Ryan Carmelo Briones

Introducing Rethink Columbus

2008-08-12T09:41:00.002-04:00

As a programmer, I've been able to accomplish a lot of things by sheer effort alone. Working in this age, whenever a brick wall problem comes along, we're usually able to brute force it with a well-crafted Google search. These situations allow us to learn some things; they expose things about the language/platform that we didn't previously know (syntax/grammar) and sometimes they represent idioms of the language we're working with. But programmers cannot live by effort alone. It's time to refactor our minds.

Welcome to Rethink Columbus. The goals of this group are simple

Introduce attendees to diverse programming languages and styles in order to change the way they think about solving problems with programming languages.

Convey a pragmatic "right tool for the job" attitude toward programming languages.

Above all: have fun.

Rethink Columbus is intended to be a gathering place for open-minded individuals who are interested in honing their skills as software craftsman. Rethink Columbus is also part lab space. It gives us the opportunity to play with languages, platforms and concepts that we might not be able to fit, or maybe don't want to fit, into the daily 9-5. The fun part is the journey. Think of it like a cruise:

We'll start out with a destination; a place we can point to on the horizon. Maybe that's programming language or concept that can teach something; change the way we think.

Hire a guide. When it feels right, we'll bring in someone to steer the ship a bit. Provide some experience for the exploration.

Identify some excursions. Maybe there are a few focused exercises that can provide clear goals and more discussion points... maybe even some pairing involved?

Enjoy the company of others. Eat, drink and be merry! Meet people. Discuss!

I think that about does it. If you're interested, sign up for the mailing list at Google Groups and stay tuned to the website. If people are as excited as I am, maybe drinks would be in order? We'll see what happens. Thanks for listening.

http://rethinkcolumbus.com
http://groups.google.com/group/rethink-columbus

Making Curved Lines in Apple Keynote 2008

2008-08-03T19:29:00.002-04:00

When I was working on my slides for OSCON 2008, I really wanted to have a curved line in my presentation. Unfortunately there is no simple tool that creates curved lines or allows you to curve straight lines in Apple Keynote 2008. So I went to Google and search for a way to do it. I came up with a lot of results for people asking how to accomplish this and an almost equal amount of results saying it wasn't possible. Then I found this post in the Apple Discussion Forums. The first time I read it, I breezed through it and immediately went to test it out in Keynote. It didn't work for me. So, I went searching farther. Later in the day, after much failure, I found that posting again and read the directions more carefully and tried each step. The results were flawless. At that point, I decided that the internet could use at least one more resource on the subject, and this blog post was born. Here's the instructions on making a curved line in Apple Keynote 2008 with screenshots.

1. While working in your Keynote presentation, choose the "Draw a shape" tool by click on the "Shape" icon in the toolbar, then choosing the "Draw a Shape" icon at the bottom. Alternatively, you can go through the menu (Insert -> Shape -> Draw a Shape) to achieve the same results.

2. Click on the presentation to set the first point. This is where your line will start. Then, when setting the second point, click and hold the mouse button. This will give you the ability to adjust the curve of the line. While holding, move your mouse downwards on the screen and adjust the mouse left and right accordingly to get the curve that you want. When you're happy with the curve, let go of the mouse button. Hit the Escape Key (esc) to stop the drawing process.

3. Your "shape" should now be selected. If it's not (has no white boxes around it), click on the shape once. Now open up the Inspector. (⌘⌥I or View -> Show Inspector) Click on the "Object Inspector" button. Now select the drop down for "Fill" and choose "None." This will turn your shape into an empty path.

4. Last, select the drop down for "Stroke" and choose "Line". This will make your line look like a real line. At this point you're basically done!

5. From here, you can customize your line line any normal line. In my example below I added a 15px stroke and an arrow head on the end point.

Enjoy!

Slides from OSCON2008

2008-07-23T17:43:00.003-04:00

Intro to Ruby Web Frameworks

Keynote, Zipped

Commanding Your SSH Universe with Capistrano

Keynote, Zipped

I will update this after my Capistrano talk. (read: slides still need work)

UPDATED: Capistrano talk slides uploaded!

