Nathaniel Brown blogs

Selling my place

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:47:58 -0700

I am in the process right now with packing up my place and putting it all in a storage locker. After that, I will be selling it.

That being said, I wanted to see if anyone out there from Japan wanted to buy this? The property is going to be staged for presentation and will have fliers all over the place. Open house will be on May 10th and 11th. Times to be determined by my two new favourite realtors. Both equal in their own right, but complimentry regardless.

When I have taken the new shots of the staged location I will do what I want to get the photos published on here so those interested in an international Purchase, can get enough information to make the buy without having to see the place physically.

If you have any questions at all about the place, and are really. Serious about buying a new house in Vancouver that is going to be listed in the neighbourhood of 550,000.00 then please do contact me. I want to sell and you won't be dissapointed. Consider it an investment in your future.

My contact information is as follows.

Cell 604-724-6624
Email nshb@inimit.com

Address:
401 - 1990 Dunbar Street
Vancouver, BC V6R 3M3

Short description about the place... it looks south and has a balcony, fireplace, access to a shared (almost private seeing as nobody uses it) rooftop patio with a gorgeous view of the city and is right across the street from the best book store in Vancouver. Banyen Books. Those that know a thing or two can get as much knowledge as they want for enlightenment at this place. I can't tell you how much they have helped me on my journey so I give many thanks alone to them.

So yea, I am selling, and will be listing it next Monday if the plan goes as schedule. Ya never know tho :) I might just give it away!

Let's start caring equally about money and people.

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:22:23 -0700

So, I have come to realize that money and people are both equal.

You get companies such as America, and people such as China, who are both great in their own right, but are so distant from eachother.

What you find is an extreme polarity that needs to be balanced and when you find this. Well, trust me on this. You will find happyness.

The Truth?

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 02:54:55 -0700

So I have finally realized in my life that I have been completely run by Fear. This fear has caused insane pain in my life and I just wanted to share this with the world.

I hope to be free of it sometime soon.

Who's with me?

Einstein needs revision.

Mon, 7 Apr 2008 01:53:47 -0700

I have been contemplating this for over 3 years now, and have come to the realization that Einstein needs revision for simplicity sake.

His equation, e=mc2 is and has been the definitive statement of energy to date.

I have come to realize that his formula can be simplified into a statement which more people can understand in true, pure mathematical simplicity.

1 + 1 = 2

Positive + Negative = Pure Energy

What does this mean? Well it's another way to look at getting an atom bomb, new means to fuel cars, etc.

Consider if one atom had both positive and negative charge in the same space. This releases an enormous amount of energy at once. Not really sure yet what happens when this actually occurs, but lets just say it's big. Real big.

Here's a snippet from a site which helped me to finally figure out what e=mc2 means.

One of Einstein's great insights was to realize that matter and energy are really different forms of the same thing. Matter can be turned into energy, and energy into matter.

For example, consider a simple hydrogen atom, basically composed of a single proton. This subatomic particle has a mass of

0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001 672 kg

This is a tiny mass indeed. But in everyday quantities of matter there are a lot of atoms! For instance, in one kilogram of pure water, the mass of hydrogen atoms amounts to just slightly more than 111 grams, or 0.111 kg.

Einstein's formula tells us the amount of energy this mass would be equivalent to, if it were all suddenly turned into energy. It says that to find the energy, you multiply the mass by the square of the speed of light, this number being 300,000,000 meters per second (a very large number):

= 0.111 x 300,000,000 x 300,000,000
= 10,000,000,000,000,000 Joules

So, those two AA you use you power your remote control, well they have a TOTAL of 3 JOULES.

How's that for power? Oh yea.. what are we made of again? Sounds too simple to be real?

2011?

Thu, 6 Mar 2008 12:22:08 -0800

Just watched a vid by Vint Cerf (one of the creators of the internet itself) and he had this tidbit on one of his slides that he didn't really talk about at all.

21:16 - "IPv4 runout in 2011"

So what does this really mean?? Should we be really looking at this closer than we are? What are the implications of this. From what I have seen, IPv6 (the replacement) is nowhere near implemented on a global scale yet.

