Wednesday

• allyn
• July 23rd, 2008
• 11:51:05 AM
• 1 Comment

Wednesday is good for a lot of things. Played correctly, a Wednesday can almost be made to seem as thought it’s a mini-weekend, thereby creating a little island of victory in a field of ordinary work days. Those that have accomplished such a feat often find the next day feels like what would happen if Monday and Thursday had a kid, but I digress. Try it! Do what you normally would do on a Saturday night, but on a Wednesday night. It’s real good.

If I had to rank the day, I’d have to give it third place. Some might argue that Wednesday deserve a lower honor. It is, after all, located next to Tuesday. I understand this line of thinking; I have a quite profound hate of Tuesday myself. However, Wednesday is a beacon of hope - the middle point in what otherwise is an intolerable (for most) strip of work, a way to evenly divide the pain and give the week a means of measure other then “oh god, we’re so far away!”

So far my Wednesday has been nearly uneventful. The only cool thing that’s happened so far in my day was taking my first hot shower since last Friday. The hot water heater for my floor of the building I live in decided to give up the ghost, but they fixed it last night around midnight. Maybe I’ve got it too good, but I don’t care if I ever take a cold shower again. It sucked a lot, and made me mad. Although now I’ve got no excuse to skip doing the dishes.

Other then that, I’ve been cleaning up our app. Some of it cleaned up very well, but I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing is ever going to be as perfect as I would like.

I think it’s time for another action shot of our ‘rake stats’ function, thus giving you an idea as to the size of our bitch’n awesome app. Check it out below, and compare it to the last action shot.

Tuesday

• allyn
• July 22nd, 2008
• 10:02:23 AM
• 6 Comments

Thus begins the day known as Tuesday. Tuesday’s are my least favorite day of the week by far.
Most people feel somewhat lethargic on a Monday. They claim that after the weekend, a Monday is just a shock to the system - too much crap after two days of not that much crap. Well, I make this claim about a Tuesday - a shock to your system indeed. Following Monday, one is naturally tired due to not quite being over the extended periods of sleep the weekend provides (unless you’re my mother, who happens to wake up at 5 am everyday). Monday night can’t help you - you’ll go to bed at midnight only to wake up to a 6 am alarm, then, if you’re like me, push the snooze button approximately 20 times until 8 am hits. Those two hours of sleep are nearly worthless because you wake up every 9 minutes.

Then the day starts. Tuesday is depressing. It’s surrounded by weekdays, and what’s more, it’s as far from the weekend as you can get without it being a Monday. It’s not Wednesday, oh no - with Wednesday, you’re half way there! Tuesday is exactly half way to nowhere, and the full ride to misery. It’s not even a Thursday, the equivalent on the other side of the week. Nothing short of using a Microsoft product can compare to the torment of a Tuesday.

What this calls for is a battle plan. What a person can do to prevent such heartache. My suggestion would be to get an iPod Touch and a few games, but that short lived experiment was ended last Friday when Dusty threatened to strangle me with the earbud cable. YouTube? If you can risk it. Be careful though, it’s a website that may be more dangerous then most, as you can easily get sucked into a never ending cycle of clicking that ultimately results in you gasping for air hours later and looking like you just bought some crack.

Probably not the best solution for work.

Whatever method you choose to dishevel your Tuesday, I wish you luck. If you slay this dragon, perhaps you’ll see tomorrow and, god willing, the holy grail - Friday night. Tuesday is a dangerous beast, and no one can help you - everybody has a problem, and it’s called Tuesday.

Monday

• allyn
• July 21st, 2008
• 10:42:47 AM
• 1 Comment

So, today is Monday. I must admit, Monday’s are my second favorite day of the week. They kick everything off for another weeks worth of work which, surprise surprise, I prefer over the weekends. I know, I know, but I think the crazy factor helped sell me to BrightMix. A more sane person wouldn’t have had a chance..

So far, It’s been a pretty interesting Monday. No doubt, due to the decent weekend: BrightMix took all its employee to see Batman at the local iMax, which was sweet even though we were sitting wayyyy to close to the screen. Yeah, it was awesome. Don’t be jealous.

Anyway, so far today I’ve sent out a few letters, received a death threat (apparently, Dusty doesn’t think the iPod Touch’s ability to play games is as cool as I do..) and converted a Model in our application to use polymorphic associations where it didn’t before. I’m still cleaning up the loose ends, but it wasn’t as tricky as some of the things we’ve done for this application. Probably the trickiest for me so far was getting the RSS stuff the way I wanted it. That task took a week to finish and added a lot of code to our application, but the end result is way sweet. I wish I could explain it more.

I suspect this week will get more stressful as time goes on, since we demo on Thursday - Wednesday night and Thursday morning are going to be a little crazy. Maybe if I get the time I’ll create a graph of amount of coffee consumed vs time on a demo-week. If you think your Monday is more awesome then mine, prove it with a comment!

work from airplane Friday

• ering
• July 12th, 2008
• 12:48:08 PM
• 1 Comment

Before I began my summer at BrightMix, I brought up to Kevin and Dusty that I had made a prior commitment out of town for a week in July. Of course, they were cool with it. Yay! Now that week has come, but I am feeling so excited about the progress of the project, I decided to keep working on it a bit while I was out of town.

I just want to say, a MacBook Pro is generally super-great except it’s waaay too big to comfortably work on sitting in 21A. I worked anyway. The screen was at that nice angle where certain colors start to invert. Who needs consistent colors? We are having our second demo this Tuesday, so I’ll be prepraring files to hand off while I’m out.
My first leg’s plane made a great landing considering the massive windshears…now I can see tons of city lights, so I think it’s time to shut down.

Finding Nemo

• robert
• July 10th, 2008
• 08:50:19 PM
• 1 Comment

I have been busy this week cleaning up a task that is a major part of our project’s Phase Two. (The deadline is coming up next week!)

I cannot go into to much information about the task I have been working on, but it involves a lot of automation to get things done easily (IE: Think millions and millions of robots doing my evil bidding. And yes, one of them will even go to the fridge to grab a soda for me.)

After completing the admin pages for these automated tasks, I was feeling quite accomplished. Then Rails decided to take all my feelings of accomplishment and throw them right out the window.

Instead of having a nice relaxing day of coding the publicly viewable page, it turned into one nightmare after another! I had written a pretty beefy SQL query that formats everything I want nicely, using a Select and Group By clause. My only problem with it… was the very reason I liked it so much: it broke Eager Loading!

Without eager loading, it was not an acceptable solution (to me). So, I decided to approach the problem differently. Instead of using a Find and doing a Group By, I created a has_many relationship in my model with an enforced limit.

This worked all great and dandy, but when it eager loaded the has_many relation, it was a bit too eager and loaded all the records in the database.

At first you might think… “Aww, how nice and helpful this little guy is… It wants to eager load EVERYTHING.”

Well, that would be the WRONG way to think! I set a limit of 5 records, but it was loading a good few 1,000 records. Just a giant waist of time and space.

Needless to say, this was a failed relationship and I quickly broke it off before it got to serious. (That’s how I roll.)

In my third, and final attempt (third times the charm!), I decided to write a method that would take care of everything for me.

In the end, it required more code and time, but this new method worked perfectly… and I am happy with the solution.

Wewt!