Well appreciate this ad campaign for motorcycles. I’m not someone who’s likely to buy a Ducati (wrong style of bike), but REALLY love this campaign.
Full article available at Fast Company…
Tweets, underwear, and farts
Just got a new Twitter follower. Wasn’t someone I knew, so I went out to check out who they were. CEO of a tech company who has a large number of folks who they follow. My suspicion is that this guy noticing my Twitter feed was due more to me following someone else that they follow than anything else, but might be related to OWF or to rugby or to open-source or to who knows what else. Twitter is slightly nondiscriminate.
So, this guy’s tweet feed. Typical executive feed: links to articles they find interesting, which, actually, is far more useful than to me as a Twitter follower than some of the folks who mostly use it to hold visible conversations. Seeing a ‘thanks!’ tweet or ‘I thought the same!’ isn’t enough to make me go check out the full thread to see if there was something useful there. Seeing an interesting article cross-referenced: usually more useful.
2nd tweet down the list:
These High-Tech Underwear Keep Your Farts From Smelling | Co.Exist | ideas + impact http://buff.ly/16u2aON #finally
This poor guy, who I’ve never met / will likely never meet, will forever be linked in my brain as the guy who advertised to the world that he’s interested in underwear that covers up his farts… And THAT’s why you need to be careful what you link to. And now I’m sorely tempted to link to it, just to pass along that ‘hee hee’ moment to someone else.
Forms application, done Google Forms style
Working on a simple application to let a group have a set of forms in which they collect data. Something like a simplistic form of WuFoo which lets the group update their forms and save the data to a backing data store.
First level idea: use Google Forms. Forms are very readily editable, even by non-technical folk, data’s saved to a backing spreadsheet, and you can use Google’s tools for analysis.
Implemented a first pass solution:
Advantages:
– data validation, either through their selections, through regular expressions, or (not yet tested) scripts
– really easy to share the form’s editing and responses with a set of collaborators
– very easy to add new elements
– the control set (textboxes, checkboxes, etc) are non-sophisticated but OK for my needs
Disadvantages:
– No great way to handle theming. You can pick from a set of stock themes, and there’s one sitethat seems to have found a way to handle it, but definitely not something that seems like it’s embedded in the core capability. Since I expect the group to need to adjust this ongoing, this is probably a non-starter
– No great way to link records.. e.g., if I have the same user fill out multiple things, no good way to connect them through.
OK… committed to taking a look at a first-level solution, and this doesn’t seem to be the right one. Next I’ll look at a hosted open-source solution.
More geek fun
Today I’ve:
– presented half-working stuff at a retrospective and then spent the rest of the day moving it forward
– figured out that one reason my widget wasn’t working was because it was being served as http, rather than https, which caused mixed-content headaches
– configured Apache to deal with https. Worked much more nicely on Linux than it did on Windows. Meaning, I was completely hosed on Windows.
– got PHP working with PDO and MySQL. No, PHP 5.3 does NOT automatically work with PDO. Though yum install nicely gets things working, once you figure out the right set
– compiled node and npm on our Linux instance, as it sure seemed nicer to pull what we need from Git directly to the box with a known build environment, rather than build it and push it up via ftp. Note: compiling node requires things like gcc and make – haven’t seen those since C++ in college. Glad everything just worked, once the right path revealed.
– reviewed a briefing deck for a meeting tomorrow… unclear what these guys are asking for, but they’ve definitely got a pitch in mind
– signed timesheets, updated mine
– talked through demo possibilities with another team
More stuff, too, including futzing with git feature branches, investigating how to create separate user accounts on the ec2 instance so that a git clone wouldn’t expose my password in history, and a few other things I’m sure I’ve forgotten…
And I thought I’d only spend 10 hours “managing” this project.. Uh, maybe that’s right. Except that most everything above is _doing_ rather than managing. That said, a healthy mix keeps me happy. Better bounds on the work day would make me even happier. Too bad I don’t give up until a problem’s solved.
Ebb and flow of a geek night
Success: getting an Amazon EC2 instance up with your software running on it. Able to take a screen capture to show work actually complete before shutting down the instance to avoid running up unnecessary charge.
Despair: testing stop / restart and then realizing that your public DNS has changed, which means your site can’t be bookmarked, its certs no longer work, and you have to update a properties file with a new host name.
Hope: the box itself still has your stuff on it, you can log in with the same keys, and there’s this thing called an Elastic IP available for a charge from Amazon.
Elation: stop / restart works! New user ids granted through IAM, console renamed to give something useful, PEM sent out for access, and JIRA ticket marked as resolved.
Contentment: Now time for bed, in time to wake up and think of the other three things you wanted to accomplish in the evening with Fringe playing in the background courtesy of NetFlix.
marysue flavors…
marysue.com versus themarysue.com – such very different websites….
