banjoplayinnerd

I was barely aware of Google Voice before yesterday when my sister told me she was using it. It's a service that assigns you a telephone number that in theory will ring through to any set of phones you assign to it. So, I call her Google Voice number and it rings through to her cell phone and her house phone. There are also a bunch of other cool services like caller ID and call blocking. Nifty.

So, I decided to check it out, since I already have a Google account that I'm using for a buncha other things. I go to the Voice web page, answer a bunch of nosy questions, and it offers to either port my existing number, or let me choose a phone number by area code, or zip, or location, or by searching for a word.

Fair enough. I want to keep the cell number I have now, so let's give searching a try, since that is after all supposed to be Google's strength. Give me a 206 (Seattle metro) number, I request.

"No results returned for this search."

OK, how about Seattle?

"No results returned for this search."

Oof. Um, King County?

"No results again, fool."

What about Washington?

That produced results; unfortunately they were all for the other Washington.

Let's search for a word then. How about "Creede"? Nope.

Wait a minute. What about . . . "banjo"?

All right. Now we're getting somewhere. Voice returned a set of five numbers, all of which were of the form 50B-ANJ-Oxxx. Not really what I wanted. I was more looking for something of the form (xxx) xxB-ANJO.

So, on to the next page . . . and I hit pay dirt. The mother lode. Option number three, a phone number in the greater Los Angeles area code, is a keeper. I need to get it on business cards and pass it around to all my friends:

The world can now reach me by dialing 3-2345-BANJO.

(OK, that's really 323-452-2656, but I'm never going to remember that, and neither are you, and neither is anyone else.)

I wasn't going to buy anything on Friday. Honest I wasn't.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm one of those contrarian types who is opposed to shopping on Black Friday. It's as much an unwillingness to go out and drop a bunch of money on stuff I don't need as it is just not want to go out and fight my way through a bunch of crowds to do it. Throw in a huge dose of "I have no money for anything this year" and you've got a pretty good handle on my situation.

But then one of the mailing lists I subscribe to came out with a super tempting deal, offering a year's free top-tier membership to Treehouse (ordinarily $600) for $99. The catch was, they had 12 deals lined up on Black Friday, and each one was only good for 2 hours, so I had basically between 12:00 and 2:00 on Friday afternoon to take them up on it.

Perhaps I should explain what Treehouse is and why this was such a tempting deal. Their stock in trade is video instruction. They break down the subject – whether it's Javascript, CSS3, Ruby programming or starting your own business – into strings of short videos, anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes long, where they present a code sample that illustrates what they're teaching. There are about 120 "badges" you can earn in these subjects, and more coming down the road all the time.

As you probably know I have been trying to learn Ruby lately with an eye toward branching out into Ruby on Rails development. I had been going through instruction books and the few free resources I could find, and was learning a few things but not enough. So when this offer came along – a year's worth of drinking from the instructional firehose – I started agonizing over it. I still had the contrarian streak, still had no business spending any money, and it was still Black Friday, but this looked like such a useful way to learn, and $100 for a year's instruction is cheap.

At about 12:15 my wife came into the bedroom and we were talking, as we often do these days, about money. I told her about this deal and how I thought it would be useful, but I really had no business taking them up on it when we had so many other places for our limited means to go.

She thought about it for a second. "Well, I can think of one reason why you might want to do it," she said.

"What's that?"

"Every dollar you've spent on education in the last 20 years has come back to us many times over."

My wife is a very wise woman.

About ten minutes later I pulled out the credit card and signed up.

This was an extremely good move.

It's been a little over 150 hours since I signed up and I've completed all of the Ruby Foundations badges, everything from explaining what variables are (for the real beginners in the crowd) to writing tests for your programs as you go. Actually, writing the tests before the programs.

It doesn't hurt that Treehouse has a somewhat whimsical sense of humor. The "Hello and thanks for signing up" video involved a very steampunkish airship and a guy with an eyepatch setting out for Treehouse Island.

So what did I do today?

OK, I'm going to admit to doing something dumb. A while back I managed to wipe my desktop clean, as in "rm -rf Desktop/". (I mean, who hasn't, right?) There was a bunch of important stuff on that desktop, including my ham radio logbook spreadsheet and a folder with all of my electronic QSL (contact verification) cards. I found a random post out on the Internet from a guy who wrote a program to download all of your QSL cards from eQSL.cc, the website that handles the service. The problem is, he wrote this program in some kind of oddball Windows scripting solution that I'd never heard of.

