notkeepingitreal.com: Category Struggle

Ready to Get Fired

Kevin — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 12:04:00 -0600

As it turns out, it’s not the greatest idea to store your personal documents on a company computer. I was talking with some of my workmates over dinner the other day about what happens in the moments immediately after you get canned.

In many cases, there really isn’t any chance to salvage personal documents from your company computer, cover up frivolous instant messenger logs, or any of the other things that you would likely do given 15 minutes at your computer. I guess the reasoning is that fired (and therefore disgruntled) tech workers, rather than doing something useful, would prefer to delete all of the company’s code or bring down the corporate website for a while. No comment.

Now it’s not that I’m planning to get fired this week, but one may as well take any obvious precautions and follow standard best practices. So I rolled on over to lifehacker to find myself an online backup solution; I ended up settling on mozy.

It’s been a delight as I’ve gotten into it for the past 24 hours or so. This mozy link does include a referral code that will get you (and me, wink) an extra 256MB on top of the free 2GB.

It’s a bit ridiculous that this is the way I was finally convinced to back up my documents, but the end justifies the means I suppose. So if I do happen to get fired this week, I’ll now be happy as a clam, at least as far as having access to my personal documents is concerned.

Um, Did I Ever Talk About What the Hell Rails Actually Is?

Kevin — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:18:00 -0700

So two people, which in the world of the readers of this blog, corresponds to about the size of the Northern Hemisphere, have read and been confused about this rails thing. They and I know that the internet is out there to help, but it’s probably expecting a lot for people to leave the comfort of their source for news on everything. It’s time to set the record straight and clarify what exactly it is that I keep going on and on about.

Rails, short for Ruby on Rails, is, as it turns out, a web development framework. It was created in 2004 or thereabouts by a person who talks funny. Rails was built using a programming language called (surprise) Ruby, which has incidentally been around for much longer (publicly released in 1995).

The great thing about web development is that you can write programs that are available on any reasonable computer on the planet. One unfortunate characteristic of software development in general – and web development in particular – is that easy things often turn out to be pretty damn hard. Web development frameworks try to help us avoid this unfortunate state of affairs. The great thing about rails is that it actually makes web development a pretty good time for developers. Rails attempts, with a fair degree of success in my mind, to make the easy things easy and the hard things attainable. Ruby (that’s the language, remember) is also not to be neglected any time “programming” and “fun” happen to be used in the same breath, since rails obviously wouldn’t have been possible without it.

And now that our ducks are in a row, go enjoy rails!

Keeping It Real

Kevin — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 15:14:00 -0700

Someone’s gotta keep it real, and it might as well be this guy:

I took a screenshot to reminisce about the good old days in case http://keepingitreal.com turns into a porn site.

Don't Get Hosed

Kevin — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 15:39:00 -0600

Upgrade rails today!