Following last week’s learnings, here’s another dose of little bits and pieces I’ve learned over the past week or so.

It is a little (unknown) fact that my first job as a software developer was writing C code, for the network group at Texas A&M University. Like most student developers, my work never saw the light of day, mostly because I never finished it, but I did learn an incredible amount working on my little project made for one.

I recently discovered that the branch manager at the Wells Fargo bank I frequent can order a bound stack of two dollar bills on request. This is rather handy since banks don’t normally have any just “lying around.”

About a month ago I changed jobs, leaving Apture to join a start-up in a completely different space: Lookout, Inc.. While I won’t delve too deeply into my reasons for leaving, my reasons for joining were almost entirely driven by the team. I was fortunate enough to meet with Kevin and John (CTO and CEO respectively) through a mutual friend and some time after that Dave G., the tech lead for the server team. The more people I met from Lookout, the more I wanted to work there.

If you’ve seen a recent flood of backlogged blog posts of mine in your feed reader then I sincerely apologize. I finally pulled the trigger on switching from Drupal, the fantastic CMS, to Jekyll, a fantastic site generator.

I saw this on another person’s blog and I figured I’d give it a try. I’ve been keeping a note in Evernote this week with all the little interesting tidbits I’ve learned this week. Nothing major or ground-breaking, just little facts and snippets of information I was fortunate enough to absorb over the course of the week.

• How to use “gemsets” with RVM effectively thanks to this blog post which compares it with Python’s virtualenv tool
• CalTrans runs a Bike Shuttle from the MacArthur BART Station in the east bay to the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco during rush hour commute times. The cost, $1.00 (for reference Ashby -> Downtown SF is a $3.50 ticket)
• Provided you give Wells Fargo enough lead-time (about a week), they will order you a stack of $2 bills ($200)
• Using elinks with Tor is fast enough to make browsing with Tor not completely painful
• Most single-window WebKitGTK+ browsers (vimprobable2 comes to mind) don’t do proper certificate checking, making you extremely vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, particularly with misbehaving exit nodes on Tor

Last night I was fortunate enough to squeeze into a packed house in the Berkeley Repertory Theatre for a panel titled “New Light on Dark Energy”. Suffice to say, I was thrilled about the entire event, I didn’t expect such a massive line and a filled 600 seat theatre.

After I managed to grab one of the last three or four open seats in the audience for the two hour long series of presentations and Q&A session.

During the Q&A session I managed to get up to a microphone to ask a softball question to the panelists: “If we could give you an infinite supply of funds and grad students, what would you focus on to identify ‘Dark Energy’ in your life time?” Panelist Greg Aldering had a fantastic response that ellicited a number of laughs and sad-pplause from the audience (paraphrased) “The concept of infinite resources is more mind boggling to us than any of the stuff we’ve talked about tonight.”

The night was a blast, if you’re in the Bay Area I highly recommend you check out the Friends of the Berkeley Lab newsletter and attend some of their seminars and panels in the future.

SCIENCE!

(full flickr gallery here)

Since moving to Berkeley a little under a year ago, I’ve started to have a commute. A good and proper, bored to tears commute via BART. A commute combined with a proper smartphone means I spent the first and last 40 minutes of every single workday answering emails and reading reddit.

While firing off some emails this evening I noticed the signature I added a long time ago: “Sent from my Nokia n900”

Originally I added the signature as a caddy jab at iPhone users who have had the “Sent from my iPhone” appended to every email sent from the device going back to January of 2007. The more I started to

think about it, these signatures actually make a lot of sense and should be included on just about every device that offers a limited email client.

If for no other reason than to inform the reader(s) of the email that it might suck, for a number of legitimate reasons.

Goddamn autocorrect: sending a grammatically flawness email from a smartphone is impossible. Invariable an phone will auto-correct “schmidt” to “schlong” and all of a sudden you look like a moron. Having a “Sent from my mobile device” footer is like a disclaimer. To whom it may concern, my email may be riddled with mistakes, you’ll have to forgive me, I’m walking down the street responding to emails that could probably wait.