Come see me at OSCON 2008

2008-07-21T13:49:00.003-04:00

If you see me this week, please come up and chat for a bit! If you're even more adventurous, come and see one of my talks:

Wed 10:45am in F151 - Introduction to Ruby Web Frameworks

Thurs 5:20pm in Portland 251 - Commanding Your SSH Universe with Capistrano

Easier Capistrano Deployments from Github

2008-07-15T10:35:00.002-04:00

I've posted an article this morning on the Edgecase Blog about our experiences in updating our deployment strategy after moving from a self-hosted centralized git repository to Github. Enjoy!

Easier Capistrano Deployments from Github

Git branches for storing project assets

2008-04-03T23:39:00.003-04:00

Background: So I'm starting up a personal project. This is a the first of which I'm going to do completely on Git hosted at github. I'm really excited because I've been using git at work, and I have been watching github come to life on the sidelines. But all was not well in git-ville. In my projects, I tend to do a BUNCH of Photoshop mockups and slice them into HTML to "prototype" designs/layouts and I like to keep them in version control if possible. In Subversion, my repository would look something like this:



- _design
   |- assets
   |- mockups
- branches
- tags
   |- myapp_0_1
   |- myapp_0_2
- trunk
   |- app
   |- config
   |- db
   [Standard Rails Directories]

Unfortunately there's some problems with this kind of setup in Git. First, what we've come to know and love as trunk in Subversion, Git refers to, more or less, as the "master" branch. So there's no way to create some top-level directory above the root of my app to handle "odd" files.

Another option I thought of was just keeping a "design" folder in the root of my app, but REALLY didn't like that. Dirtay! The idea from the beginning is to keep these files separate from my actual app. And then when deploying I'd sure as heck want to make sure that I either 1) didn't get those files when pulling (which I'm pretty sure would be have been next to impossible) or 2) setup some sort of script to delete that crap out of my release directory as part of deploy process.

In the spirit of Git, why not create another branch to track the odd files? (git checkout -b designbranch) Is that one of the things that Git is supposed to be really good at? Yes, but part of the idea of branches is that they share a common history. git checkout -b designbranch is the same as git checkout -b designbranch HEAD or git checkout -b designbranch and that's not what I want, but it seems like the best plan with a little bit of deleting... and hacking... and ABSOLUTELY no merging.

My Solution: I decided tonight was the night. I needed to do something to get this done. I made a little mention of this at the office explaining to Jerry, who's going to help me out on the design stuff, what the plan was. Chad then interjected with the idea that Git was capable of making blank branches. Wow! That would be great. But a quick look at man git-branch left me wanting. There was nothing there that looked like you could create a blank branch.

Fast forward to "free time". So I'm ready to do this thing, and being the Git newb that I am, I wanted to make sure that I was creating this branch properly so that it would work with my github setup and subsequent clones would have access to the branch in the proper manner. I stop by one of my favorite git usage guides, and that pretty much had what I wanted, but it still didn't feel right, so I moved onward. After Googling at bit I found an article with a very interesting title: Creating a git branch without ancestry. Jackpot! This is exactly what I needed. And, after a few tests, rm projectdir; git clone git@...project.git and some success recreating this in /tmp here's what I came up with:



# standard github project setup
mkdir myproject
cd myproject
git init
touch README
git add README
git commit -m 'Intialize repo'
git remote add origin git@github.com:ryanbriones/myproject
git push origin

# add design branch
git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/design
rm .git/index
mkdir assets mockups
echo 'Placeholder.' > assets/HOLDER
echo 'Placeholder.' > mockups/HOLDER
git add assets/ mockups/
git commit -m 'Initialize design branch'
git checkout -f master
git push origin design:refs/heads/design

# after making changes in design branch, push with
git push origin design

And so far I'm happy with this, but of course, if I run into any issues with this, I'll post something about it. Enjoy.

Stephanie on Etsy

2008-03-21T00:15:00.002-04:00

So I've been a little lazy about making this blog post. Ok, really lazy. I've been trying to convince my wife Stephanie for a long time to post her notecard crafts online and try to make a little money at it. We were almost there one time, but I failed at "e-commerce 101". Luckily, one of Stephanie's coworkers picked up the torch where I left off and had a much more adept convincing power.

Stephanie created a site on Esty a week or two before Valentines Day and since has put up some wicked cool notecards. I'm personally keen on the Repurposed Magazine Envelopes with Notecards. You can't pack that up in Hallmark!