This could be what we anticipated for the year 2000 but got wrong? Worth considering I believe.

For the people that may not understand what IPv4 is (and why Vint saying this means so much), is basically he created the internet using a specific protocol and it evolved as such into IPv4. We currently use IPv4 to manage pretty much everything on the internet from domains to whatever.

Now, per say, imagine that all of a sudden no more ips can be made. A complete traffic jam occurs and now you have all these machines trying to connect to the internet but there is nobody letting them on? My guess is that there are many factors that we have not even come close to addressing on this.

Whistler / Blackcomb Peak to Peak Gondala

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 16:37:55 -0800

I was just checking out whistlerblackcomb.com and came across a link to a video that absolutely blew my mind. The intro goes on to explain that they are building a 4 tower lift that goes from the top of Whistler to the top of Blackcomb (the largest vertical rise mountain in North America).

The gondola will be 3.5 times the width of the San Fran bridge, that famous one. And 4.5x the height of statutes of liberty, 415 meters higher than the valley floor below.

This is one ride I am quite positive will be like no other. Can't wait! Planning to launch for Winter 08. With plenty of time for the 2010 Olympics, which if you didn't know already, will be hosted here in Vancouver and Whistler.

GIT, the new standard for SCM (Source Code Management)

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 03:26:24 -0800

Just watched the video on GIT from Google Talks, and I am going to put the wheels in motion to get this setup. First by researching it on best practices and such, but afterwards move it into our entire environment (meaning Toolbawks and most if not all of my clients as well).

Linus (the guy that created Linux) who made GIT (an alternative to Subversion/CVC/Perforce/Bitkeeper/etc) for SCM (source code management) tears people down to the ground with a neo-superior attitude that is hard to listen to, other than the fact is actually grounded in some very real truth behind what he says. The questions Google asked were sometimes more complex situations than we would need to solve for our repository, but in all of his responses, they resulted in a truly superior SCM system.

With that said, this is without a doubt the best way to handle our code in future and quite likely for a serious long time to come. The inherent methodology behind the technology is insanely secure, amazingly fast, and quite possibly the smallest way to store any code I have ever come across. It not only compresses the code, but in addition also takes less a mere kilobyte (1KB) to create a new branch. And with 22,000 files in the linux codebase, with more than 15,000 commits per week. Linus states that on his laptop he can merge an entire tree in less than a second. And on his home computer (which definitely sounded like not just one computer, but a decent cluster) he can run it at less than 1/10th of a second, minus the time it takes to actually download the files.

I don't know about you, but those few points above are reason enough to switch. The 70 minute talk was chalked full of highlights like this, so there is no doubt now that this is the new defacto of SCM, most people just don't know it yet :)

If you are interested in hearing the most condescending genius of our time, I'd check the video out. I listened to so many of his ideas that mimic my own, he's my new tech hero :)

Not to mention I am slightly jealous of his triple tier firewall network at home with 100% restricted physical access only to his machine to read his own email. Hah. You'll love how ironic it is me using gmail to host my own email after listening to him. I keep jumping back and forth over the fence when it comes to caring about whether people know that much information about me :)

By the sounds of it, he probably created Linux as a precaution to ensure that he only runs software on that triple fire-walled computer in which he controls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

And more details on git here:

http://git.or.cz/
http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html

Installing it:

On OSX, install MacPorts and run the following to get a list of GIT packages and install all of them:


port search git
sudo port install git-core stgit cgit cogito

Installing GIT with EPEL (for RHEL 4 & 5) - run this command afterwards "sudo yum search git | grep git | grep el4" (change to el5 on that grep if you are using RHEL 5.x) to find out what packages you can install related to GIT. Ignore the "digitemp" package in that list though.

Recent Shots - Jan 28th, 2008

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:21:14 -0800

Back since Nov 2006 I have been a "pro" photographer offering my services in the form of doing photos for things such as clothing lines needing to get their product shot for ecommerce stores, or any other type of business really, as well as shooting portfolio shots for some of the larger Vancouver talent as far as models go, or those that I think have a unique look that I haven't shot before.

