Interview after interview with some of the world’s most successful people—actress Laura Linney, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, crossword mastermind Will Shortz—they began seeing patterns emerge. No matter how diverse their goals or crafts, these super-achievers shared many of the same habits. How can you follow in their footsteps?
Read the article here or watch this short and sweet summary (recommended) …
This one is really nerdy, but it would be cool if in the “About Google Chrome” page of the browser, a list of whats new or what’s changed showed up right after the version number.
This could be restricted it to only if the user was on the dev/beta channel. I figure if you’re on dev/beta, you care about that kind of information.
Even cooler would be a list of all the versions that you previously used, that folded out on click, so you could see your own specific upgrade path (along with their changelogs)
Making iOS apps is getting easier and easier with each new release of Xcode. However, all the new features and approaches means there are more options to choose from, outdated books and old documentation.
Back in my day it was so much harder – that’s is true in many respects, but a much higher level of quality and features is expected now.The bar keeps rising, and that’s a very good thing.
If I was starting out with iOS development today these are the things I would hope somebody would tell me.
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Watching this 60 minutes episode (scroll to end of post) got my mind running in a hundred different directions. Its clear to me now that the future of software is Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning. In the future, people aren’t going to just want the software we’re churning out right now. They’re going to want software that learns their preferences and adjusts to their needs.
Manually set my alarm before I go to bed? pffft, the ios alarm app in 2020 will monitor the time you went to bed and use your past behavior to know that you need to be up in 4 hours.
The other thing that I realized is that the American economy is slowly moving to a phase where high skilled jobs will make up most of the job market. These jobs will be highly paid, but will also have to be highly taxed to support the rest of the country that simply will not have work.
We live in interesting times
I restarted Elasticsearch and started getting a nasty stack trace in my elasticsearch logs, the key line being
failed to connect to master [[Buzzard][bC1NWlbVT8Wnq7adl3VetA][inet[/192.168.1.2:9300]]]
There was no ip address like that on my network, it was maddening because no matter what I tried, it kept trying to find that non-existent master node.
Turns out that older versions of elasticsearch (I’m running 19.2 … current version is 20.x) have that problem where stale master id information can be broadcast over the network by a client node. This probably happened because I took my laptop home from work and did a restart of elasticsearch at home (different network/ip address etc)
Eventually I found the solution here.
If you’re getting this error when you go to startup elasticsearch, multicast is probably not working properly. I’m running elasticsearch on a single server (dev environment) and didn’t need all the ceremony.
So I just went into elasticsearch.yml (mine was in /usr/local/Cellar/elasticsearch/0.19.2/config/elasticsearch.yml) and set
discovery.zen.ping.multicast.enabled: false
thats was it. Elasticsearch came right back up!
In very unscientific tests Ruby 2.0 is 60-70% faster than 1.9.3.
Very promising.
PS: I couldn’t get my test suite to run in Ruby 2.0.0 but I managed to run the very simple
“time bundle exec rake environment” test
The average was
– 7.74s for ruby 2.0.0
– 11.8s for ruby 1.9.3-p368, a 65% speed improvment, right in line with the results from the gist
– 17.07s for rubinius 2.0.0 (1.9 variant) … yeah thats slow
We just moved to the latest Test::Unit, which uses MiniTest under the hood. Because of that, I wanted to take advantage of the new MiniTest::Spec DSL to get RSpec-like syntax in Test Unit.
The problem is, when I went to the try using it, I started getting all sorts of strange duplicate key/column errors.
At first I thought it was because of a recent upgrade I had done from Postgres 9.1 to 9.2, but as I dug in deeper, I realized it was my new Spec Test. We are running our tests in transactions that we rollback on the completion of each test, MiniTest::Spec wasn’t doing this and causing all the test errors.
After hours of digging I finally found the solution to the minitest duplicate key issue here. I hope it saves you some time. Definitely did for me!
PS: The other alternative that was pointed out to me was to simply use the minitest-rails gem. I tried it but it didn’t work cleanly right out-the-box for our setup (errors in tests, etc). I was too tired to fix it up, so I’ll kick the can down the road till I need to revisit this issue, probably in upgrading to Rails 4.
Old but Good
Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the governmentIf you’ve stayed with friends who live in European cities, you’ve probably had an experience like this: You hop onto their WiFi or wired internet connection and realize it’s really fast. Way faster than the one that you have at home.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.— George Bernard Shaw
The latest exploit looks pretty bad
From a presentation I gave to a bunch of UT Design undergrads in a class taught by my dear friend Terry Soloway.
