Drove back to the farm for a wedding and it has been a great weekend. The fall air and spending time with the family has really reminded me how much I miss the rural area of Indiana. This breath of fresh air has helped super charge my programming itch and I am excited to put more into my open source packages!

Just a quick shameless post promoting the gem I made. Password Required

Recently I discovered what may be the best find yet on my path to enlightenment with vim, ctags. This nugget is amazing! It works with an impressive list of languages, of which Ruby and Erlang can be found. With Ubuntu it can be installed simply with

sudo apt-get install exuberant-ctags

From the working directory of your project the command “ctags -R” will index all the source files found in your project and put them in a file called “tags”. For this reason I added “/ctags” to my git global ignore file found here. Once the ctags file is created you can start up vim, and with your cursor under any language constant you can press “ctrl+]” and will jump to the file:line were it is defined.

Was doing some prototyping today that required some deeper knowledge of how active record transactions work. From doing my spike I found a great light weight setup to tinker around with Active Record and felt it should be shared.

require 'active_record'
 
ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDERR)
 
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  :adapter => "sqlite3",
  :database => ":memory:"
)
 
ActiveRecord::Schema.define do
  create_table :widgets do |table|
    table.column :name, :string
  end
 
  create_table :bits do |table|
    table.column :widget_id, :integer
    table.column :name, :string
  end
end
 
class Widget < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :bits
end
 
class Bit < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :widget, touch: true
end

Last week my brother wanted to make a Music Bot for mumble that would stream music from di.fm. He found a pretty cool project that was started in ruby for a headless client. Here is the link to that project. Being a ruby inclined person this seemed like a chance to relax and do some code tinkering.

Straight from a Google search “define: burn rate” — ‘the rate at which an enterprise spends money, esp. venture capital, in excess of income.’ This really isn’t a term I have heard of before for that context, and I am here to tell you it’s something you’ll want to be mindful of.

So about a month or so ago I made the switch to doing development fulltime on the console. The road hasn’t been exactly easy and there are times when I feel like going back.

Had an amazing time this weekend at the Valley of Fire. For those of you who have not been fortunate enough to visit, it is probably the coolest state parks I have been at to date.

I have really been terrible at keeping up on this blog. Never really quite recovered from Christmas to get back into the swing of things. Any excuse I muster is really nothing more than that, an excuse.

The last week or so has been busy and I feel bumbed out that I have neglected my blog so much. It hasn’t been a terrible time though; in fact quite the opposite!