Since then my photos have jumped leaps and bounds, and now I am offering pretty much magazine quality photos for everyone I shoot with. Whether it's a product shot, or a personal reminder of how you looked in your youth, they are memories that don't fade and can be remembered again and again by all (or we can keep them private too if you like) you choose to share them with.

That being said, I throughly enjoy doing development and still plan to continue doing this in the future. I've been doing it since I learned algebra, so I have learned a thing o two about what it is to do this profession. That's over 13 years for those that don't already know.

With that in mind, I have realized just how much I enjoy doing photography. Something that I have never experienced during all the years doing software development for large companies doing tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in business on the web. It comes when you do any sort of creative art, whether it be music (which I am trying to learn to truely understand with my new electric guitar), painting, photography, graphic arts, really any sort of creative form where you lay down a permanent track or piece of art that never fades. With websites and this constant rate of change, you really forget to make that next feature or next piece of the project that important. To the extent that it really could be never forgotten.

When it comes to now looking back at my programming, with this new way of seeing a creative day in photography, you change your approach, to now include a quality never before found. It has brought a rejuvenation to my coding that I can't explain. Not long ago I was thoroughly wanting to find another career, I felt like I had reached the top, and with all the bullshit that was going on with the conference scene, I was about ready to make it big doing something else. Well I found it, but I have relearned why I like developing so much. You really can make something that may very well never be forgotten.

Take a look at www.perity.com for my Recent Shots.

RubyCamp Notes - Rack, Merb, and Rubinius

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:02:29 -0800

I managed to get to a few hours of the RubyCamp event here on Saturday and it was interesting to see the few talks I did.

Rack - ability to handle multi threaded image processing
Merb - multi threaded "rails", but better
Rubinium - the new "RVM", a Ruby Virtual Machine heading on track to run Rails in the next 6 months or so (totally random guess based on the feedback at the talk, but this sounds like a fair estimate).

Out of these three talks, the least interesting but maybe the most important was the Rubinium talk. Due to the infancy of the project, you really can't do much with it other than run Webrick and a few other things, but none of which has shown to prove any use to me at this time. When it does come to fruition, Rubinius promises to be faster than Ruby core, and with the inherent virtual machine interoperability, you will see some great reactionary products come out of this market space. Something to watch for, but not of immediate importance as of yet.

The Rack and Merb talks were quite interesting, but after about 5 minutes or so I found myself realizing the value, but really needing to dig in and basically implement a project or two to see the real results. Both of these new options in the Rails/Ruby space had a far greater impact on my future decisions towards project technologies than I expected. The results can be quite astounding.

Such is the case with Rack. The presenter went on to say that they setup the multi threaded environment only to find out that his server infrastructure basically came to a halt when they didn't have a throttle on the image processing that was going on. With the potential of having infinite threads now entirely feasible with what was demonstrated, you now can cause your server to come to an instant halt without care. So, plan for this.

Merb uses gems as plugins. That was one of the coolest features I heard of the framework. I don't like the fact that I can't immediately use my Rails plugins inside of Merb, but regardless - the reasons I plan to use Merb in the future, don't entirely include my existing codebase anyways. So not much of a concern there. I asked the presenter during his talk about a Rails Plugin to Merb Plugin conversion utility, but he knew of none yet in existence. Whether it's me or someone else, this is a likely development that will encourage wider adoption and faster transition to Merb in the future, unless of course Rails does what Merb did and fixes itself up to the new standard Merb has drawn.

All in all, a well spent 3 hours or so of my time. Learned a few tricks and can't wait to try them out on a near future project. Expect to see some new plugins based on these technologies in the future.

Mcirosoft Office 2008 for Mac / OS X

Wed, 9 Jan 2008 14:20:06 -0800

Just got the announcement in my inbox that informed me that MS Office 2008 is now ready for purchase. I was quite displeased with Office 2004 that I have been running since I switched to Mac last February. One of the best productivity choices I have witnessed to date.