So, if you've got a few extra dollars just burning a hole in your pocket, consider buying some notecards for you or one of your loved ones. Money well spent!

Speaking at OSCON 2008

2008-03-20T23:21:00.002-04:00

So as the geekier of you reading this might know I started out my career of computer programming using Perl. Being a young programmer with no formal training, I immersed myself in the Perl community as much as possible. Perlmonks. Magnet and DALnet #perl. But once a year there was the mecca of Perl community events that I so wished I could attend. The Perl Conference that took place as part of O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, or OSCON. Back then there was never any chance I'd get to go.

Fast forward to the 2008. I had already decided that I didn't really want to go to RailsConf again. RailsConf 2007 was a bit of a disappointment for me in many different ways. After having attended Codemash 2008 in January, my itch to be involved in things that broaden my "software development horizons" had become much itchier. What could scratch this itch for me? OSCON 2008 maybe? "No way!", I said. "I couldn't come up with the money to attend this conference, much less travel to Portland, OR." Luckily Joe O'Brien was there to offer me some good advice. "Submit a proposal to OSCON. If it gets picked, you'll probably get free registration to the conference." It sounded like good advice at the time, anyway. So, I put together two proposals for OSCON and submitted them right at the Feb. 4th deadline. I don't think I could have squeezed another one out, but the idea is the more proposals you produce, the better chance you have of being accepted. And then there was waiting.

Until Mar 17th...

We were just talking at the office that morning RailsConf and if I was still going to go to Portland. ENTP is hosting an "unconference" (CabooseConf) during the same time as RailsConf in Portland, and I thought it would be cool to go. It would have to be dependent on whether one of my talks got accepted for OSCON, though. I would only have enough moola for one of the conferences. Later that day I happened to be checking Twitter when I saw that Jay Fields had his talk on Adhearsion accepted for OSCON. "When am I going to find out whether either of my talks were accepted!?" I thought. Annoyed, I brought up the OSCON proposals dashboard when I saw something odd. Two things required my attention. Not to be distracted, I soldiered on to the proposal status page and that's when I saw it; both of my talks had been accepted. A rush of excitement rushed throught my veins! I announced to the office that I had been accepted. Cheers all around. After I sat back down, I looked at the page again and another emotion rushed my veins: fear. Both of my talks have been accepted for OSCON! This will be my first conference speaking engagement. Yikes.

So I'm both excited and fearful. This is a big step for me and I will finally get to attend OSCON, a dream not forgotten. At any rate, here are the abstracts I submitted and hope that if you can attend you will come and see me!

An Introduction to Ruby Web Frameworks

The Internet is changing at an exponential rate. Yesterday’s web pages have effectuated today’s web applications and the fresh, fertile soil that it brings is manifesting itself in a new crop of web frameworks that are driving this new frontier. The Ruby community isn’t holding back either. They’ve got the power and simplicity of the Ruby language on their side. They’re opinionated and pragmatic. And most of all, they’re having fun.

In this talk we’ll take a journey into the world of Ruby and take a look at what’s making waves in Ruby Web Framework development like Convention over Configuration, Domain-Specific Languages and focus on Test-Driven Development. We wouldn’t be well-rounded if we didn’t take some time to address some of the criticism that Ruby has received and admit that it has shortcomings. Throughout this talk we’ll cite examples from a few Ruby Web Frameworks, like Rails, Merb, Camping and Sinatra, talk about how they’ve changed the world for others and how they might change your world too.

Commanding Your SSH Universe with Capistrano

What could be worse than having to manage and maintain application servers for a team of agile developers? Being on that team as a developer AND the systems administrator. A setup for one application might included a development server, a staging server, a cluster of production servers and one or two servers for version control and continuous integration. The fuse is burning at both ends for you and there is never time to waste. Meet Capistrano. Capistrano enables you to automate your many system administration tasks harnessing the ubiquity of SSH and the simplicity of a Ruby DSL configuration.

During this talk, we’ll take a look a some of my real world usage of Capistrano in my job as a web application developer and system administrator. I’ll demonstrate how to free yourself from the monotony of login-execute-logout method by creating a few simple Capistrano tasks, covering the basics of configuration and usage. We’ll also examine how Capistrano runs a task in parallel on multiple remote servers by creating a simple Rails application deployment using a standard Apache Proxy/Mongrel Cluster setup and touch on a few “advanced” recipes.

