:Dread Pirate PJ’s House of Hacks and Tricks

Last Wednesday, I sent emails and résumés for various job posts, and by that afternoon, I started getting nibbles. It was weird! Whereas I barely got any attention for over a dozen job applications I sent out between September and early February, I suddenly had five companies interested in me in a matter of hours! Maybe companies were waiting for post-holiday economy reports to start hiring? I wonder.

So to cut to the chase, I got a great hourly-pay remote development gig working on a Ruby on Rails project, on a really cool sounding website, for a very-high-profile vehicle racing company in the UK. It’s right down Ken’s alley, but if I’m not mistaken, this sport usually has a definitely more European racing audience. I think American racing fans like Ken, might resent these are not American cars, and just don’t watch. LOL

I cannot disclose any more information because of client confidentiality, but I think I may already have said too much. :-p

I’ll post a link here when the site goes up, at any rate. Only then can we drop all this silly NDA crap. It’s a bummer, because I can’t discuss application architecture specifics that would be of interest to my readers.

But fret not. There’s no rule about my discussing the project’s architecture in general. I just can’t say right out what architecture I’m dealing with on this gig.

I’ll be writing more about Rails in the weeks ahead, but just cuz I write about it, don’t mean it’s got a thing to do with work, you hear? :: rolls eyes ::

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, hacks, life, software.development, open.source, web.architecture, system.architecture, web.technologies, web.services

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pjtrix.com and my other domains are now hosted at Dreamhost. I think they run just as fast as they used to on the GoDaddy virtual private host. But I don’t know, why don’t you come and kick the tires? Just let me know if anything seems amiss.

Be advised svn.pjtrix.com and trac.pjtrix.com are AWOL because of DNS propagation issues. I’m pretty confident they will become available once the DNS records are synchronized across the whole ‘Net. I tested the shared host install and content of trac.pjtrix.com on a dummy domain, and it ran fine.

As if to underscore that the move to Dreamhost was a good decision, I originally thought the svn.pjtrix.com and trac.pjtrix.com unavailability was a misconfiguration issue on Dreamhost’s part. I fired up a support request, and would you believe they got back to me in less than 30 minutes, and with the correct answer?

Let’s see the dumbass tech support folks at GoDaddy beat that! The best GoDaddy tech support can do on a first try is quote their unhelpful help pages, which they’re too dumb to understand anyhow, and they take many hours to reply! I guess it takes them that long to find which of their unhelpful help pages is more vaguely related to my problem.

Dreamhost tech support is leaps and bounds over GoDaddy’s. I never felt so confident about something as mundane and commonplace as web hosting. But as with everything else in life, there are dumbasses and grumpy saboteurs everywhere, ready to take your cash and trust and treat it without care. You need to be careful and find someone worthy of your cash and trust.

I’m glad to see first hand that Dreamhost lives up to its good reputation. And I’ve learned first hand that GoDaddy lives up to theirs.

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As I mentioned at the middle of January, my virtual private hosting yearly contract with GoDaddy ends on March 1st, 2007. Back then, I decided to go with VPSLink and their LightTPD and Rails virtual private server package.

Well, that was not working out. LightTPD is a different beast from Apache, and I couldn’t get Drupal and some other software installed properly. Luckily, VPSLink has a 30-day money back guarantee, so I didn’t waste any money.

I had heard many good things about Dreamhost from many friends and through the web, so I decided to have a look see. And as luck would have it, I found a coupon code where I could get Dreamhost hosting for $29.40 USD for the whole year! With a 97-day money back guarantee, I also had nothing to lose. (I’ll share a coupon code later, so that you too can get a year of Dreamhost hosting for $29.40 USD.)

Dreamhost is a shared hosting company, whereas I had virtual private hosting with GoDaddy and VPSLink. That means I’m not free to install anything I want, in any way I want. But to be honest, I’m not doing anything out of the ordinary with pjtrix.com and my other domains. What I’ve been doing on my VPS host can be setup with a bit extra work on a shared host. Apache is quite flexible, and Dreamhost allows quite a bit of Apache reconfiguration through htaccess.

So far, the move to Dreamhost has been going well. I’ll be moving pjtrix.com tonight. My next weblog post will signal a successful move.

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You can see from the title, I started this post two days ago! And I just managed to post it now! Busy, busy!

Hi there, readers!

I have been busy for the last week, looking for new gigs, and sending out article proposals for a few sites and print magazines. I’ve also been toying with making screencasts, using my camcorder, and operating iMovie, for a not-so-secret pjtrix project from the summer. And then there’s another two projects, but they are secret for now. All this fun left me with little time for pjtrix posts.

Among other news, this here weblog finally got approved for PayPerPost.com and ReviewMe.com. Let’s see if I find something you and I might be interested in. First thoughts: … meh …

I continue to cover living expenses with the odd gig here and there. I have to find a way out of the hole into better gigs, though. The secret and not-so-secret projects should help, as well as the writing. We’ll see. I remain hopeful for the near future.

iCal to GCal Sync

I started this open source project in December, but I’ve actually made little progress in all of January. The learning curve is a little steeper than expected. Drawing a Mac OS GUI is super easy with Interface Builder, but making it work in a foolproof manner isn’t.

Then there’s the added complexity that all the Mac OS specific documentation is in Objective-C, a language I haven’t used or even looked at until now, and very different from the PHP, Python, Ruby, C++ and Java I know. And then I have to convert from the Objective-C examples to the Ruby-Cocoa construct I need to write my application. It’s not difficult, it’s just I haven’t yet internalized all the “bastard C-like object-oriented language from hell” newness.

From what I have gathered, Mac OS X Leopard is going to come with built-in Python and Ruby bindings to Objective-C. Maybe Apple will add some helpful documentation to their developer site that will help with this kind of conversion. I have half a mind to write a little GUI tool to convert short Objective-C snippets to their Ruby-Cocoa equivalents.

Spam, SPAM, Spam, SPAM, Spam, SPAM, Spam, SPAM

It’s not a pirate movie, and it’s not quite as good as the The Princess Bride, but Robin Hood: Men in Tights gets a good quote now and then in my emails and chats with my old college buds. And the Spam song always makes me laugh. So without much further ado, here is the monthly Akismet comment spam report.

In the month of January, Akismet reports I received 57 spam comments! This is compared to 74 for the entire year 2006. I remember not having any spam comments for quite a while, until some time in August 2006. I don’t remember the exact amount of spam comments I received in December, but I think it was less than 30, and November 2006 had about 20. So it seems that as I become more prolific in my posting, the spammers turn up their attempts. Or whatever.

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