With Office 2008 you will notice that there are 3 versions, the usual education version, standard, and a new media version that does some fancy stuff with digital assets hooked into Expression. Long story about this product name, but needless to say, it's been used before Microsoft got their hands on it.

Regardless, the upgrade looks pretty sweet, and likely screams on the new dual core CPU's in the Mac's these days.

Check out the product details here:

Office 2008 for Mac - Home and Student Edition, $149.95

Office 2008 for Mac, $399.95

Office 2008 for Mac - Special Media Edition, $499.95

Oh and Apple, you guys need to get some "pretty urls" for your store. Not being able to copy and paste the url due to session restrictions does not make it easy for me to share the announcement.

Engines 2.0 and Rails 2.0 Upgrade Gotchas

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 12:37:35 -0800

I just updated a couple of my personal projects to Rails 2.0 and Engines 2.0 and I ran into a few problems once the gems were upgraded.


sudo gem update --system
sudo gem update rails -y

Change your svn:externals for your engines plugin to point to the trunk.


cd project/root
svn pe svn:externals vendor/plugins

Add/update the following:


engines    http://svn.rails-engines.org/engines/trunk/

First, the config.plugins needs to change from "*" to :all. So your new line would look something like this:


config.plugins = [:engines, :all]

Change the Rails version in your environment.rb.


RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '2.0.2' unless defined? RAILS_GEM_VERSION

Adding the boot line to your environment.rb (above the initializer).


require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '../vendor/plugins/engines/boot')

Adding some new session config options to your environment.rb as well:


  config.action_controller.session = {
    :session_key => '_www_example_com-trunk_session',
    :secret      => 'Long string for security. Run "rake secret" to generate'
  }

Utilization of the new /config/initializers to be used on load (optional). Use these for plugin or namespaced configuration options. I use them quite a bit for the Toolbawks suite I am building.

For your project, strip environment.rb down as much as you can by extracting and spliting the options out into individual.rb files inside initializers. This will clean it up and keep it much more organized for future releases of Toolbawks in particular.

Not sure if this wasn't in 1.2.6 or not, but I seen an update to the root route change in the new default Rails project. Change your empty route (root url) to be like this, but with your own controller/action:


  map.root :controller => "collections", :action => 'show'

Migrations have also been updated, but when I tried to use both the 1.2 syntax as well as the 2.0 syntax, it worked fine, so not much of a gotcha:

Rails 1.2 Migrations syntax


    create_table :collections do |t|
		t.column :title, :string
		t.column :description, :text
		t.column :count, :integer
		t.column :created_by, :integer
		t.column :created_at, :datetime
		t.column :modified_at, :datetime
    end

Rails 2.0 Migrations syntax


    create_table :collections do |t|
		t.string :title
		t.text :description
		t.integer :count
		t.integer :created_by
		t.datetime :created_at
		t.datetime :modified_at
    end

As you can see the 2.0 syntax is much cleaner, but for all your old migrations this is sorta a waste of time to update as far as I'm concerned. So refactor when needed, and use the new syntax from now on.

The breakpoint server has changed, and the environment.rb config option is no longer needed. This really doesn't do much if it's in the config, but to get rid of the deprecation warning, I suggest removing it:


config.breakpoint_server = true

Pagination has been removed from Rails core, so you will need to upgrade that. I suggest using the will_paginate plugin. Checkout their site for upgrade instructions. Or you can use the classic_pagination if you don't need serious performance increases. The code is claimed to be dead for classic_pagination, so I suggest upgrading now to will_paginate, to avoid confusion later.

I had a problem with some of my logger code, so I added this line in one of my lib files to give me a global logger function I can use anywhere. This will later be extracted into a plugin for more comprehensive logging functionalities, but for now a simple addition of these three lines worked:


def logger
  RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER
end

Engines.current.version no longer exists, so if you want that sort of functionality to see what version the engine is, add a new property to your plugin like so:


module DatetimeToolbawks
  mattr_accessor :version
  self.version = false
end

And add this to your init.rb script within your plugin.