So, I decided to write my own. I started looking for ways I could do this and came across the web documentation for Ruby's Mechanize gem, which allows you to write scripts to load web pages, fill out forms, keep track of cookies and the like.

After about seven hours I had a working program that not only downloaded the eQSLs, changing one variable would determine whether you downloaded all of your eQSLs or just the ones you hadn't retrieved yet, and gave them sane names as opposed to the indecipherable string of digits eQSL saves them as. This is probably less time than it would have taken to go in and download all 200-something of them by clicking on them one by one, and certainly less boring.

On the basis of this and some other scripts I've written I feel confident enough now to put Ruby on my resume. There are a lot of positions and recruiters looking for Ruby, sometimes as a standalone skill but more often as a way to work with Ruby-based tools like Rails, Chef and Puppet.

And that's what I've been doing for the past week.

And yes, I think this sort of thing is great fun. Beats sitting around moping while I look for work.

A couple of posts ago I mentioned my brand new development box, workstation, computer, toy or whatever you want to call it. I've been tinkering with it since that post and it is still the bee's knees. As of right now it's running a browser (chromium), an email client (Thunderbird), an instance of Windows 7 running in a virtual machine (virtualbox) that's busy running some ham radio software and the Zune music software, an IRC client (xchat), and somewhere down there in the silicon maze are daemons for apache and mysql and other things that come to think of it don't take up a lot of resources. I even kicked up the CPU clock speed to turn it from a 3300MHz processor to a 4000MHz processor, and it's not even heating up significantly.

This is sort of like when I bought my banjo almost 10 years ago now. I wasn't absolutely sure at the time that I should be spending the money on a toy when there were other things I could have been doing with it, but I've never looked back, and look at the friends it's helped me make and the fun I've had doing it. The only regret is that I didn't do it many years ago, and I could have been having all that fun this much longer.

Similarly, when I'm out of work it seems a bit foolish to spend about $400 on a new computer. But I don't look at my computer as a toy. (Well, not entirely, OK?) I look at it as a tool. Computers are how I make my living, and like I said before, the old one was driving me around the bend because it was so underpowered. I can do things on this computer I can't even do on my laptop (a dual-core 1.8 GHz machine from when Windows Vista walked the earth), much less the old single-core 1.3 GHz machine. With any luck at all this machine will last me another 5-6 years, or until software starts outpacing the hardware again. But running today's software on XUbuntu 12.10, it is great.

One of the things that a blazingly fast computer doesn't help with is doing the actual programming. Someone once said that most of a computer's time is spent waiting for you to do something, usually type in a command or click a mouse. That's true as far as I can tell. The browser comes up fast and the mail is pretty quick, but if I'm writing a program it still takes me the same amount of time to type in the code or debug it. I get the results faster, but for the stuff I'm doing now, imperceptibly so. Then again there are the times I had to wait for the old computer to play catch-up in some other process before I could get back to work, so I'm glad I don't have to worry about that at the moment.

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While I'm knocking around the house looking for work I have been working on improving my skill set. Part of that is learning new languages and new technologies. I was once labeled a "one-trick pony" by an interviewer; fortunately I got that job since the one trick I knew (Perl) was the one they wanted. I'm trying to shed that these days by learning some new skills, languages and technologies, or at least getting an idea of what they're about so if someone says they want a guy who knows something about Hadoop, Nagios, Nginx or Puppet I can discuss them semi-intelligently rather than saying "Nope, no idea" or, worse, something dumb.

To that end I've been working on learning Ruby. Ruby is sort of similar to where Perl was 15 years ago, a hot scripting language that's making its presence known as an engine for creating interactive web pages. It's a typical open source success story, similar to the one behind Linux itself. In 1993 a Japanese programmer named Yukihiro Matsumoto (known to one and all as "Matz") decided that the scripting languages available to him left something to be desired, so he set out to create his own that was "more powerful than Perl and more object-oriented than Python." I don't know if it out-muscles Perl, but it is certainly object oriented. Everything in Ruby is an object, including what would normally be simple primitives like integers.

