My new roommate

Cindy is my new roommate. I have already broken the code of roommates and fallen in love with her. She’s an “Alaskan Husky”.

Monday Morning Office Surprise

monday morning surprise

This was fun to find in the engineering fridge this morning…

Ok so we had a party in the office on Friday, but I mean, awesome, keg of 90 schilling in the fridge to greet me monday morning.

It’s going to be an awesomely painful week.

Found this on my iPod about my time at WMC 2005

Miami, it’s a place where everything is fake, fake gangsters, fake smiles, and fake breasts – none of its real. Not even the beaches are real.  Heaven forbid if the ocean were to carry all the sand away; but don’t worry, we have mounds and mounds of backup sand with bulldozers to build a new beach, yea!
Cultural collision is the best way to describe the South Beach area.  Cubans, gang bangers, fake gang bangers, old Jewish people spending their nesteggs in Flarida,  drug dealers in Ferraris, east coast pretentious assholes on vacation, meathead frat guys on spring break,  fake mafia boys from New Jersey pretending to be cool meanwhile maxing out their platinum cards on dinners they can’t afford, there’s everything and everybody but no one seems happy.  Either everyone here has a story or everyone here doesn’t have a story and if they did they’d probably be lying.
I’m not liking it here but maybe it’s because I’m alone and I have no money.  Maybe once the actual conference starts I’ll be having more fun.  Hopefully I see myself meeting cool people and forming connections that may pan out into a career in music or journalism. I hope I can get past the velvet ropes, beyond the guest-list and bouncers checking fake id’s for girls who aren’t more than 17.  I would like to rock on someone else’s dime.  That would be awesome.  But it will probably end up me being too shy and 20, two weeks before my 21st birthday, not being able to really talk to anyone of any importance or even if I’m outgoing, finding people who don’t want to talk.
I feel like a visitor in my own country.  When the cops don’t speak much English you know you’ve definitely left some realm of sanity.  Everyone here is looking to see who’s looking at them, no one actually does anything.  Car loads of people roll by restaurants with the music bumpin’ looking for all the people at curbside to look their way.  No one in the car is singing or dancing or having a good time – everyone has the same blank stare.  They are just rolling by trying to be louder than the next guy.  And no one really pays attention to the cars and the music – over saturation.

A night with Jaad and Lev
Hotel
Walking around
Dinner
Them going out

Monday –
Slept late.  Nothing really happening at the hotel – setup began for the conference stuff.  Trusses poolside getting setup.  Went to the beach.  Tried to use a beach chair but after ten minutes was accosted and asked for the $5 rental fee.- F that man.  So I tanned, ok, burned on the sand.   Having very little money on vacation makes things interesting, like not being able to buy suntan lotion.  So I just hung around worked on some music. Pretty bored and pretty lonely.  Watched some movies talked to some people on the cell.  Eventually fell asleep.

Tuesday –
What a better day.   Confrence started today so at least there are people around.  Came down to the lobby about noon or so and was quite pleased.  A DJ will be in the lobby all week from 12-6 bumping the tunes.  The normal guests at the hotel must be terrified by all the music people and loud music all the time.  Checked in and got my badge but wasn’t able to register as press.  My internet dilemma was solved by WMC – thankfully they set up computers in the registration area to get online with for free.  Ventured towards the pool area and got my free goodie bag and went back up to my room to check it out.  Several mags – none of them especially good but some free cd’s and dvds.  Turns out the DMC champions are out here from France – I saw them runin around the hotel and then saw their dvd.  Seem like cool guys.  Anyway, ventured back to the pool for some trance/breaks stuff with a live vocalist.  It was cool – the pool sound system is pretty huge – the bass was shaking the concrete.  There is security for getting to the pool area so people can’t just waltz into the party and many of the guests were very disappointed at the fact they had to get checked out on a guest list before they could access the pool.  Hung out for a while then came back in surfed the net and found I have pretty much no money.

