:Dread Pirate PJ’s House of Hacks and Tricks

… it means PJTrix is in its new home. I have upgraded to WordPress 2.0.3, and applied a new theme. I’ll be tweaking the layout a bit, adding my page “tabs” to the header. Why don’t you come over and kick the tires and leave a comment? That will help me shake things out and make sure things are working right.

Up next … well, you’ll just have to wait and see. I have 500 GB of paid up bandwidth to fill every month from here to February, and plenty of ideas on how to do that.

Ain’t unemployment grand?
[Updated on 2006-07-18: I returned to work with Ruby on Rails three weeks ago, and I picked up a part-time customer last week, for a CMS migration from Postnuke to Drupal. I'm still planning to leave PR for the US mainland in August.]

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This is just to let you know, I’m moving PJTrix.com to another server, where I have more storage. The server PJTrix is on right now is actually owned by a friend of mine, Ernesto Diaz. He is one of my ex-employees at SNAP Platform, and is running a web hosting and web design business for the Latinamerican geek market. For the past four months, he has let me have 2 GB of space and 60 GB of bandwidth per month on his server for free. It’s served me well, but I gotta move on.

As PJTrix grows into hosting my open source project for Rails Day and other ideas, the domain needs more space and bandwidth. I actually own that space and bandwidth, on the server where I host my friend’s web store and my other friend’s web gallery. That server has 500 GB of bandwidth and 20 GB of space, which are currently underused.

So over the next few days, there will be a change of IP address, and you’ll see PJTrix updated to a new version of WordPress and a new theme.

See you on the flip side!

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Well, I got about 50% of my planned features done. I’ll just keep correcting the layout till ten minutes to midnight, check in the last changes, and them I’m gonna crash till about noon tomorrow. My dad’s Father’s Day party is at 1 p.m.

On Monday, I’ll deploy my Rails Day entry on my server. So you can all laugh and point fingers at my naive web design. I never claimed to be a web designer, I am a developer. It’s not the same thing. I don’t have the graphical talent needed for web design, whereas development is mostly about logic. Right brain vs. left brain, and I don’t have the right brain for it (pun not intended, I swear!)

I’ll post a post-mortem later: why I didn’t finish, what held me up the most, what was simplest.

PS - Happy Father’s Day, Ken, and my other “childrened” readers.

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… and I need a nap. I’ll get an hour of shut eye, and have lunch when I get back up.

It doesn’t look like I’ll get 70% of the functionality in by midnight. It may be more like 50%. I’ll keep on truckin’, no sense quiting now.

If I’m gonna look like a fool, might as well go all the way, no?

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railsday, rails, software development, open source, ruby, hacks

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My stomach started hurting about 10 minutes ago. It could be from the coffee I had a few hours ago. But I think it’s just gastric juices from 10-11 hours without a meal (and that’s a guess. I don’t remember if I had dinner at 6, 7, or 8 last night.)

So I’m going to have breakfast. I’m doing good with the wakey wakey, so I’ll lay off the coffee for now. Save it for when I really need it.

PS - Preliminary functional tests for conversations are done. Now I just need to tailor them for typical webmail actions. Then I move on to implementing said actions, and adding unit tests for conversations and emails.

PS - … and miles to go before I sleep.

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My webmail app for Rails Day 2006 has the all-popular tagging capability (i.e. what GMail calls “labels”.) In the spirit of agile development, Rails has a plugin called acts_as_taggable, that lets developers add tagging to their applications without a whole lot of work.

At least that’s the theory.

A webmail app has many users, so it is important for taggings to be per user. And the Rails community has published how-tos on the web to solve this issue, and it is easy to add user relationships to taggings.

Except the plugin comes with no tests! I don’t even have tests to modify and fix to reflect my code changes.

One positive note: no tests means, the test framework has nothing to fail on. LOL!

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I just spent about two hours getting all my unit and functional tests to pass for basic authentication functionality. Not good. I should have nailed that down in under 40 minutes.

I got little more than nineteen hours to go. Hopefully I can make up the time lost. I’ll be happy if I can get basic webmail functionality done within that time. Let’s see what the judges think of that.

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In just over three hours, I will be competing in Rails Day 2006. It’s a coding competition, where you are only allowed to use Ruby on Rails to create a full web app in 24 hours.

I have a thermos full of hot coffee, with milk and sweetener already added - can’t waste time on the little stuff! I also have juice, water, and ready-to-eat snacks and food in the fridge (choc chip cookies, Subway salads and subs, and leftovers from yesterday.)

As (bad? good?) luck would have it, my customer was short on funds this week. So I didn’t have work, but therefore had the whole week to get ready for Rails Day. I’ve been practicing by writing lots of small apps, learning to use more of Rails and the various plugins available.

I am competing just to see what I’ve learned in the last year. Whatever problems I encounter will be an indication of what I need to concentrate on in my self-education in the months ahead. Hopefully I’ll do a good enough job to win a prize or two, and I’ll work my butt of to achieve that.

Whatever the outcome, I also thought I could document how I made my web app in a series of screencasts/vidcasts. I’m going to be sans work for a few weeks until my customer can get some revenue (two of their customers didn’t pay them in May, so they are short on funds. If things don’t change by July 1st, it’s sayonara Rails project in PR, hello USA traveling consultant.) So I actually will have time to make a few vidcasts about how I implement my app.

Either way, win or lose, this is going to get me some exposure. I doubt I’ll get everything I have planned implemented in 24 hours. But I believe I can get 70% done in that time. After Rails Day, I’ll keep working on and improving the app, whether I win anything or not. I’m writing something I’ve wanted to see implemented since as far as I’ve used email, oh 20-odd years ago. Oh yeah, it’s an email app. You’ll see.
I’m gonna catch a few winks, and then I’ll get up at 11 p.m. to get my source code repository credentials. Talk to you all later.

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