PostgreSQL on Leopard for Rails: A few notes

2008-01-02T15:17:00.001-05:00

So I recently had a client project where the production database was postgresql. I was able to go quite a while using mysql, mostly because I was blissfully ignorant that my SQL was not postgresql compatible. At any rate, I finally had a reason to install postgresql on my machine and learn how to run it.

So I started reading around about it. It looked like for a while that there were some problems with postgresql on Leopard, then they were fixed or something, mostly using the MacPorts way of installation, which is the way I prefer. I found this article by Robby Russell which appears to be the bible when it comes to OS X, Ruby on Rails and postgresql. Since I already most of the ruby/rails part down, I skipped ahead to the "Step 4: Installing the World's Most Advanced Database Server...PostgreSQL!". Unfortunately it didn't work. Compile errors everywhere. I was slightly annoyed, but not [SOMETHING]. (Editors note: [SOMETHING] was supposed to be a place holder for a descriptive word. Whoops).

I decided to consult the OS X god of the Edgecase office, Chad Humphries, in hopes he would help a mere mortal with his database dilemma. "Fear not!", he said. "The MacPorts of yesteryear is broken and desolate. To become whole again, you must renew yourself and become one with the ports." "What???", I said totally not understanding where Chad was going with this one. That's what I get for calling him on his vacation.


sudo port selfupdate
sudo port sync

And then all was well. Or so I thought. I continued by following the Robby Russel bible bringing me closer and closer to a postgresql epiphany until I came to this¹:


sudo gem install ruby-postgres (don't run this)

Yay! More build errors. This one was a wee bit easier to figure out since there have been a lot of gems already that have had issues with Leopard because during the build process it attempts to link against PPC libraries, which apparently must be absent from Leopard installed on a Mactel. The basic gist to fixing this problem is to pass ARCHFLAGS environment variable to the command, which seems easy enough, but to the untrained eye, this doesn't seem to work with sudo. You might be tempted to do something like sudo -s, but we're more agile than that, aren't we? So instead we have this:


sudo env ARCHFLAGS='-arch i386' gem install postgres

and badda bing! PostgreSQL, Rails and my mac are now all happy. The end.

P.S. If you're a wimp like me and need a GUI tool every once and a while to get you through some data grokking, I've found that the free Navicat for PostgreSQL works pretty well.

[1] - The new version of RubyGems, which you probably have by now, assumes the "-y" flag, so I left it off in my examples, as opposed to the Robby Russell article.

Consumer Warning: Priority mail not guaranteed.

2007-12-22T11:11:00.000-05:00

This is a warning to everybody looking to send anything, especially Christmas gifts, via USPS Priority Mail.

This year we had the great opportunity to be with our family for Christmas. You see, we currently live in Columbus, OH and most of our immediate family lives in either Zephyrhills, FL (Tampa Bay area) or Madison, FL (45 mins East of Tallahassee, FL). My mom was gracious enough to pay for flights for us to come down and be with them. Since we have so much family down here, it seemed best to have Christmas presents shipped ahead of our arrival. So, we worked hard to get our Christmas shopping done earlier and get everything packed up in to two boxes. Thursday Dec 13th, I went to the USPS facility in on Twin Rivers Dr in Columbus, OH to get our packages sent out. I set them up to be delivered via Priority Mail, which is 2-3 day delivery. "Of course that's plenty of time for the packages to be there before we arrive on Dec 18th!", I say to myself. I also asked for "tracking" on both, but the closest analog USPS offers to this well known service of UPS and FedEx is "delivery confirmation". So, for $0.65 per package, I figure it can't hurt.

That night I decide to start checking online to see what kind of status I could expect from this. It showed this:

Label/Receipt Number: [redacted]
Status: Acceptance

Your item was accepted at 10:18 AM on December 13, 2007 in COLUMBUS, OH 43216. Information, if available, is updated every evening. Please check again later.