Later at the Stanton poolside cocktail party – at which no one was dancing or drinking – I met John Sterling from NY.  He’s into trance but more of a chill out type trance.  He also really likes to dance and work with a positive vibe.  Similar to me he likes to get high on the music instead of drugs. Cool guy but kinda slow and not as into the scene as I was hoping someone might be.  The pool dj was Chris Liebing from germany spinning on all Stanton

The CTO of my company looks remarkably like Deadmau5

I was at Beta nightclub this weekend to see Deadmau5 (dead mouse).  He played a great set, but I noticed as he stepped into the dj booth that he looked remarkably like Tim Wolters, the CTO @ CollectiveIntellect

Take a look:

$1200 on my Jeep…

I have Jeep 4.0 liter Wrangler model year 2000.  This was my first car, thus, I have abused it, battered it, and generally mistreated the poor bastard.  I try to put oil in it every, oh I don’t know, 12000 miles, changed the tires out when they are past the point at which driving is probably safe, and haven’t taken it in for a factory scheduled maintenance…ever.

My jeep on Radical Hill outside of Montezuma, Co near Keystone

So last weekend I was in Vail and my buddy Jim and I noticed that the clutch sounded funny, making squeeking sounds and what not.  Which, to be honest, wasn’t surprising, I’ve noticed the clutch being weird since 2006.  Also the gears are really loud when I change them too, which of course is due to the lack of fluid in the transfer case.  So I come down from Vail last Sunday afternoon, which the drive down is not very clutch intensive, and I drive to Boulder to look for houses slash not go home.  After spending the afternoon unfruitfully locating both a house or an iPhone3G, I head back to Denver.

I get three blocks from my house and put the clutch in at a stop light, and it starts wailing, like super loud horrible metal is being destroyed under my feet, wailing, and I try to put it in gear and I stall it, restart it get it in gear and basically roll the thing to a stop in front of my house.  Awesome, now I’m going to have to get it fixed.

My dad reccommended I take it to Todd at Maximum Auto/The Speed Shop in Wheatridge.  Todd’s son and I were in drumline together in high school, and Todd built really freaking amazing props for shows, he’s a talented engineer, and turns out he builds drag racers for a living.  So I’m going to have to get my car towed, so I decide to just purchase the AAA plus package for $117, which gets me 100 miles of towing, in addition to all the other AAA benefits (the tow would have probably would have cost just as much anyway).

Anyway, get the Jeep up there on Monday morning, they call me on Wednesday and tell me a new clutch is going to run around $300.  Sweet, a lot cheaper than I thought.  Thursday morning they call back and say, clutch is done but we notice some other things…of course they did.  Front brakes are cooked, leak in the radiator, alignment needed, and probably new shocks.  I ask how much each of those is, and which one they reccommend doing if I have to pick one.  The said do the brakes, it’ll run $350, sweet, that’s cheap, do it.

Thursday afternoon I get down to the shop to pick up the Jeep and pay for the bill.  Turns out they weren’t quoting me labor!  The clutch was like $300 for part…and $400 for labor! The brakes ended up being like $300, like they said, but only for parts…and another $200 in labor…which adds to $1200 freaking dollars!

But considering that I’ve abused the crap out of that car, its never been in the shop (only twice for accident repairs that weren’t my fault), driven it to California and back, been pretty mean to it off-road (I’ve gotten a foot of air in it…on my high school’s property no less…there are witnesses)…I mean $1200 for almost 9 years of abuse…not to bad I guess.

Rentmappr.com now has RESTful search!

Rentmappr.com now has RESTful search.  Here’s how it works:

You can now just fill in the url to search for properties. Every option available in the search form has been put into a RESTful url that are built in the following format:

www.rentmappr.com/search/minimum_price/maximum_price/bedrooms/

You can add “none” for min_price, max_price, or bedrooms, to say you don’t have a preference.

You can search for pets by adding /cats or /dogs, or /cats/dogs for both.

Some examples

/search/1850/none/3br/dogs will search for properties with a monthly rent of at least $1850, with no maximum price, that has three bedrooms and allows dogs.

/search/none/2650/none will search for properties with no minimum price but a monthly rent capped at $2650 and with no preference on bedrooms.

/search/1850/2650/4br/dogs/cats will search for properties between $1850 to $2650 per month that is four bedrooms and allows cats and/or dogs.

Currently you will have to pick a city to search in before these url’s will work.

I am working on a RESTful url search that will let you target specific markets.  Using the same schema from above I would only have to add the city’s name to the url.

