Derek Neighbors’ blog

The Wall of Doom

nobody@vox.com(Derek Neighbors) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:42:04 -0800

We are an agile development shop through and through. We have a custom process that draws from many different methodolgies in the agile community. Currently we chew through note cards and consume blank cork board space quicker than any team I have met!!! I have an addiction to green push pins. For data warehouse project for one of our customers I created a mobile task board to keep on task. Here is a little insight into our Cork World!

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Test Driving The New Diggs

nobody@vox.com(Derek Neighbors) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:45:49 -0800

DSC00026.JPG
Originally uploaded by aparticularpath.

We have been doing some re-modeling around the Integrum shop to accomodate continued growth. We have setup a sitting/presentation/napping area with some shiny new couches. The team decided to give them a test after we opened them up.

IMG00054.jpg

While this is a nice serene look at the new furniture. It was no easy task getting the furniture up to the second floor where we reside. In fact, we had to hire a pack mule named Kolt to get r done!!!!!

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Crazy Delicious?

nobody@vox.com(Derek Neighbors) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 08:04:16 -0800

Spill_the_beans

During the last few weeks the speed at Integrum has been at break neck speed. We are doing a ton of cool stuff and working with a lot of top name clients (that of course we are under NDA with). We are touching technologies that are new and exciting on a regular basis and we aren't taking the time to talk about them. So I figured I would spill the beans a little bit.

One area that we have started mastery of is Xen virtualization. We have consolidated our server farm considerably to cut power needs and create standard rails machines to bring new applications on line with little effort. This work has really started pushing us to research Amazon's elastic computing cloud and S3. We have some interesting ideas on how to abuse this technology for many of our customers. We will let you know how it works or doesn't work as the days pass.

Iuseopenid

Additionally we have many customers that are building families of applications or services and want to solve the problem of having to re-register for each service. We have been researching OpenID for some time and recently have really made a push to implement this at our core. I noticed that DHH seems to be going down the same path and so I am sure we will hear a lot more about this in the near future.

Last, but not least one thing near to my own computing heart has been research towards doing some some data warehousing via rails. I have run into a great little gem called activewarehouse. I have not had a chance to fully exploit playing with it, but on the surface it shows potential. I hope to blogging about how wonderful it is in the very near future.

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What Is Under Your Hood?

nobody@vox.com(Derek Neighbors) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 07:47:15 -0800

So a while back everyone was "showing their gems", I liked the idea of seeing what others were using so I figured I would drop my trousers and expose my gems in a similar fashion.

actionmailer (1.3.2, 1.2.3)
Service layer for easy email delivery and testing.

actionpack (1.13.2, 1.12.3)
Web-flow and rendering framework putting the VC in MVC.

actionwebservice (1.2.2, 1.1.4)
Web service support for Action Pack.

activerecord (1.15.2, 1.14.3)
Implements the ActiveRecord pattern for ORM.

activesupport (1.4.1, 1.3.1)
Support and utility classes used by the Rails framework.

activewarehouse (0.2.0)
Build data warehouses with Rails.

BlueCloth (1.0.0)
    BlueCloth is a Ruby implementation of Markdown, a text-to-HTML
    conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using
    an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to
    structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

builder (2.0.0)
Builders for MarkUp.

capistrano (1.2.0)
    Capistrano is a framework and utility for executing commands in
    parallel on multiple remote machines, via SSH. The primary goal is
    to simplify and automate the deployment of web applications.

color-tools (1.3.0)
color-tools provides colour space definition and manpiulation as
well as commonly named RGB colours.

daemons (0.4.4)
A toolkit to create and control daemons in different ways

fastercsv (0.2.1)
FasterCSV is CSV, but faster, smaller, and cleaner.

gem_plugin (0.2.1)
A plugin system based only on rubygems that uses dependencies only

mailfactory (1.2.3)
MailFactory is a pure-ruby MIME mail generator

mime-types (1.15)
Manages a MIME Content-Type that will return the Content-Type for a
given filename.

money (1.7.1)
Class aiding in the handling of Money.

mongrel (0.3.13.3)
A small fast HTTP library and server that runs Rails, Camping, and
Nitro apps.