That looks like it could work. So I setup some bookmarks so I could check these easily and sent the links to Stephanie so she could check them as well. We checked again on Friday and Saturday, no change. That was a bit worrisome, but being that this was a "delivery confirmation", I guess this is the best I could do. Then, to our surprise, package #1, delivered to Zephyrhills, FL on Sunday Dec 16th! Success! Delivered on a Sunday even! Now that's service. We continued to track package #2 as the week went on: as we left on Tues Dec 18th, all week while in Zephyrhills until Dec 21st. No change. We even had Stephanie's mom go to the Post Office on Friday to see if they could do anything while we were en route to Madison. Their response: "We can only check what you can. Look on the website."

As we were getting close, Stephanie started to work the phone to see what she could do about this. Her attempt led her in a bunch of circles and no luck. So when we arrived I made in my personal mission to find out what was going on with this thing. I started by calling up the originating post office in Columbus, OH. The people looked the tracking number we had in the system and confirmed that the box had left their facility. She suggested we talk to a supervisor in the destination facility. So, next thing was to call the Madison, FL post office.

Post Office: Madison Post Office this is [Person]. How may I help you?
Me: Hi, my name is Ryan I...
Post Office: The post office is closed. Please call back tomorrow.
Me: Umm...ok. Bye.

What the heck? I'm REALLY frustrated at this point. I have not been able to get ANY answers as to what has happened to this package. I plan to go to the post office as soon as they open on Saturday.

I end up being the third person in line Saturday morning. I got up to the counter and gave the whole story to the person there. Response: "I can't really check anything." Frustrated, I give her more story. Response: "Well let me see what I can pull up.", as she sets the delivery confirmation receipt to the side. "I have to wait on these other customers first though since I'm the only person here at the front." Great. After we wait for 5 minutes or so, we move around so that we can remain in the sight of the counter person. When she sees us, she hands our delivery confirmation receipt to another worker standing there who disappears to the back. A few more minutes of waiting and we hear: "They're standing over there by that door." A lady steps out. "As you can see here", pointing to a report printed from their internal tracking system, "the package is still in Columbus, OH." Excuse me? I talked to someone in Columbus last night and they confirmed that the package had left their facility. "Oh yes, that's what I said it left Columbus, OH on Dec 13th and it's somewhere in between. You know, there's no guarantee on Priority shipping, right? The only guarantee is on Express shipping" I understand that now, yes, but it has been 9 days since I sent the package. That's more than a day or so late. "Well, sir, it's Christmas. There's a lot of mail going around right now." Well the package I sent to Tampa, FL (200 miles south of Madison) made it there in 3 days... "I don't know what to tell you sir. We're delivering on Monday (Christmas eve), we can only hope it will be here by then."

Wow. Thanks for nothing USPS. I will not being using your service ever again to ship a box. With UPS and FedEx I get an updated status if someone sneezes on the box INCLUDING when it gets delivered. At least they know where the package was at last when something happens. USPS response: "It's somewhere between where you sent it and where it's supposed to be delivered. That's all we know." Great.

The moral of the story here is: if you HAVE to send a package and you expect it to end up where it needs to be delivered to either: pay the extra amount to get a "guaranteed" delivery via Express Mail or send using something else. Personally, I'm going to send using something else.

Update: The package arrived the morning of Christmas Eve to much rejoicing! We will be sending the presents we received in Florida back to Ohio using UPS.

Capistrano 2: In the Wild

2007-12-17T02:45:00.000-05:00

About 29 days late I suppose. Better late than never.

This presentation was given at the Columubs Ruby Brigage on November 19th, 2007. Enjoy!

CRB_2007.11_Capistrano2.pdf

Blank Screen Screen Saver in Leopard

2007-11-05T17:55:00.000-05:00

This quest actually started out as a possibly lame attempt to consider how much energy my monitor is using just leaving it on with the screen saver. Before Leopard I was using Sleep Display and it worked pretty well for what I wanted, except that it didn't lock the display like a screensaver does. After Leopard I found out that Sleep Display just plain doesn't work. Turns out I don't REALLY care about the energy aspect, although it'd be nice to contribute in a small way like that, I just hate the wall display my 24" monitor displays when the screen saver comes on. So really I just wish that Apple shipped OS X with a "blank screen" screen saver. Wouldn't that make life a little simpler? Enter Quartz Composer. With a little Google searching I came up with this howto on quartzcompositions.com, which wasn't EXACTLY what I was looking for, but pointed me in the right direction. So, without further ado, a how-to on making a blank screen screensaver for Leopard with Quartz Composer.

