect { |x| x if x.name == 'Shopping' }.compact.first

items = shopping_list.tasks.collect { |x| x.name unless x.completed? }.compact

def post_file( shell, file, datum )

shell.touch(file)

shell.send_command("echo \"#{datum}\" > #{file}")

end

def build_html(items)

"<ul>#{items.collect{|item| '<li>' + item + '</li>' }}</ul>"

end

Net::SSH.start( 'myserver.dreamhost.com' ) do |session|

shell = session.shell.sync

post_file shell, "~/shoppinglist.mydomain.com/index.html", build_html(items)

shell.exit

# session.loop

end


RailsConf and CabooseConf '08 Recap

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RailsConf 2008 is now over. It was a great conference, and here are a few of the highlights:

Avi Bryant demonstrated MagLev, a ruby vm written on top of the smalltalk gemstone architecture. Summary: Code and data in the global namespace of one ruby process is available in another ruby process. Oh, and if that's not enough, there's transactional memory too.

On the theme of distributed processing, there was a great demo of Skynet, a map/reduce style processing framework. The Rails plugin for skynet gives some great features with a slick API. For example, the 'distributed_find' for ActiveRecord models will let workers each handle a small slice of any given model.find and process the data accordingly.

David Chelimsky gave a great run through of what rSpec's story runner looks like, a tool which I'll be using as much as I can justify. Integration with webrat makes it even more useful, as now stories can be tested using the full rails stack.

The highlight of the weekend was hanging out with Phil and working on Bus Scheme. My first real pair-programming experience was hugely insightful, and now I've decided that it's essential that I find some time to work closely with some great programmers on a more regular basis. Aside from learning some excellent emacs tips (eshell, for instance), we got lots of TODOs knocked off and made some important structure changes in bus-scheme's AST.

Now I've just got to digest all the new code I've seen and the 20 new RSS feeds I now subscribe to.

Why Automate?

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The latest post at Rands in Response started a bit of a heated discussion with a group of friends, and I thought I'd touch on a few of the reasons I think it is absolutely imperative to automate, even if the automation only saves a second.

The concept of automation is an old one. In fact, automation is the reason computers were built in the first place. They were used to automate processes that were too complex or laborious for humans to tackle themselves. In early days, these complex tasks were simple by today's standards; "discover the trajectory of a bomb" or "calculate one plus two". However, as computers have become cheaper they've started to automate everyday things. This is painfully obvious to anyone who lives in the 21st century, but it's a fact that programmers shouldn't forget. A good programmer is someone who's always looking for redundant tasks that can be automated; both to save time and to reduce human error.

Saving time, however, is a concept that carries with it many externalities. The day of writing this post, I have been working on a fairly complex shell script with many moving parts. This itself is not a problem, but the fact that I've been asked to respond to a few emails at random times during the morning provides a significant complication. As "sufferers" of N.A.D.D. will understand, taking 60 seconds to send off an email may well torpedo 30 minutes' worth of productivity. Extrapolate that to 3 separate yet short tasks, and I've lost about half of my morning. This is an important measure to bring into the cost/benefit ratio when discussing automation. Typically, the equation used to calculate a processes' automated value is the following:

a = Amount of time for task (un-automated)
    * Number of times task performed
b = Amount of time for task (automated)
    * Number of times task performed
    + Amount of time to automate the task
If b is less than a, then the task should be automated.

However, this simplistic equation misses the issue entirely. If my automated task is short enough to keep me from getting sidetracked by any of the hundreds of windows on my desktop, then it's paid for itself after two uses.

Round 1 with AppEngine

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I was one of the lucky few to get an account in the first round of AppEngine signups, and today I started in on my first app.

I recently found Edward O'Connor's backpackit entry on Personal Unit Tests, and I thought this would make a great little app to get started with. It's like a daily goals tracker, but with a very slightly different focus. More on that tomorrow.

Overall, I was very impressed with the amount of minor annoyances google has removed with this new setup. Having worked with these types of webapps for a number of years now, I know that they're rarely easy to host and deploy, but google has certainly taken the grunt work out of the equation.

I was most impressed on the user account tie-in they've built. It's absolutely trivial to let people use their own google accounts [gmail accounts] instead of creating a new account on each site. Effectively, they've built their own OpenID implementation into the framework.

At the end of the day, I'm reminded a bit of GeoCities and Tripod, who brought static webpages to the unwashed masses. With AppEngine, all that's needed for a small app is a handful of yaml, some html, and a few hundred lines of python.

Scheme on the bus, and a little on a train

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Ever since reading "The Little Schemer", I knew I had to write my own implementation of scheme. I started, and I didn't get very far before I noticed someone else had the same idea, and a better implemented one at that.

"bus-scheme" is the name, and I'm loving working with it [on the MAX]. Definitely worth checking out if you're interested in compilers, languages, scheme, or any combination thereof.

(In case you're curious, here's the version that I started.)