Double Shot #43

Now that the FogBugz book revision is manuscript complete, I can move another fraction of my time to Rails work. And with RailsConf coming up, perhaps I can find some more Rails work. Of such hopes and dreams are careers built...

Double Shot #42

As I cruise into the weekend I'm stuck updating some older .NET work. But that doesn't stop me from reading the stuff I'd rather be working on.

Progress Report

Four months into the year of giving up on Microsoft and here's where things stand...

  • I'm actively working on my first Rails application for a paying client. It's not gone live yet, but we're on track to deploy June 1. I've cut my rate substantially in recognition that this is a learning experience for all concerned; fortunately, it's a client who I've got a good history of mutual respect with.

  • So far freelance work is keeping food on the table, between the one Rails app and various bits of writing. I'd like to get to where I'm doing more coding and less writing.

  • Second Life is the major distraction in my first life. I'm sniffing around some business opportunities there but nothing has gelled.

  • Traffic here at A Fresh Cup continues to rise roughly linearly every month. Thanks to all readers & commenters.

  • Traffic over at Larkware hasn't started dropping off yet, but ad sales are declining and I'm clearly starting to lose touch with what Microsoft is up to. My self-imposed moratorium on covering anything after .NET 2.0 has made most of the news out of MIX this week irrelevant, for example. I just don't have time to keep up with their latest and reinvent my own career.

  • Looking forward to being at RailsConf in a couple of weeks. I'll be aggressively looking for more consulting opportunities there.

  • I did buy a Mac Book Pro to take to RailsConf with me, so the financial picture for the year as a whole is looking even less great. But then, that's not unexpected. As I've said all along, I'm willing to take a hit this year to get myself back on the right track.

Double Shot #40

I've now reached the point where I'm finding it easier to find stuff for this blog than for my .NET link blog. Which is good for me but not so hot for the bottom line, since I sell ads over there. But onwards!

Double Shot #39

Time to clean out the links bucket in anticipation of a busy weekend.

  • Hackety Hack - Ruby-based take on the idea of a starter's coding environment for kids. (via Ruby Inside)

  • ActsAsSecure - Automatically encrypt specific fields from an ActiveRecord model when they're stored in a database.

  • Compiling RMagick on OS X 10.4.9 Intel - RMagick, or at least its setup, is one of the pieces of the whole Rails story that just seems utterly devoid of elegance.

  • Tips for Upgrading to Capistrano 2 - I'll probably jump in this pond sooner rather than later. One of the nice things about being new to the Rails world is that everything is new anyhow so there's no special penalty to being out on the edge.

  • acts_as_sphinx plugin - Yet another option for full-text searching in Rails applications.

  • Rails: Group results by week - This came in handy last night when I needed to do multilevel reporting in a Rails view.

Double Shot #36

I've actually spent a couple of days doing paid work on a Rails application. I feel all accomplished and stuff. Of course two thirds of the time has been off the clock as I scurry around researching things, but it's a start.

Searching a Model on Multiple Fields

I'm looking for a way to do a complex search across a variable set of multiple fields in a Rails form. In .NET, I'd just build up dynamic SQL by brute force, but that doesn't seem very Rails-ish, so I went hunting.

  • Use find_by_sql and the join method to build up a condition string. This is essentially the brute force method translated to Rails.

  • Acts_as_Ferret lets you set up full-text searching across multiple fields, but that doesn't actually fit the requirements.

  • ModelSearch is a plugin that was demoed in one of the talks at RailsConf Europe 2006. It lets you do things like




 search = ProductSearch.new
 search.keyword = 'television'
 search.max_price = 300
 search.sort = :price
 search.find(:all)

This is cool, but it doesn't seem to have actually been released into the wild yet.

  • ez-where is a plugin from Brainsplat (more info here and here). It enables things like




 articles = Article.find_where(:all) do |article|
   article.title =~ 'Lorem%'
   article.author.name  'Ezra'
   article.comments.user.name  ‘Fab’
 end


  • Squirrel is another plugin inspired by ez-where. It has a similar syntax and includes pagination support.


Right at the moment I'm inclining towards using Squirrel to meet my requirements.

Double Shot #33

Yeah, I've been MIA for a few days. Life has been pretty hectic. Here are a few liks to make up for that.

Double Shot #32

After 18 months of drawing a paycheck, I'm having to learn anew how to self-motivate. Which is to say that I had a very lazy Easter weekend.