Ruby was first released in Japan at the end of 1995 and interest was pretty much confined to Japan for about four years, when the first English-language Ruby mailing list started up. It gained a modest following, but really took off in 2003 when David Heinemeier Hansson was developing an application that would eventually become Basecamp. He was working on some web scaffolding for Basecamp, and realized that with a little work he could create a general purpose web application framework, which he released under the name Ruby on Rails. (Again, this is similar to the history of Perl, where Larry Wall realized that a one-off script to do some text parsing could be expanded into a general purpose Practical Extraction and Reporting Language.) In some ways Ruby on Rails is Ruby's killer app; it does a lot of the heavy lifting involved in creating an interactive web site, and it does it all in Ruby. "Ruby on Rails" is one of the most common desired skills I've been seeing while doing my job search.

Before I dive into Rails I want to do some general purpose scripting in Ruby to get a decent grounding in the language. To that end I've been rewriting some projects I've done in other languages in Ruby. For instance, I have an application I wrote that sends a bunch of tweets at regular intervals. It's written in Java, in part because I wanted to say I had written a Java program. It took me about three days to get everything written, tested, debugged and functioning, and even so it still isn't working 100% right (in part because I don't have my class path set to work properly from a cron job . . . but I digress).

Today I got out of bed at about 8:30 and decided I wanted to convert this script to Ruby. So my morning looked something like:

8:30 - get up, get showered and get dressed

9:00 - sign on to boris (my big bad dev box) and in a separate window load up sitka (the remote server the Java code is on)

9:05 - copy the list of tweet contents from sitka to boris. Close the connection to Sitka. Format the strings for use in Ruby (mostly removing the String identifiers in Java - Ruby uses flexible typing, similar to Perl)

9:30 - install the Twitter Ruby gem (package) and take a look at the documentation

9:45 - create a sample tweet with the Twitter gem and see it appear in my timeline

9:50 - Do a little more experimenting with the gem to see how tweet objects are formatted (for use later)

10:10 - Write the code for sending the tweet lists. Test it. Fix a few bugs and try it again

10:45 - Run a full simulation, not sending tweets but testing the timing

11:00 - Done. Off to answer my mail and contact some of my recruiters.

The Java original took me three days to complete. Now granted I already had the login information and the strings I want to tweet, but putting the Ruby version together took me less than two hours, and that was with breaks to look up code examples online.

My goal is to get somewhere near the expertise I have in Perl as fast as possible, preferably within a month or two. If today's experience is any indication, I may be able to reach that goal with time to spare.

Yesterday was quite a day and I feel like I actually accomplished something.

The Tooth Of The Matter

Sunday I was sitting in church waiting for services to start and Igor the Younger offered to share a couple of Mike&Ikes his grandma had given him. I took one, thanked him, praised him for sharing, bit down on it and immediately wished I hadn't. Bit down, not praise Igor the Younger. The candy knocked a crown loose off of one of my lower right molars. Luckily my dentist, who is a family friend and attends the same church, was sitting right behind us, took a look and arranged for me to come in yesterday. The bottom line is that he feels like I need a couple of posts in what remains of the molar to get the crown to stay on, but he cemented it on so it would stay in until he could bring me in for the full procedure. I'm grateful that he was able to take care of it quickly. I wasn't in pain - the tooth was root canaled long ago - but my tongue kept scraping against the sharp edge of the remnants of the tooth. It's healing up now but will probably still be a couple of days before the abrasions and lacerations go away.

Shopping For Tools

My daughter very kindly picked me up from the dentist with Igor the Younger in tow, and we stopped off at Walgreen's on the way home to pick up some Spider-Man Band-Aids to take care of some boo-boo or another he had gotten himself into. It was a fun experience as only shopping at Walgreen's with a four-year-old can be. We never got past the toy aisle, where he tried to use his Con Auntie And Grandpa skill. Luckily we both made our Resist Con Job From Four Year Old Who Wants You To Buy A Bag Of Water Balloons roll. We didn't get water balloons (although if the temperature stays up we might just have to), but on the way to the checkout I spotted a little $5 household tool kit with some jewelers' screwdrivers and a couple of other useful gadgets. The water balloons would have been cheaper, but Igor the Younger's is fascinated by tools and this looked like it would be a good addition to his collection. It wasn't until I got to the checkstand that I figured out that this toolkit had both a pair of scissors and a wire snipper, both of which can be very dangerous in a little boy's hands. Especially this little boy By then it was too late, though. He had already seen it and decided it was his. So we went home and he and his scissors helped me open a box that arrived in the mail, cut up some stray pieces of recycling and generally had a good time with the new toy.

