The Learning Journey

It’s that time again where a new application catches my eyes (and mind). Zoomii: the [near] real online bookstore.

I remembered Alexaholic/Statsaholic’s story and wondered how long will Amazon allow Zoomii to survive.

Apparently I was marketing some medications through this blog.

After dwindling Google result ranking, I discovered that my old installation of wordpress (ancient 2.1) was vulnerable enough to allow unauthorized template modifications.

All is fine now isA.

After Ninh pointed out Dreamhost’s mod_rails news, I was tempted to get my hands dirty deploying a test application.

I revivied one of my long lost pets (that hated the FCGI it was running on), made some modifications, and capified it to my Dreamhost’s account.

And … It was a breeze.

The deployment process (including capistrano script modifications, and enabling mod_rails for the domain) took around 10 minutes. Dreamhost made a good effort making the deployment easy (just a checkbox to enable mod_rails for the domain). I’m sure this has taken some effort from both Dreamhost and Phusion guys, so, Kudos to them.

Maybe afterall Dreamhost isn’t that bad.

Here’s a snapshot of the one-page application - jobalytics (Ruby Job Trends).

I got an update from Ninh Bui from Passenger fame about Dreamhost progress on mod_rails adoption.

We’re working closely with Dallas Kashuba (CTO of Dreamhost) on getting Passenger ‘dreamhost’ ready (even though we’ve inferred it was already production ready, taking on a huge hosting company is a challenge on its own, i.e. it’s in its own league :-)).
We’re making excellent progress, and maybe I’ve already said too much
Stay tuned for a little longer!

from the Passenger Discussion thread.

The amount of corn needed to produce a full tank of gas for an SUV is enough to feed a person for a whole year.

The 2008 World Development Report “Agriculture for Development” provides a compelling example of the food-for-fuel debate: over 240 kilograms (or 528 pounds) of corn – enough to feed one person for a whole year – is required to produce the 26 gallons, or 100 liters of ethanol needed to fill the gas tank of a modern sports utility vehicle.

Source: World Bank: Africa - Rising Food Prices Spell Hunger for Millions Across Africa.

The guys from Phusion - The Computer Science Company - released mod_rails (Passenger) today. I’m just feeling unusually happy.

They made a great job not only producing that longly-awaited piece of software (years in the waiting), but also creating a great hype, marketing, documenting, testing, and nailing down the details that made Rails deployment as easy and as enjoyable as Rails development.

Thank you guys for giving us that peice of software; it sure will lower barriers to entry into Rails/Ruby world even further. I know that there are rough edges, yet, the community owes a lot to these guys.

After a journey of Webrick, Apache+FCGI, Mongrel, Apache+Mongrel, NGinx+Mongrel and deployment processes that are more suited for JavaEE applications, now I’m finally prepared to enjoy Rails to the last drop.

Dreamhost!? I’m waiting.

UPDATE: A donation was due. Although modest, I felt compelled.

Steve Howard from MLE Systems has started talking to me about Sales techniques and, man, do I love it!

Although, Sales is a modern “survival” skill, it’s hardly taught in schools for non-business majors (what a shame). Being a techie, you become more involved into tech details and, like it or not, social skills (including sales) quickly withdraw from your soft-skill stack.

Selling products, services, or even yourself (hard skill set) is often overlooked by techies, but I see it a major component in any success (Apple, eBay, Microsoft, 37 Signals, … you name it). I’ve long wanted to start learning more about it and Steve is offering me a great opportunity.

Thanks Steve.

This is serious.

The United Nations’ World Food Program has been hit so hard by skyrocketing grain prices that it may be forced to cut off some food aid to the world’s poorest countries, while the United States is planning to turn record quantities of corn into automotive fuel.

Cereal grain import prices for the world’s poorest countries are expected to rise 35% for the second consecutive year in 2008, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Droughts and floods have reduced grain stocks, and demand is rising in part because better living standards in developing countries are bringing a change in diet — Indians and Chinese are eating more meat, so more grain is needed for livestock feed. And ethanol is making a bad situation worse. The U.S. is the world’s top corn exporter, and about a quarter of last year’s crop went to ethanol. Food prices, meanwhile, have increased so much that the World Food Program says it will have to raise $500 million more just to carry out its scheduled operations.

via LA Times, via reddit

Update: The NY Times is publishing about the same issue.

How would it be like if our sales-person shared a few hours of his time acting as an observer on implementing a user story with one of the developers? What if our HR manager set aside a part of her Monday to watch a developer troubleshooting an application or setting up a deployment script?

If software development is at the core of a business (or even if it’s a support function), I would expect that such scheme can help shed a light on how the service is being delivered. It would make it easier for business people to understand what it means when a propeller-head say that “Story X would take Y days to implement” or that “a new release will be deployed to the production server”.

I can understand (and appreciate) that each party has his own value to add to the supply chain. But, sometimes that internal supply chain is taken for granted, and as days go by, everyone starts swimming in his own pond, forgetting that it takes a team effort to deliver quality service.

I’m not sure if such schemes (Business/Developer Pairing) are implemented, but, I would expect it being part of an operations management practice.

Anyone out there?

These images have been glued to my brain since I first saw them. A masterpiece by Jeff Patton that rang lots of bells.

via Obie Fernandez.