DatetimeToolbocks.version = Proc.new { File.open(File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'vendor', 'plugins', 'datetime_toolbawks', 'VERSION'), 'r').readlines[0] }

Some methods have been entirely removed now, such as render_file and render_json. That means you must update them to get a functioning Rails 2.0 app.


      render :file => rescues_path("layout"), :status => response_code_for_rescue(exception)

That's it for now. Pretty sure I missed a few things, so when I update another app to Engines/Rails 2.0 I'll be sure to refresh this page with any additional upgrade steps.

All the Toolbawks plugins are now functioning for Rails 2.0, so it would be wise to get on board, reap the benefits of the Redmine. I was introduced to it by one of my clients and I have since been using it to compare the likes of other project management systems out there that I have used in the past such as Trac, JIRA, dotProject, Mingle, Basecamp, and well pretty much any other one that I've come across trying to get one that actually works the way I want, provides the additional customization layers I need (cudos to Mingle for this) as well as just serves like a natural Project Management app inside and out.

The new upgrade from Redmine does just that and more. With it's subversion integration and clean interface upgrades, this version is a keeper. Definately going to be using this as the primary from now on and moving my tasks into it.

Take a peek on the Toolbawks dev environment and see what you see. It's a pretty rockin app I must say.

More details on the Toolbawks suite soon. We have a major release of our very private and super awesome eCommerce components coming out. Can't wait to show this one off.

Firefox 2.0 Phishing Protection

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 11:01:52 -0800

Just came to my attention that Firefox has been safely managing the integrity of the websites I visit for some time now and until today, I had no idea.

Firefox 2.0 apparently comes with some really sweet integration to protect you from Phishing attacks, that I believe links into the database of all logged phishing websites and shows this handy little Window anytime you visit one that has been flagged.

I had an email from eGold saying my account was expiring, so I decided to take a peek. All emails that come from bank accounts, or even paypal for that matter are prety much removed immediately as I am sure they are fake, even if they come from my bank. This one, however, seemed to have missed the logical first glance and garnered a click of mine.

Want to try it out yourself?? Sure, but do not fill in any information. You're account is not going to expire. You probably don't even have one at eGold anyways.

I repeat, do not fill anything in. Here it is.. Be sure to load it up in Firefox 2.0 otherwise there is no point unless you like having your identity stolen?

Another site I just found to test it, which is a bit safer (as it's the official link by Firefox), is here.

Internet Explorer on Mac - IE 5.0, IE 5.5, IE 6.0, and IE 7.0

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 10:30:15 -0800

Just came across a site that outlines how to get IE 5.0, IE 5.5, IE 6.0, and IE 7.0 all on OSX and run natively using X11.

You'll need to install X11 from the Tiger DVD's you got when you bought it, or head on over to this guy's site to download it. For those on Leopard, you're in luck by default.

So, with IE 5.0 all the way to IE 7.0 now being able to be run on Mac natively using Darwine and X11, there doesn't seem to be much need to get back on Paralells for debugging my CSS and AJAX interfaces anymore.

Check it out, ies4osx is where it's at.

Internet Sync, is it really that hard to do?

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 11:37:17 -0800

Well I have never done it yet, and it sure sounds interesting, but how about that. You look at Cell phones, iPods, and well pretty much every other mobile device that has internet and you see that they have to sync by plugging them in.

Honestly, that's why I always trail off with using these things is that:

a) Either too much of a pain to charge the battery so often
b) I get bored of having to sync it all the time.

So back to the title. Why not just have it sync over the internet? With the iPhone's and iPod Touch's coming out these days, and even the other new cell's coming out nearly as good. Not one have I seen that sync's wirelessly. The iTouch's have the Wifi capability, so there's no reason why not to. They get internet just as quick, why not a webservice call?

I am believing that they are going to read this and come out with it or someone else will, but if I don't see it soon enough, surely I will see about building it myself. Would anyone else use it? Curious to know.. email me at nshb(at)inimit.com - which also works for MSN too - and let's hear it.