The incoherent ramblings of a developer called Tom.

Code reviews are great, they produce better code, and allow convergence in style and approach, without the authoritarian feel of formal best practices documentation. Avoiding formality is something I hold dear, as creative free thinking individuals are who I want to be around, and who I want to be. The problem with code reviews, is that creative free thinking individuals will always have creative free thinking differences. This causes tension.

What I really want is a code review where I don't have to suppress the urge to defend my less elegant choices. A code review where my lizard brain sense of pride doesn't have a say.

The problem is that this defensiveness is natural, you poured your heart and soul, 3 days of your life into that final change set. Having someone you respect nitpick about that 10 line method somewhere in the 500 lines of change is hard. We both know it's shit, but the idea that your masterpiece has a flaw, and a flaw that may take another day of your life to fix is hard to swallow. This is normal.

A computer saying the same thing does not tickle the same emotions.

I did some rails updates, this error came up, google was no help:

cannot load such file -- unicode/unicode_native (LoadError)

So here's the fix, so next time Google will know.

• Do you have an app?
• Do you have an app that you don't want to deploy over?
• Do you wish there was some way to stop drunk you from shipping to production?

You should use my broken build pack! (Now with over 100% extra nonfunctionality!)

I was recently trying to send some big files (8-20gb) over X-SendFile file (this was for reasons). The files were being truncated after seemingly random points. File size and the Content-Length were in agreement, but the file on disk was longer. This was hard to google for.

So, this has been mildly annoying for a while, but the addition of fancy images has pushed it over the edge.

If I already know who we are, and know who you are, DO NOT ADD A SIGNATURE!

Doing so may seem harmless, and good PR, or just seem like the kind of thing you're supposed to do. People do all kinds of stupid things, you shouldn't copy them.

A little while ago twitpic change their terms and conditions making it so they owned all your pictures.

People[1] got all pissy, as people do. So I made justpics. It's a very simple image hosting site that you can host yourself, on your own hosting, using your own s3 bucket.

Some people have trouble sleeping, others have trouble getting up. Others like me just need to put the fucking laptop down and go to bed.

This is not the story of how I put my laptop down, but of how I wrote some code to help with going to bed failure states. Because failing to go to bed is what I do best.

The Reevoo dev team recently upgraded all our desktops to SSDs. I forget the model, but they are those ones that don't need trim support, or some shit like that.

Keep on reading though, I made graphs and everything.

I was recently trying to silence webrick (the noisy bastard) to let me run it in a test suite. The bastard just wouldn't stay quiet, it kept saying stuff like:

[2010-06-22 15:29:11] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start done.
[2010-06-22 15:29:12] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2010-06-22 15:29:12] INFO  ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11) [x86_64-linux]
[2010-06-22 15:29:12] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=18324 port=4001

… like I care.

Recently some people copied this image and put in all over the internet without credit, or a link back to see more of the awesome.

This made me sad.

So here is the pic and a link back to the source

The year is 2010AD and Reevoo has a new designer, sent from the future to make things more nice looking than they previously were.

This new “Govias” brought with him a grid exactly 960 pixels wide, with a 10px gutter on each side, and several columns of 60px separated by gaps of 20px. Apparently it's not rocket surgery (designers have been doing this stuff for years), but the developers were astounded by how this grid was the root of all alignment.

We call it the Govias Grid.

A gem to cripple caching. Because sometimes pressing ⌘-R repeatedly in development mode makes you want to stab things in the face. Neither my colleagues, nor my monitor appreciate a good stabbing like they used to.

…

Arial black is the shit.

A simple gem to direct all traffic to a single canonical domain.

Your own personal gemcutter, but without any bells or whistles.

FIRCKING SNOW ON THE FRICKING COMPUTER SCREEN!!!!

The incredible true story about a man and a hat. (Cross posted from facebook).