I will show my true geek here. Battlestar Galactica will be back on the air this Friday night. I am so excited. When I was a kid I watched the original series all the time. I will be sad when it is over, but for now I will just look forward to one of the…
Walmart is Not so Evil
Normally you wouldn’t find me extolling the virtues of a large corporation like Walmart, but this article that Marion sent me outlines how Walmart was a lot more helpful during Katrina than Fema. I find the argument of private corporations being more responsive and capable than governments interesting. I have to think that one through…
Ringside Networks
I have been writing quite a bit lately about open Social Networks and the infrastructure that I think will emerge from WordPress to help fill that niche. Then David sends me to Ringside Networks. Although new, this projects appears to be a fairly robust piece of software that can integrate with your existing website and…
Ruby Grand Masters
I spent two years in Japan. While there I met all kinds of interesting people. I remember one individual in particular because he was a chess grand master. He was also very good at Shogi. In fact he had written Shogi the video game for Nintendo. I like chess and so we played a game….
FamilySearch Developer Webinar
I just got an invite to a FamilySearch Webinar. I imagine you are supposed to be a member of the developer group to attend, but I doubt they would throw you out. Here’s the details: FamilySearch Developer WebinarJoseph Smith Memorial Building (JSMB) 5th Floor, West Lobby Conference Room 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM Agenda: Introduce…
Lifetime Marriage
In church today an older lady stood up and said she was grateful for her marriage of 60 years. I was impressed. I think that the divorce today tends to discourage people from believing that they can spend a lifetime with another person. It seems rare to find a couple that has been together for…
Chocolate
On the way back from the Mountain West Ruby Conference we dropped by xocolate in Salt Lake. They have a mole chocolate made with something that will set your mouth on fire. I bought a half a pound of chocolate and a half pound of peppermint bark. That stuff will be the death of me….
Cache Valley
The Desert News is saying what we already know. Cache Valley is a great place to live. Of course the numbers don’t tell the actual story. This is a great place to live because it has a small town feel, the biking is awesome and people are friendly. The schools are great and you feel…
More Ruby Conference
We missed the first talk this morning (sorry Devlin we suck). I slept till 9:30, but mainly because we were up till 4am. Dave South gave me some great info on using TestSpec. RSpec seems to be the hot thing right now, but I like how TestSpec is lightweight: Install the gem: sudo gem install…
Using Amazon’s Web Services from Ruby – Jonathan Younger
Right Scale has a great gem: gem install right_aws RightScale RightAws::Sqs RightScale RightAws::Ec2 They will automatically retry errors for you. gem install kato Kato – EC2 Pool Manager require ‘rubygems’ requrie ‘right_aws’ RightAws::RightAWSParser.xml_lib = ‘libxml’ SQS = RightAws::Sqs.new(access_id, access_key) #get an SQS object queue = SQS.queue(“name_of_queue”) #create a or get a reference to an existing…