Entries from March 2008 ↓

For those lucky few of you who follow my RSS feed you may have gotten repeat posts from me today. Sorry about that, but I just changed the feed address linked to my feedburner account to reflect the change to chrisrohde.net!

Thats right, I have moved… again. After just about two short weeks in the confinement of wordpress.com, my twitter buddy Ryan Ellerbe has come through with some spare room hosting for me, and I went ahead and registered my own domain (which should avoid the nonsense I just went through happening to me ever again)

I have, for the moment, settled on the copyblogger theme for wordpress… as far as no-maintenance goes, I like it, as it doesn’t require much tweaking on my part to be satisfied with it. This is not to say, of course, that I am not going to style it myself later, but as for this weekend I have loads and loads of housework to get done.

For those of you who haven’t heard the buzz yet, Socialthing! is the new social media aggregator that is recently making a splash.

Socialthing! takes your usernames and passwords from such services as twitter, facebook, flickr, and del.icio.us (among others) and aggregates your posts to these services, along with those of your friends in those same services, something that friendfeed had a hard time with. Along with this upgrade comes an interface that I find to be a bit more pleasing and easy to use.

Right now it is invite-only, but I managed to score myself an account through a TechCrunch promotion (promo code: techcrunch) this morning, and you may too if you act quickly (it was limited to the first 1000 visitors that used the code). However, if you manage to miss the opportunity, just leave me a message here in the comments, or grab me through twitter, and I might be tempted to spare one of my extra invites just for you, because you’re special.

UPDATE (3/10/08, 1:45 PM): As of right now, Socialthing! has closed invitations and rescinded all the invites they had given their new members, in reaction to getting hit so hard by TechCrunch…. stay tuned, I will dish them out as I get them back

Given my current state at my job, I am strangely driven to document the occasion every time I learn something momentous, especially when the learning of said momentous nugget of wisdom came at the expense of multiple hours of my frustrating work and self-loathing.

Today, with some gentle prodding from Jason, I was able to wrangle a previously insurmountable obstacle of organizing all amounts in a column of a table with a nested route recognized, sorted, counted, and summed, all down into a simple, one-line, 47-character piece of code.

Here today, for your viewing enjoyment, is the evolution of Chris’ ruby learning. Enjoy.

def additions
@additions = @register.additions
end
This was utter nonsense here, disregard

It then evolved to something that is at least appropriate:

def additions
self.additions.collect{ |addition| addition.amount }
end

Which was technically right, but I needed to not only list all the amounts of the additions in the table but add them together, so I extended:

def additions
self.additions.collect{ |addition| addition.amount }.inject( 0 ) { |sum,x| sum+x }
end

Which worked perfectly, passed the unit tests I had written for it to pass, and all was well in the world. And only then, after I nearly lost faith in myself as a human being, Jason step in to give me a hand-out. This could be much simpler!

def additions
additions.map(&:amount).inject( 0 ) { |sum,x| sum+x }
end

Now, you may be saying to yourself “Why should I care what this guy is learning, its just snippets of code from some program, to me,” and you’d be right. However I have a tendency to lose examples of my learning work in the multiple practice apps I have lounging about all over my computer, so for me, I can just post things I learn here so I can find them easier… that is of course unless the code bit I learned is sensitive in a work-sense, then I can’t post it and I guess I am just screwed, huh?

So come on, who’s proud of me?

In the wake of recent events and the forced rebuilding of my blog, I am faced with a bit of a quandry.

Do I allow this violation of my trust to cripple me, and resign myself to a blog hosted perpetually on wordpress.com, knowing full well that it reduces my control over design, plugins, analytics, and other fun aspects of blogging?

Or do I place my faith and effort into another hosting service, accepting the risk of losing all my data once again in trade for the freedom to do with my blog what I want?

I think I would like to find a decently-priced hosting service, I think I am ready for the plunge again. Or I will be, soon.

Who would you guys recommend?

So when I created this blog yesterday at lunch I had just finished wrangling a rather simple Ruby on Rails problem that took me a solid hour or two (yeah, I’m that much of a noob)… as such, I was in a particularly drained and geeky mood, and named my blog :Chris_Rohde. Shut up.

Anyway, I want to come up with something decent. My last blog, Veritas/tic, was named in much the same way… except I was drunk. And this blog, I would like to reflect something about myself or my interests, the focus of my hopefully more frequent writings.

So what do you say, world? Any ideas?

This is honestly just a test post, to see how this works.I am currently writing this post in text mate, thanks to its blogging bundle… lets cross our fingers, shall we?

Hey folks, after the unfortunate disaster with my other blogs, I have rebuilt, remodeled, and resigned myself to using wordpress.com once again.

I have set my old veritas/tic feedburner feed to draw from here temporarily, so I can let you all know of the change… If you would like to keep receiving mediocre-quality content at the super low price of absolutely free, please change your feed address for me to this:

 http://feeds.feedburner.com/chrisrohde

And of course,  the original site can be found Here!

Well for those of you kind enough to follow either of my other two blogs that I had been cultivating, Veritas/tic and TaxNation, you may have noticed a rapid drop in posts. Then again, with TaxNation you may not have, since I haven’t had time in months to truly devote the effort I wanted to creating solid, worthwhile topics. 

A little under a year ago I won some free hosting services through a contest on a friend’s blog, and I gladly moved my two sites over from their wordpress.com domains to what I thought would be a reliable hosting solution, Wordly.org (no link, since the site is now offline).

Now, I should have seen this coming, given the warning signs:

•  No dedicated cPanel, so I had no control over the backend of my blogs, including important wordpress updates
• No change (ever) in the wordly.org site, it remained static
• Bad response time, if any, from the owner of Wordly

So needless to say, last week when my blogs went down simultaneously, I wasn’t so much surprised by the event, just the timing. Anyway, I have created this new blog, on wordpress.com, to continue what I had started with Veritas/tic… it was time for a change anyway.