/search/boulder/1850/none/3br would search for houses in Boulder with at least a monthly rent of $1850 that has three bedrooms.

This feature will shortly be extended into a “link to these results” generator, making sharing of results much easier, ala “link to this map” in google maps.

Rentmappr.com: more things coming soon…

So I did some analysis on my rentmappr.com results.  Looks like I get on average about 84% of postings to successfully geocode and get posted to rentmappr from craigslist.  I do have an address correction algorithm in place but I haven’t analyzed its results for success.  From watching the geocoder do its work though, I estimate I get about 20% of the postings that have a “bad” or non-geocodeable address to successfully geocode.

I will shortly be adding bedroom search to further narrow results.  I did push dog and cat search options to production last week.

I’m also pleased to announce that my roommate successfully found, and rented, an apartment using rentmappr!  Her glowing testimonial to follow.

TopFunky Memcache install script works on ubuntu…

Just a note for a quick and easy install of memcache on ubuntu…just use topfunky’s sh script. Worked for me.
wget http://topfunky.net/svn/shovel/memcached/install-memcached-linux.sh
sh install-memcached-linux.sh


Memcache Sessions in Rails

Does rails scale? No! But memcached does!

Ok ok, you aren’t probably going to need memcache for caching huge queries yet.  But it is useful for storing your user’s session data server side and not having to worry about filling up cookies or clearing out files in your tmp directory or your database.

So I’ve been designing a single sign on system for the interanl applications at CI.  And I need apps on all kinds of different servers to talk to the same memcache instance(s) for their sessions.  I did follow this article on err.the_blog to get started but I only got so far and ran into some issues that got hard to debug.

The default memcached session store hits localhost:11211 which is generally fine for most applications but I needed a clustered approach and could not for the life of me figure it out.  Turns out like most things with rails it was really easy.

Pre-req’s:
1. Memcached installed on your machine or whatever machine you want to use for sessions
1a. Top Funky has a really simple shell script that will work on os x and another that works on ubuntu
2. You will need the memcache-client gem, you know what to do.

In environment.rb in my rails app I needed to do a few things:

1. Setup the connection to the memcache server

2. Tell rails to use memcache for sessions

3. Setup rails to drop all its sessions stuff into the memcache server we setup

Alright so 1:
require 'memcache'
CACHE = MemCache.new(:namespace => "your_app")
CACHE.servers = 'some_ip_address:some_port', 'another_ip_address_if_you_need_it:some_port'

and then 2(pretty easy)
config.action_controller.session_store = :mem_cache_store

and then 3 (this is where you can set the session timeout and then pass in the memcached object CACHE)

config.action_controller.session = {
:session_key => '_your_app_session',
:secret      => 'someotherkindofsecretthatnooneknows',
:cache       => CACHE,
:expires=>900  }

I think if memcache doesn’t find the session on one server it’ll look on the others you put in the CACHE.servers list.  However if your memcache instance goes down your rails app is hosed and starts throwing up 500 errors all over itself.

You can actually throw alot of this config into a gem if you are going to have several apps that are all going to use the same config (setup the CACHE stuff in your gem and then just do step 3 in your apps)  That way if you need to switch or add servers to your memcache setup you don’t have to make changes in 20 places.

RentMappr.com Online!

My new project (devised and developed in two weeks…thanks ruby and you too rails) RentMappr.com is now online.  Its kinda basic right now but definetly adds some value to searching cragislist.com for rental housing.

Currently you can only search Boulder, Colorado properies but you can save the ones you like, and trash the ones you don’t.  Its mapped based (if you didn’t figure that out by the name already) so it makes it easy to find places in specific neighborhoods and parts of town.

The address geocoding however, is only as good as the address information the people who post the property provide.  So sometimes properties will get rejected if the address can’t be geocoded or isn’t provided.

You can search by price right now and I’ll be adding bedroom searching too (1bd, 2bd, 12bd, studio) in a few days.

Other cool features coming online are: user set search boundaries on the map, no user registration to test out the full functionality of the site (including saving and trashing properties), and I’ll be adding anonymized email support (why should you give some landlord your email when they won’t give you theirs?)…like you can email the person posting the property and the reply email address they get will actually be accepted by rentmappr and post the response next to the property in your short list – you can also have it forward the email to your real email address.