  • Microsoft is Dead - You know, being a good developer and making a bunch of money with a startup in the right place at the right time does not qualify you to be an insightful commentator. I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but it's absurd to say that Microsoft is dead or to imply that the era of desktop applications is over. And ending the essay by implying that those who disagree with you are old and therefore stupid is just offensive. Graham should realize that his public posturing reflects on the companies that Y Combinator funds.

  • Schools should use Openoffice.org - I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, NeoOffice (which is essentially OO for Mac) is handling all of my personal Office needs quite well these days, and that's after having been a heavy Microsoft Office user from versions 2.0 through 2003. On the other, those students are going to end up in a world where they're required to use Microsoft Office. It's a quandry.

  • ActiveWarehouse ETL 0.7.0 Released - One of the more ambitious Rails-related projects that I know about continues to march along.

  • The Absolute Moron's Guide to Capistrano - Baby steps and a helpful explanation of the conceptual framework. Useful if Capistrano is still a mysterious black box to you.

Double Shot #31

Time to put my money where my links are (to fracture a metaphor) - I'm on the verge of signing a contract to do a small amount of custom Rails work. Exciting and a bit scary.

Double Shot #30

Picked up a few more odds and ends in my peregrinations around the net.

  • Get your Rails tests results via Growl notifications - I'm starting to rethink whether every bloody thing should come in via Growl. If test results come back quickly enough to be useful, aren't they foreground information? Still, eye candy is seductive. (via dzone)

  • Ajax File Upload - Not really Ajax, but a reasonably clever hack to keep everything on one page.

  • iStalkr - New lifestreaming site with a public feed of everything. If this one becomes at all popular it could be a surefire recipe for drowning in infotrivia.

  • Ruby In Steel Developer Updated  - With various editing and debugging improvements, for folks doing Ruby on Windows.

Progress Report

3 months into the 12-month clock for reinventing my career, so it's time to take stock again:

  • I quit my full-time .NET consulting job, effective last Friday. This was 9 months sooner than originally planned, but the time was right for a lot of reasons. This means that I'm definitely interested in talking to people who want to hire a freelancer (though I'm actually fairly busy for the month of April already). While I expect to take on some more .NET work to hold things together, my first preference is going to go to Rails work if I can find any, even if that means substantially discounting my rate.

  • I didn't do a lot of Rails work in March, mainly through lack of time (which is one reason for the sudden change of job status). I did find time to explore some of the interfaces between Rails code and LSL, the scripting language used in Second Life, which has been fun if not terribly instructive or lucrative. This has also led me to the Rubyists of Second Life group, which may end up being my local user's group (for some value of "local").

  • I'm now writing daily pieces for Web Worker Daily . This isn't going to be money to live on, and I don't expect to be a full-time writer, but it's good fill-in money and I enjoy having the new direction to stretch in. Good new set of contacts, too.

  • Traffic on this blog is still going up, roughly linearly by month. That's good, though I still need to figure out what all the doubling in the XML feed is about.

  • I'll definitely be trolling for business at RailsConf. During April I need to figure out what to do about a Mac Book (Pro?) to take along with me. At this point, roughly 75% of my daily desktop work is now on the Mac, so bringing a Windows laptop along isn't going to cut it.

Double Shot #29

I'm just about back to a full-time freelancing career. Trading the loss of steady income for flexbility is always a gamble, but I feel good about it.

  • Ubuntu breezy badger installation for RMagick - I found some much more complicated howtos on the subject, but this one seems to have worked fine on the latest Ubuntu (after I bumped libmagick6-dev to libmagick9-dev).

  • Rails for IIS: Always Have Friend Named 'Mike' - Rob Conery adds some experience-based notes to installing the alpha bits to make Rails run directly on IIS.

  • Lighthouse Launches - New Rails-backed issue-tracking system aimed at developers.

  • OpenOffice.org 2.2 released - With various improvements. So far the OpenOffice family (I'm using NeoOffice on Mac) is handling my document needs just fine. Dumping MS Office is proving to be utterly untraumatic, except that I have to keep it around for a few publishers who absolutely require using their Word templates.

  • Sexy Migrations - As with Hobo, I'm not quite ready for this level of elegant terseness in my Rails, but it's worth tracking.

Double Shot #28

I'm nearly back to being independent again...and perhaps about to start my first Rails gig...so definitely still scouting around for interesting links.

Double Shot #27

Life gets more fun all the time. Turns out I'm going back to full-time freelancing at the end of this week.

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