needle (1.3.0)
    Needle is a Dependency Injection/Inversion of Control container for
    Ruby. It supports both type-2 (setter) and type-3 (constructor)
    injection. It takes advantage of the dynamic nature of Ruby to
    provide a rich and flexible approach to injecting dependencies.

net-sftp (1.1.0)
Net::SFTP is a pure-Ruby implementation of the SFTP client protocol.

net-ssh (1.0.10)
Net::SSH is a pure-Ruby implementation of the SSH2 client protocol.

pdf-writer (1.1.3)
A pure Ruby PDF document creation library.

piston (1.1.1)
Piston is a utility that enables merge tracking of remote
repositories.

postgres-pr (0.4.0)
A pure Ruby interface to the PostgreSQL (>= 7.4) database

rails (1.2.2, 1.1.4)
Web-application framework with template engine, control-flow layer,
and ORM.

rails_sql_views (0.5.1)
Adds SQL Views to Rails.

rake (0.7.1)
Ruby based make-like utility.

rami (0.4)
A proxy server/client api for the Asterisk Manager Interface

rcov (0.7.0.1)
Code coverage analysis tool for Ruby

RedCloth (3.0.4)
    RedCloth is a module for using Textile and Markdown in Ruby. Textile
    and Markdown are text formats. A very simple text format. Another
    stab at making readable text that can be converted to HTML.

ruby-openid (1.1.4)
A library for consuming and serving OpenID identities.

ruby-yadis (0.3.4)
A library for performing Yadis service discovery

ruport (0.6.0)
A generalized Ruby report generation and templating engine.

scruffy (0.2.2)
A powerful, clean graphing library for Ruby.

sources (0.0.1)
This package provides download sources for remote gem installation

transaction-simple (1.3.0)
Simple object transaction support for Ruby.

vpim (0.360)
iCalendar and vCard support for ruby

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Passion?

nobody@vox.com(Derek Neighbors) — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 07:50:41 -0800

An interesting topic that comes up on occassion is what kind of employees are we looking for? What separates a great employee from a good employee? How do you achieve great things as a company? Recently Josh Knowles floated a good posting from Kathy Sierra's blog on "Don't Ask Employees To Be Passionate About The Company". It got a fair amount of dialog started here at Integrum.

In fact, it kicked off losts of good discussion and brought out some great responses from many of our employees. Personally, I thought that something was missing from this post (as did many on the Integrum team). For me it was the lack of focus on the customer. While I agree that trying to get passionate about a "corporation" (that dirty "C" word) isn't where it is at. Being passionate about the craft only gets you so far. The true love of a professional craftsman is seeing the outcome of their labor being enjoyed by the customer. The tailor loves to see their perfect creation on the run way on a great model. The architect loves to see their building inhabitated and adored by its dwellers. So too should the programmer bask in the glory of having their application appreciated by it's users as something that helps and not hinders their task at hand.

I was very inspired by a different line of thought reading "How to be Remarkable" by Seth Godin. One of the lines there just struck home If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it? No use being remarkable at something that people don't care about. Not ALL people, mind you, just a few. A few people insanely focused on what you do is far far better than thousands of people who might be mildly interested, right? In fact, I asked Gist to start designing a T-Shirt because we are ready to become remarkable.

Tattoo Harley Shield

I kind of filed these things away in separate compartments and didn't really think to bridge the two. Then last night Josh asked me if I was ready to be a passionate employee? So my initial thought is hmmm an Integrum tattoo. I'm down. Then I read the comment on the bottom about Harley Davidson tattoos. A light clicked on! A really remarkable company/product doesn't inspire users to simply buy and wear a t-shirt. Remarkable is having your logo forever branded on your customers body!!!!

So I ask, what makes Harley Davidson the kind of company that people widly emboss their logo for ever on their being? What other companies have such a strong passionate base of users/customers that they emblazing their logo with pride on thier body? I have my opinions but will share them in a different posting.

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Weekend of Luxury

nobody@vox.com(Derek Neighbors) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 12:24:02 -0800

This weekend was spent getting away from life. It was so nice. I spent nearly all day Saturday lounging on the couch and getting caught up on 22+ hours of PVR'ed television shows. Then my lovely wife made great Mexican food while I finally grabbed some Cointreau at the local liquor store in an attempt to try to perfect the "Pomegranate Martini" for my bride. Getting closer, but its still not perfect.