I was digging through my old stuff and found it, thought I’d throw it up.
Be kind 😀
Seth’s Blog: Clean bathroomsThe facilities at DisneyWorld are clean. It’s not a profit center, of course. They don’t make them clean because they’re going to charge you to use them. They make them clean because if they didn’t, you’d have a reason not to come.
The for-profit sector is no different. People at all levels, especially management, witness the slow undoing of good customer service, product quality, or safety standards, and they don’t say a thing about it. Even if it violates their own value system and the mission of the company. But if everyone at a crummy airline, for example, had the same zero-tolerance for bad customer service as a lesbian has for lying about the fact that she’s married to a woman, it wouldn’t be a crummy airline for long
Never Lie About Who You Really AreYesterday was my 12-year anniversary of being with my partner, Jimmy. I called a florist, and a nice woman picked up. I told her, “It’s my anniversary, and I want to send roses.” I know she’s thinking the roses are going to a woman.
If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole.
If you run into assholes all day … you’re the asshole— From the FX TV Series “Justified” (Season 4 Ep 1)
I learned from my mistake in falling behind when Rails 3 came behind, so I’m trying to get a jump on Rails 4. Skip straight to my summary if you don’t want to watch the 20 minute video right now
#400 What’s New in Rails 4 – RailsCastsShort Ruby on Rails screencasts containing tips, tricks and tutorials. Great for both novice and experienced web developers.
ActiveRecord
– Array and hstore support for Postgres
– Model.all is now an ActiveRecord Relation vs loading records immediately, Model.all.to_a now gives you former Model.all behavior
– Model.scoped is deprecated
– Model.none (no idea why anybody would use this)
– Model.not.where() inverts/negates the scope/where clause
– chaining scopes to an active Relation object is possible with an ! at the end of the scope. This option mutates the current Relations object for you, so you don’t have to assign the new chain to a variable
– Model.find_by, Model.find_or_create_by now accepts a hash so that its Model.find_by(name: “Hello), stops dependence on method missing implementation of find_by_xxxx
– Model.find_or_create_by is deprecated but Model.find_by is not
– using an object as an Active Model object is easier, just include a module, used to be a bit more tedious
– in scopes you could pass in another scope as a second argument, now it has to be a callable object (like a lambda) this is to avoid passing in something Dynamic like Time.now by accident
– Model.update_attributes method has been renamed to just Model.update (probably to avoid confusion with update_attribute?)
Controllers
– the placeholder index.html file doesn’t exist anymore, dynamically generated
– turbolinks
– before_filter is renamed to before_action … won’t be deprecated though
– update action responds to PUT or PATCH, PUT might be deprecated
– support for strong parameters is built right in ( checkout Railscast Ep 371), better option that attar_accessible
– means that we don’t need attr_accessible in models but if you want that behavior still, you can use the protected attributes gem
– concerns. Designed to add modules which encapsulates behavior that you want to share among controllers/models. Ryan doesn’t care much for it, will add it in as needed in his apps (see Railscast ep 398)
– ActionController live (will be covered in future ep)
Views
– collections. collection_check_boxes, collections_radio_buttons. Can be used to handle associations or array attributes in forms more easily.
– helpers for html5 input types. date_field vs date_select (for example). Spits out html5 date control or just select input depending on the browser
– support for custom templating with .ruby extension. Probably limited usage for html, but useful for json (more in ep 379)
– cache Digest/Russian doll caching (more in ep 387)
Routes
– concerns, helps remove duplication in routes.
– match method is no longer supported (wtf?) have to change them from that to the right verb i.e get/patch/post
– if you supply constraints to a route its going to turn into a default attribute when you generate the url, so it forces the url to match the constraints. very cool
– new exception page, if its a routing error, you get all the routes in the app listed after it (kinda silly if you ask me)
– you can get all the routes in the app from /rails/info/routes
Other
– ability to specify console config options in application.rb with console block
– config.eager_load is default in production.rb so the entire app is loaded on start instead of autoloading, that helps keep Rails thread safe
– config.threadsafe! has been deprecated (more in ep 365)
– test directory is now structured differently, controllers, models, mailers vs functional, unit directories (big one here)
– Test::Unit now uses minitest under the hood which allows us to use rspec like syntax in Test::Unit
Removed
– Active Resource
– Model Observers
– Page & action Caching
– Disabling cache by default
– all available as gems if needed