I work on the back-end of a Rails app that uses Solr via Sunspot. Looking at the solr logs, I could see the same item being added/indexed repeatedly sometimes right before it was deleted from solr. I didn't write the code, but I was tasked with figuring it out.Glancing at the

I recently solved a thorn in my side relating to some Rspec tests in our code base when running on my development machine using MySQL.  For some reason, some instances that were created using Factory Girl weren't getting cleaned u

For the last couple of months my Motorola Droid running Android 2.2.2 has been complaining about being "low on space" for the phone, not the SD card.  I pruned some apps, but that didn't help much. Things really came to a head this morning when my phone was so low on memory that it was no longer downloading email.

In a project I'm currently working on, we're moving a bunch of our back-end processing to Hadoop.  We started a two-node cluster: one master, one slave.  That seemed to work fine.  Then, we went to four nodes, and about the same time I was testing out a new Hadoop

When I came up with the Five Technologies in Five Weeks project, I hadn't intended to compare any of the technologies to each other directly.  My original ordering for the technologies didn't have any head-to-head match-ups, bu

For the second project and technology in five weeks I chose Grails.  I was very curious to try Grails on on a "real"/non-tutorial project to confirm its usability and productivity.  On my last contract gig, I was in a non-development role (configuration management) on a project tha

For the first of the five technologies in five weeks, I picked something easy - Google App Engine using Python and Django. As someone who's been using Python for 15 years, there was no language learning cu

I am currently between consulting jobs, and during the down time, I have embarked on a project to learn five new (to me) technologies in five weeks. The reasons for doing this include:Learn new things - this project is a variant on the "learn one new language a year" meme that's been going around. I'm just t

A friend of mine told me that he just met the new guy on their team. I thought it was odd that he was just meeting a new team member, so I asked if he wasn't around during the interviews, and he told me that the developers on the team never interview candidates - only managers do that. As near as I can tell, they do this t

I've been doing some JIRA administration and customization for a client, and I ran into a problem that was driving me crazy. I created a new workflow to deal with an Issue Type called Change Request by copying an exsiting workflow. I renamed one of the transitions from "Close Issue" to "Decline CR," and I associated a scr

I live outside the city of Monmouth, Oregon (beneath the Western Skies, of course). Our city's official website has URLs like:http://www.ci.monmouth.or.us/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={F6D36CB4-8AB1-4E2F-9F16-EEB14A3A83DD

Is it just me, or does OpenOffice Base (the database tool in their suite) suck? Or maybe it just sucks on the Mac? Honestly, I'm not throwing bombs just to be a tool. If I'm doing something wrong, please tell me.For some time I've been looking for a database tool along

I'm giving an updated version of "How to Get a Software Job w/o Experience" at Willamette University tomorrow, 9/24/09. It's a fun talk that I enjoy doing. I updated the SlideShare version, rather than uploading a new version, so the old version is publicly unavailable.

Generally, I'm not one to talk about crazy dreams. You know those ones right before you wake up that seem like a Salvador Dali painting? Anyway, I had one the other day where either I was homeless living out of a car, or I was observing someone like that. Anyway, it dawned on me in the dream that Mercurial (or any DVCS)

Setting up Hudson to run as a windows service is wicked easy. However, at a client we ran into a problem with the user that the service runs as. By default, the service runs as the Local Service (or maybe Local System) user. Als

The Principles of Successful Freelancing by Miles BurkeISBN 978-0-98004552-4-6The Principles of Successful Freelancing is a comprehensive

While debugging another manifestation of the "wrong library for groovy webtest" bug recently, I found an email thread that makes reference the java_hom

DreamHost sent me an email telling me that my account had been moved to another server. OK, fine - "what's that mean to me, Al Franken?" They said that it shouldn't affect most sites, but that you'd have to look out for paths in your applications that look like "/home/.something/username". So, when when

I just cut-and-pasted some text from a PDF into PowerPoint, and this is how it rendered:

It's been about a week since the Open Source Bridge Conference, and here are some brief thoughts about it. I'd summarize it by saying that it's approximately 80% as good as OSCON for nearly one tenth the cost, and it was here in Portla

When I was a kid, it was cool to go to Disneyland and ride the Autopia ride. For those of you unfamiliar with it, you get to "drive" a car along a track. As I recall, you get a gas pedal, and the steering worked for about plus-or-minus a foot off the center-line of the tr

In a Python class I'm teaching, I had the students do the Django tutorial with some added bits. One of the added bits was to add an About page using Django flatpages. A couple of students had problems where they were getting 404 errors even though t

This is a talk I gave at WOU last week. I also presented it later the same week at Beaver Bar Camp. In an ideal world, I would have delivered the talk at least a few weeks before the deadline for Google Summer of Code applications. :-( OTOH, maybe some students will join some F/OSS

Writing for Scholars: A Practical Guide to Making Sense and Being Heard by Lynn P. NygaardISBN: 9788215013916Writing for Scho

Pro Django by Marty AlchinISBN: 978-1-4302-1047-4Pro Django is an excellent book on Django, but it's not fo