Top posting: for the record, I hate top-posts and typically try to avoid them at every turn, for reasons that I won’t go into in this post. If your top-posted message contains your “mobile disclaimer”, it’s acceptable. Trying not to top-post on smartphones these days is near-impossible, so nobody will think any less of you.

Brevity: let’s face it, there’s a lot of extra words in sentences that exist purely to provide some inter-personal lubricant. “Hey Jared, would you mind checking on those services running on those machines when you get a chance, thanks, love you too, etc.” When emailing on the go, particularly when you’re in an on-call situation, brevity is key (especially if somehow your production machines are offline). “Check services on machines 1-12” without the mobile disclaimer might make the reader think I’m an impatient twat (I am, but irregardless), instead of being strapped for time.

On the flip-side of all these reasons, if you’re using a desktop/web client, I expect you to put as much thought into composing your email as you expect me to put into reading it. You know who you are.

Last Sunday, I announced the “0.1” release of my memcache-ada project on comp.lang.ada, thus ending a 2 month experiment with the Ada programming language.

In my previous post on the topic, I mentioned some of the things that interested me with regards to Ada and while I didn’t use all the concepts that make Ada a powerful language, I can now confidentally say that I know enough to be dangerous (not much more though).

This is what my coworkers thought of me, learning Ada.

All said and done I spent less than two months off and on creating memcache-ada, mostly on my morning and evening commutes. The exercise of beginning and ending my day with a language which tends to be incredibly strict was interesting to say the least. Due to the lack of an REPL such as Python’s, I found myself writing more and more unit and integration tests to get a feel for the language and the behavior of my library. Due to my “fluency” in Python, I tend to think in Python when scratching out code, similar to how a native speaker of a language will write or speak “from the hip” instead of doing large amount of mental work to construct statements. With Ada, not only am I not yet “fluent”, the langauge won’t let me get away with as much as Python allows me.

The overhead of writing Ada, in my opinion, is a double-edged sword, I can very quickly informally test, debug and rewrite Python but with Ada such a process is (in my opinion) onerous. My 20 minute walk to the train station would be spent contemplating how and what I wanted to write and where. By the time I sat down on the train, I had thought out and designed things internally, so I would immediately write out tests around my ideas and assumptions before writing code to pass the tests. The time spent writing code was minimal since I rarely had to rewrite code, I can think of only one function that had to be rewritten after it had passed tests (botched some socket reading) in the whole project.

I’m not yet sure what will be my next project in Ada, I am certain that I don’t want to build anything of consequence in C again. Working with a language, like C, that not only gives you the rope with which to hang yourself but will often times push you off the chair is more masochism than I feel comfortable with these days. Ada on the other hand will allow you to hang yourself, but it’ll make damn certain that have the perseverence to go through with it. Frankly, I don’t have that kind of drive to really shoot myself in the foot anymore. I want to build software that works with a language that doesn’t want to make me suffer, which means I’ll be in a weird Ada + Python love triangle until future notice.

Let’s all pretend I have a Geeko-related pun for “SCALE.” Anyhoo, SCALE, otherwise known as the Southern California Linux Expo, is coming up in February (25th - 27th) and yours truly will be present and accounted for.

Yes, those are bus tickets you see there. I will be heading down from Oakland to Los Angeles by bus instead of flying for ideological reasons, so I’ll try to be in a good mood when I arrive!

At this year’s SCALE, the openSUSE project is making a big splash. Contributors and ambassadors will be showing up from all over the globe to show off openSUSE, talk nerdy, socialize and eat tasty snacks supplied by Cruise Director, GNOME Accessibility contributor and openSUSE Board Member Bryen Yunashko, who just got his annual haircut in preparation for the momentous occasion! ;) If you’re in the area, check out this amazing speakers listing and be sure to register as soon as possible!

I’ll be covering the specifics of SCALE more in the coming weeks on OMG! SUSE!, so stay tuned and I hope to see you there!