You know you’re a geek when…
About to have a discussion about potentially putting some effort into a project within our company to clean it up and possibly make it available open-source (geek indicator 1). Had a discussion about open-source with the corporate CTO and Chief Engineer, as well as others, earlier this spring (geek indicator 2). Trying to find my notes from that meeting, I end up discovering new flags for Windows 7’s search capability (geek indicator 3: the regular search was taking too long – needed more flags to make it precise), as well as a whole host of new command-line capabilities in Windows 7 that I wasn’t aware of (thinks that’s cool: geek indicator 4). Hunting through notes on my iPad, on my laptop, etc. Finally found my notes written on paper in my organizer, based on a search of Outlook’s calendar to find the date of the original meeting. Geek fail, though personal success.
Other geeky goodness: in the past few days, I’ve stood up an LDAP server on an Ubuntu image on EC2. I’ve configured CAS to interact with that LDAP server. And I’m now rebranding CAS to handle the look and feel I want for our corporate demo site, using Jetstrap to give me a Bootstrap skeleton. I’m explicitly not linking through to all that stuff because the folks who know what it is already know what those things refer to, and the folks who don’t really aren’t going to want to wade through it all. Count it as a mercy non-linking.
Summer adventure list
My kids gets this amazing summertime experience: long days, little to no schedule, and family members around to be able to do things. They have the benefit of a stay-at-home-parent, so we don’t need to send them somewhere to fit into someone else’s schedule. The rub: they’ve got no driver to do anything in particular. So, every summer I ask each kid to think about what they’d like to learn or try over the summer. Callie and I in particular have had a great time building these lists. Last year’s list had everything from ‘go to a tea party’ to ‘rollerskate’ to ‘learn to unicycle’ to ‘go camping’. We didn’t accomplish all of them, but it was a lot of fun to both think up the list, and then also to get to cross things off. I also think it’s important to point my kids to thing towards bigger ideas and goals, to not just live in an hour by hour what keeps me from being bored kind of mental model.
I have an informal summer list this year… things on it include ‘learn to juggle 4 balls’ (I can do 3, but have never solved 4), ‘unicycle’ (we didn’t solve it last year, but now have two unicycles to work with), and ‘write a mobile app’. That last one’s for a contest with a deadline. Deadlines are good things. I’ve had that same unicycle goal on a list of 100 goals since 2007… Some of the other 100 goals I’ve met: I’ve driven a motorcycle, gotten another tattoo, taken my family to Disney, and read the Bible through completely, as well as a few other goals. Of the original 100, I’ve accomplished 12 1/3 so far. The 1/3 comes from a goal that says I’ll crochet an afghan for each of my kids. 1’s done, 1’s in progress (been in progress for a while) and the last hasn’t started.
Looking over the list, none are ones that I want to strike, though a few have gotten more complicated. It was simpler to visit my grandmother once a month when she lived in Silver Spring rather than out near Cumberland: think that one will be amending to ‘visit or call’. I could see adding new goals prioritized over the original batch of 100. For example, I want to earn a most-valuable-player ring from my rugby team, as well as want to win a championship with our team. Those goals might come ahead of ‘spend at least a week touring in Australia’…
Revisiting the list helps kick me out of my own personal rut of whatever I’m dealing with day-to-day to remind me of big dreams and the idea that some things are worth planning out small steps to get to bigger dreams. That’s one of the things I want to teach my kids, as well as remind myself. Going to go sketch in some ideas for my mobile app…
Comics
May the 4th was Star Wars Day, as well as Free Comic Book Day. Complete geekfest. After an alumni rugby game (we won, I scored!) and a lunch out with the kids, I took my younger daughter to the local comics store. She’s not hooked, but now I am – after she asked me the ‘where are the girls in comic books?’, I went hunting for female characters. Found two new comic series: the Fearless Defenders and Ame-Comi Girls. Fearless Defenders is a new story line, mostly, while the Ame-Comi Girls series tells the stories of the women from the DC Universe comics. We see how Wonder Woman ended up coming off her island and why she’s in such a revealing costume (she resents it, by the way), get to see adventure stories of BatGirl and SuperWoman, etc.
I was never all that interested in comic books as a kid, but really liking this stuff. I figure purchasing them helps send an economic signal that folks are interested in these story lines. And if it doesn’t succeed, I suspect these comic books could end up as collectibles of interest to women such as myself – win, win.
Oooh, I see there are two new Fearless Defenders out – gotta go hit my local comic book store!
Geek fun this evening
After a pretty lousy day at work, had great fun geeking out a little this evening.
* Lego WeDo – spinning ducks! (first efforts at activities for a corporate Women In Computing Day this Sunday… LOVE that the women in our company are now pulling this together for the 3rd year! Uh, linked video is not me or my child commenting…)
* Used a random number generator online to pick the winner of a 50/50 raffle to benefit some rugby players fundraising to go to Russia for the World University games. These ladies are all Naval Academy midshipmen, so have some significant restrictions on how they can fundraise. Help them out via their fundraising site
* ThinkGeek has a Mother’s Day section! Uh, not so keen on the whole idea of cosmetics on ThinkGeek. That said, superhero socks (somehow listed in the cosmetics section?) would be pretty fun to have peeking out under slacks at work on tough days…