Install XCode Tools from your Leopard CD, or download it from the Apple Developer Connection

Open up "Quartz Composer" from /Developer/Applications/Quartz Composer.app

Create a new "Blank Composition". You can do this by choosing the "Blank Composition" template or you can File->New Blank

In the Patch Browser search type "Clear". It's likely there should only be one patch in there of the type "Renderer". Drag that patch to the Root Macro Patch space

Save your composition; It's probably helpful to name it "Blank Screen"

Copy your composition to /System/Library/Screen Savers

Open up Desktop & Screen Saver pref pane from System Preferences and choose "Blank Screen", or whatever you named your composition, from the list

And there you have it. I personally have my top-right hot corner setup for screen saver, so this works perfect for my usage pattern, blank screen and lock the machine. Note I also have to my Energy Saver setting to sleep the display after 1 hour to feed my inner tree hugger, but it's all preference I suppose. Hope this helps someone out!

another move

2007-10-24T23:57:00.000-04:00

Ahh, but this is a move of a more trivial nature. Thank the Lord we didn't have to move our worldly possessions once again. No, Stephanie and I have moved our bits and bytes to a greener pasture. GoDaddy was holding me back, and I didn't like it. I switched our website hosting to VPS, linode.com specifically, so that I could have more virtual freedom.

There's an odd irony here, though. The original reason that I wanted to move to a "free-er" web hosting service was that I wanted to switch to a blog software that fit my needs a better. My plan was to use Mephisto, a rails blogging engine, but I didn't like it's built-in "sections" and setting up to separate instances seemed...silly to me. A quick look a typo sent me running. So where did we end up? Blogger. Simple, and better yet, not having to be maintained by me. And here we are. I'm hoping that I continue to like it. I rarely remain satiated with software. Eventually I want to make a custom theme too, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Also, if you were subscribed via RSS, please update your readers to point to http://brionesandco.com/ryanbriones/atom.xml.

Word.

my mantra as a developer

2007-09-10T03:44:00.000-04:00

[...] And I think, you know, it's really great when you show somebody something and you don't have to convince them they have a problem this solves. They know they have a problem, you can show them something, and they go, "Oh, my God, I need this."

— Steve Jobs at D5 2007

I've been meaning this post quote for a long time. It pretty much sums up how I hope the software I write comes out.

new beginnings: rehash, one year blogging

2007-08-22T23:50:00.000-04:00

It's been just a little bit over a year since I started trying to blog somewhat regularly again. I've been somewhat successful, but not as good as I wanted to be. The status quo as stayed basically the same in that time. Work. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. Stephanie and I have tried to venture out of that cycle when we could, as I'm sure all many like us do. We've been to an NFL game. Who dey! We've started to read exponentially more than we have before, including becoming Harry Potter nerds. Our biggest venture has probably been our trip to Portland, OR so that I could attend RailsConf2007. I will have a listing to a post archive up soon.

Well, times, their always a changin'. Last Thursday I started my first official day as a full-time employee of The EdgeCase, LLC in Columbus, OH. I had been contracting with them for 2 weeks and they asked me to come on full-time. This is an AWESOME opportunity for me as EdgeCase is overflowing with awesome talent. Wait, rewind.... something something something Columbus, OH... Yup, you caught it. Stephanie and I are going to be adding another pin to our "we've lived there" map! Our lease in KY runs out at the end of September, so that's the timeline. Things are moving fast, as usual. We did a little looking last week and we're going up again this weekend to hopefully get down to a "short list", maybe even pin something down. We'll see.

So I'm hoping as a result of all this I'll have more to actually blog about which could possibly result in more blog posts. But that might be asking a bit much... So thems the words. Thanks everyone for the ongoing support and edification we've received this past year. We really appreciate you.

my new setup

2007-08-10T03:49:00.000-04:00

my new setup (2)

and ssh tab completion fell from the heavens, and it was good.