Special Creation Breakfast

This morning I woke up and grabbed the Wii and started to play Wario Ware Smooth Moves while Noah was out playing and the girls were upstairs. I got all 50 levels complete on one of the mini games and had a BLAST doing it. Then Ashley really started to ask about making "flower eggs". I figured I would give it a try but we didn't have flower cookie cutters. So we settled on Heart shaped eggs. They really turned out better than I expected.

We started by cutting out the bread with the cookie cutter. Lathering the cookie sheet with butter and bread with butter. Then pre-heated the oven to 400 degrees and started to wait. Well actually we brought mom some coffee.

Egg Creation.

We then cracked and egg at a time and poured them into the holes we had created. Only one yoke was funny looking during this stage. We then slid the tray in the oven for about 7 minutes while we started to prepare the bacon on the stove. In seven minutes we had decent looking creation that was very presentable. The kids said it tasted good (like boiled eggs). I ate a little of Noah's and it definitely had that easter egg taste. Pretty cool little creation. I love getting a chance to hang with the kids and be dad!

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Eye Surgery

nobody@vox.com(Derek Neighbors) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 12:52:39 -0800

Driving downtown this morning I got a spec of sand in my eye. It was causing havoc with my contact lens. Of course, I have 30 day lenses in for about 120 days w/o ever removing them. I tried to remove and put glasses on last weekend to let eyes breathe but have lost my glasses in the move.

Make Shift Contact Lens Kit

Anyhow, I got downtown and finally took out the contact, but could not find anyone with solution. Normally, water works fine, but it just wasn't flushing things out properly. I finally got someone to give me a little Systane eye dropper. I flushed my eye and no avail it still hurt like a bitch.

I took a bottle of water, removed the cap, placed lens in cap and poured water on the lens. I went back to work with one eye shut (felt like a pirate) for about an hour or so. Then went and re-flushed my eye and re-instered the lens. All seems well in the world now and my eye is moist and happy.

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Vox Hunt: Personal Best

nobody@vox.com(Derek Neighbors) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:29:57 -0800

Show us the best picture you took in 2006.
Submitted by Captured Moments.

IMG 3384

First thing that came to mind. Im a sucker for stupid things like this. Damn you Vox. Damn you!

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Rub The Nub

nobody@vox.com(Derek Neighbors) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 08:29:26 -0800

So for the past few days my mighty mouse has just been acting up. Sometimes I would lose the ability to scroll down. I thought maybe Colloquy might just be acting up as it has issues a lot. This morning was the last straw as it just would NOT scroll down.

So like any employee of a company with good irc channel, I asked my fellow geeks.

[09:16am] derek: has anyone seen a mighty mouse freak out and allow you to scroll up, but not scroll down?
[09:16am] ruinous: yep
[09:16am] ruinous: well known problem
[09:16am] derek: is there a hack or a fix
[09:16am] ruinous: to fix, turn upside down and rub vigorously
[09:16am] ruinous: (i'm serious)
[09:16am] derek: at least this mouse has no balls or that would be wrong
[09:17am] ruinous: Just Rub the Nub!
[09:18am] derek: yes that fixed it
[09:18am] derek: thank you sir

You can find the Apple support documentation here.

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Free Time

nobody@vox.com(Derek Neighbors) — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 19:59:59 -0800

It has been a long while since I have had a relaxing half hour. After a very stressful kickoff to the Winter 2007 soccer season that started with an 8:00am game in Fountain Hills (60 miles away) got home and did some BBQing. I love to cook especially on the old BBQ!! While eating a juicy burger I started watching the Seahawks vs Cowboys game. At half time my channel surfing diverted me to a seminar at USC on Blogging vs. Print and the future. It inspired me when turning the game back on to go search for some new blog feeds to read.

I happened to stumble across Seth Godin's blog and a post about being T-Shirt worthy. There was another digg article about top ten tech cities. So, it spurred a goal for 2007 in me. Make Integrum T-Shirt worthy. So thenewugly, if you are reading this start designing a t-shirt worth wearing! Local tech groups beware... by the end of the year you will want an Integrum t-shirt!

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