Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

Good luck using the server controls on Mac OSX Lion (10.7.2) for setting up virtual hosts.  I wasted an hour trying to get the built-in tools to work before bailing on them.  You really want to use PatrickG’s virtual host script (pretty much easy mode).  See:

• http://patrickgibson.com/utilities/virtualhost
• https://github.com/pgib/virtualhost.sh/

sudo virtualhost.sh kermit.dev

cd ~/Sites

mv kermit.dev kermit.dev.old (yes, you could just go ahead and remove it)

ln -s ~/code/projectname ./kermit.dev

I found this via Google News today:

The Governor made stops across the state Monday signing the bill designating 50 counties as “Rural Opportunity Zones”. All 50 counties have seen population loss over the past year, most of them in the double digits.
Under the bill, people moving to the zones from out of state will not have to pay state income tax for five years. There is also an incentive for college students. Graduates who move to one of the 50 counties could get reimbursement for as much as $15,000 in student loans. (source)

Which I found interesting due to growing up in Kansas.  Of course there wasn’t a list of the counties there, but there was one over here:

Barber, Chautauqua, Cheyenne, Clark, Cloud, Comanche, Decatur, Edwards, Elk, Gove, Graham, Greeley, Greenwood, Hamilton, Harper, Hodgeman, Jewell, Kearny, Kingman, Kiowa, Lane, Lincoln, Logan, Marion, Mitchell, Morton, Ness, Norton, Osborne, Pawnee, Phillips, Pratt, Rawlins, Republic, Rooks, Rush, Russell, Scott, Sheridan, Sherman, Smith, Stafford, Stanton, Thomas, Trego, Wallace, Washington, Wichita, Wilson and Woodson.

which doesn’t list the county I grew up in…grand.  Finally, here’s the map I produced (via 2010 Census data) that finally puts this in perspective (at least for me):

Ouch.  While there are about 10 different sites that tell you how to do it that didn’t work for me, there was one that did:  libjpeg symbol not found error with PIL on 10.6 Snow Leopard

Then all you have to do is a  sudo pip install pil and it works.  Finally!

via ChartPorn (information visualization site)

Since I’ve heard about this one several times, I’m just posting it again here for reference:

Finally saw reddit’s “interview” of Peter Norvig today.  Maybe the kick I need to learn clojure (as opposed to having it in the hopper) regarding his discussion around the 14:11 minute mark.  Quotes:

• “I’m used to thinking of the computational unit as the data center“
• “Then probably this manual keeping track of threads with locks is not going to scale, what we need is something closer to the functional type of approach…”

I have sat in a number of meetings where a manager will get up and talk about the important contribution of the “worker bees” performance to the organization.  That’s like talking about the important contribution that jelly makes to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Yes, we all agree a PB&J isn’t the same without the J, but face it, the PB is the rock star in that relationship.

Wikipedia:

A Worker bee is any female eusocial bee that lacks the full reproductive capacity of the colony’s queen bee; under most circumstances, this is correlated to an increase in certain non-reproductive activities relative to a queen, as well. Worker bees occur in many bee species other than honey bees, but this is by far the most familiar colloquial use of the term.

Now, when I hire, I prefer ninjas.  What’s a ninja?  Where the hell have you been?  Kansas? There’s a freaking ninja standing behind you right now.  Let’s punt and go with Wikipedia again:

In Japanese history, a ninja (忍者 ninja?) is a warrior specially trained in a variety of unorthodox arts of war. These include assassination, illusion, espionage, and variousmartial arts.

Ok, that sounds bloody violent (yay?).  Ok, let’s do the old switch-a-roo and convert that into work-speak.  Assassination?  That’s just getting the job done…really well.  Illusion — that’s being able to brief a client effectively (no, I’m not saying lie, I’m saying that the best briefings typically have some story time element that presents a benefit to the client).  Espionage?  That just means they’re aware of the environment.  Martial arts?  That’s the core of their job and they *are* good.

Maybe you are in fact running an assembly line and you don’t think you need ninjas.  Maybe you’re right — you’d use a robot if you could, but you don’t and you’re got people.  Now tell me what it costs to refer to your employees as ninjas (denoting some skill) or worker bees (denoting the sheer monotonous work of it all). Yes, that’s right, it costs *nothing*.

There’s a ninja in your IT department reading this right now.