2007-07-24T23:09:00.000-04:00

http://drawohara.tumblr.com/post/6584031

Please look. I'll wait. I've been CLAMORING for that. Personally I modified the linked code and took out the | egrep -v [0123456789] as it allows me to tab complete all entries in my known_hosts. Maybe one day I'll find a way to access my local machines by name, or just added to my /etc/hosts, but for now this is RAD.

and you thought james lipton was cool before

2007-07-15T21:28:00.000-04:00

You haven't lived until you've seen James Lipton shotgun a beer. Seriously.

the new me

2007-07-13T04:52:00.000-04:00

I've been wanting to update my website design for quite a long time. So, the design process started this weekend and "little here, little there" and we've got a version 0.1! I'll be making some changes here and there (i.e. blog post tags listing sucks), when I feel like hacking on Wordpress/PHP, to make my theme more feature complete. Otherwise, this is basically it!

are we nerds or what?

2007-06-25T03:22:00.000-04:00

So most of our (Stephanie and I) friends by now probably have heard that we are on the verge of becoming serious Harry Potter nerds. Yeah, it's true. We went and watched Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer on Friday night and there was an awesome Order of the Phoenix trailer that got us really psyched again. Fast forward to about 15 minutes ago. We're about ready to go to bed when an Order of the Phoenix "teaser" showed on TV. For giggles, and since I was already on my laptop, I decided to check out the Harry Potter website. To my amazement, I noticed on the bottom of the page, there was a link for Tickets and Showtimes. My heart jumped a little. So, in a little bit of unbelief, I started to follow the links to showtimes and ticket purchasing on MovieTickets.com to 12:01am, night of July 10th. And there they were. Quantity 2. Checkout. I was actually a little too lazy to buy them now because that meant getting up and going to the office to get my wallet, but Stephanie was going crazy with excitement, so I proceeded.... and so it was.

Does this mean we need wizard robes now? Hmm...

RailsConf, a recap...ish

2007-06-12T02:31:00.000-04:00

Well, I was trying to do the "cool" thing and blog from the conference I was at, but that didn't work to well. It'll just be easier to blog about it when I get back or when I'm in the airport or something. Apparently that was a no go either. So here I am, two weeks later. I have new things I want to post about, but I don't want to just leave it at what I put before. So, the shortened version:

Quality of Speakers - Of what I saw, probably 90% were pretty bad speakers. There were some standouts, for sure. Robert Martin. James Adam. The Keynotes were good. DDH. Avi Bryant. Ze Frank was hilarious.

Content of the Sessions - One of the things I was REALLY interested in was web application/desktop application hybrids. Apollo and sessions added on late, XUL and Slingshot. They all pretty much disappointed. Apollo, WAY too much funky code for a simple web app. XUL, not bad. Could look into them more. Can't remember what I didn't like. Slingshot, very alpha and kind of a weak concept. On top of that, I dumped some of the sessions that generated the most after-talk for other things or just plain old brain-rot.

Overall Experience - Good. Portland was very nice. A little rainy, but the parts of the city I saw were great. The Saturday Market, which was also open on Sunday, was great! I got stuffed in 5 difference countries! Public transportation was a dream.

Would I do it again? Not unless somebody paid for it. Also, if I had to go to a conference that was more than $200 and not local, I would only go to generic conferences, like OSCON, the Open Source Conference. Diversity. I find it a bit hard to justify going to a conference on one technology, a very specific one at that, when I'm more of a tool for the job guy, as opposed to working for a company that's Rails specific.

So that's my RailsConf experience in a nutshell.

RailsConf2007, the beginning

2007-05-18T23:28:00.000-04:00

Our story begins as our heroes Ryan and Stephanie come back from a 12 hour drive from Florida, nearly missing the grasp of the voracious smoke from various fires throughout Florida and Georgia...

That was 10:30pm or so Sunday night. Monday and Tuesday went by very quickly. Tuesday afternoon we took Daisy to the boarding facility. It was nice, but sad. After a long night, I stayed up all night, we left at 2:30am to drive to Indianapolis to catch our 6am flight.

Fast forward. Flights went good. No real problems. We knew we had to take the MAX light rail Red Line to the Convention Center stop, but when we got here, somehow it seemed A LOT more complicated. Eventually we figured it out. The rest of the crew got in anywhere between 2:30pm and 6:00pm. Weee. Dinner at Red Robin.

Day 0 at RailsConf2007, which begins at 5:45am PST, was tutorials day. Two 3-hour long "classes" seperated by a lunch break. Not so good. I'm sorry Thomas Fuchs, you're an amazing developer, but the tutorial was not good. His was about Prototype and script.aculo.us. David A. Black teaching "Rails Routing Roundup" was definitely more animated, but I don't feel like I learned anything that wasn't in the docs. Just re-enforced some stuff. Dinner at Kells Irish Pub, microbrew beer and some weird BLTC sandwich; WALK back to the hotel. bleh. Stayed up a bit late and coded.

Denise asked me at Kells "If you were to leave today, would you feel good about the conference?" Answer: no. Meeting some cool people though. A guy named Harmon, who happens to be from ATL. Great backdrop in Portland. Good weather so far.

That was a lot to write. More tomorrow.

i twitter

2007-05-18T19:12:00.000-04:00

Ok... I've decided to get on the Twitter bandwagon. It's kind of a social texting app. I think. I'm really not sure if I'm doing it right, but I figured it could be fun. So check me out at http://twitter.com/ryanbriones. I'm going to try to keep in interesting, at least for now.

WOOOO! Portland!

2007-05-18T18:08:00.000-04:00

We're in Portland and rockin' and rollin'! Stay tune for a more complete, wittier blog post! Cheers!

garageband and electric guitars

2007-04-16T16:10:00.000-04:00

...or, why sales people are stupid.

(If you don't care about the back story, skip ahead to The Goods)

For some reason I've recently gotten the itch to play my guitar. So as we were out shopping on Sunday I thought, "Why don't I pick me up some strings and play a little?" Both of my guitars, acoustic and electric, have really old strings. So I was all set to stop by the brand new Guitar Center store in Florence and buy a set of acoustic strings when I started to get aspirations. Could I actually use my electric guitar hooked to the line in on my MacBook Pro coupled with GarageBand as a replacement for the pedals I don't have? (GarageBand comes free and preloaded on my MacBook Pro) This is a great idea! I could play my electric and not have to worry about the loudness of that amp and I'd have recording already baked in and everything! So, as I entered Guitar Center I started to take a look at their 1/4" cables, since I would need one to get going. (It's been that long since I've used my guitar) At that point I'm approached by a sales person with the usual "Is there anything I can help you with?" My normal answer would be a nice version of "Go Away", but I thought "maybe this guy knows about my GarageBand question..." At this point, alarms should have been going off in my brain "ALERT ALERT!! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!?" But it was too late. The question had been asked. First off, I don't think the guy knew at all what GarageBand was, but he understood what I was trying to accomplish so he proceeded to show me a hardware/software combo from Line 6 to do what I wanted, amp modeling, effects, etc. The problem is that I didn't want to spend $99 on something I might already have access to. Then then guy walks me back to Pro Audio to check out another hardware/software combo. Sigh. This isn't what I want. The Pro Audio guy, realizing the Guitar guy had no idea what he was talking about, chimed in, "What exactly are you trying to do?" Finally! Maybe I'll get a good answer! So I asked my question about GarageBand only to be met once again with, "Oh, I haven't really messed with GarageBand." "What is it you guys actually DO here?", I thought. They have a TON of Mac equipment scattered throughout the Pro Audio section, they should know SOMETHING about it. In the end, frustrated, and having spent WAY too much time at Guitar Center while a very tired wife was waiting for me at Target, I resigned to buying some acoustic strings and some picks. What a waste. So this morning, while reading my regularly scheduled RSS feeds, I decided to do some quick searching on the subject. And that brings us to:

The Goods

After some well-crafted searches on the Google, I found this article about recording Guitars and Basses in GarageBand in the Apple online documentation. Perfect. I felt the steps were a BIT confusing, so hense this post, and the following steps to amp modeling and effects in GarageBand:

Open GarageBand and start a New Music Project, or open an existing project if you have one

Add a new Track, Track -> New Track (⌥⌘N)

Choose Real Instrument

Open the Track Info for the new Real Instrument track you've just created, Track -> Show Track Info (⌘I). When open you should see a sidebar on the right labeled Track Info

Look to the very bottom and click the Details

You can start out by going to Guitars in the tree view above Details and choosing different presets on the right and watch how they affect the Details below. As far as I can tell, all of the preset use manual Amp Simulation (ie amp modeling) so then,

Start tweaking the Details a bit. See what you can come up with. It looks like you can only use two effects at a time, and amp simulation is one of them.

Granted, I haven't tried any of this out yet. I still have to buy a cord, an 1/8" adapter and some new strings. :)