Wireless Access Coming Soon!

Several years ago I bought a combination wireless access point and ethernet hub so I could share out our cable modem connection. It turned out to be not exactly what I wanted. Apparently Linksys makes several different kinds of WRT-54g WAP, and the one I bought wasn't the one that runs Linux natively and can be modified and improved. Even so, I put it to work, but it's showing its age and has some frustrating limitations, the lack of modability being one of them. Flakiness is another. Every so often it seems to drop connections or lose power or something, and I have to reset it.

I've wanted to replace it for a long time, but I wanted a specific replacement. I have an HP Vectra computer that's been around long enough to have a "Made For Windows 2000" sticker prominently displayed on the front. It's old and slow and would collapse under the weight of the software if you tried to put any modern GUI-based operating system on it (Linux included), but it's plenty fast enough for my mad scientific purposes.

The Linksys does have one thing going for it, though. It's a purpose-built machine that you can just plug in and go. There's a little configuration involved if you want to do anything fancy on your side of the network (meaning I did some configuration) but not much. Turning the Vectra in to a firewall/router/WAP/DHCP/DNS machine is a do-it-yourself project that involves scouring the Internet, discarding the stuff that was applicable to versions of Linux from six years ago that now would be known as The Hard Way, and making it all work and play nicely together.

I installed the latest version of Ubuntu Server onto the machine over the weekend (an adventure in paleocybernetics I won't bore you with here), gathered the software I needed and started configuring. Some of it was "by the book," er, website, some of it was trial-and-error-and-read-the-logs-and-try-again. Executive summary: Yesterday I turned on the access point package and got my cell phone to connect to the WAP and get an address. This means most of the configuration is done and everything is working the way it should for the packages installed so far. There's still some tweaking to be done, mostly involving security and making the Internet accessible to the machines behind the firewall, but the bulk of it – something I've wanted to do for over a year now – is done. I still have one piece of hardware on order before I can hook everything up, and my plan is to switch out the Linux machine for the Linksys router over the weekend, possibly after everyone has gone to bed Friday night. They'll all want their Internet access on Saturday, and I can't blame them. I would.

And Whaddaya Get? Another Day Older

After I finished up with the WAP, we ate supper and the grandkids settled in to watch a movie with Auntie. I was in the bedroom winding down and getting ready to go to bed, and as I often do I had the banjo in my lap as I did my computer stuff. I was just kind of idly picking at the strings, sounding an open chord, not playing anything in particular, when I hit upon the pattern 5-1-2-3-4. Hmmm. That sounds almost familiar. I tuned the second string down a half step to a B♭, did the pattern again, and yep, it was the opening riff to Tennessee Ernie Ford's version of "Sixteen Tons."

So of course I had to work out the song, which involved figuring out the chords on a banjo that's not tuned the way I usually play it. Luckily the way I remember the song it's only three chords. Rise Up Singing says four, but I usually go with what I hear when I can figure out what it is. Makes it sound "folkier," in my humble opinion. Anyway the base G minor chord was now an open strum and the other two just involved moving the finger fretting the second string up a fret.

There was something missing, though. I mean, I followed Ford's version pretty closely, but as it sometimes does, my ear was telling me to do something different. So just before the last verse ("If you see me comin'") I shifted the key up from G minor to A♭ minor by barring the first fret. That's something I don't often do on a banjo because the fifth string becomes discordant (G against an A♭ chord), but as it turns out I was able to solve that fairly easily. I had been ending each verse by doing a quick attack with a D7 chord on "owe" and then doing "my soul to the company store" a capella, following it up with the "5-1-2-3" riff. Since I have "railroad spikes" on my banjo (a capoing system where you put actual model railroad spikes into the fretboard and capo the fifth string by slipping the string under the spike) I figured out I could hit the chord for "owe", then while singing "my soul to the company store" quickly spike the fifth string at the sixth fret so it would sound an A♭ and be in accord with the new key. Then I did the riff, played a couple of Gm chords, and moved up to A♭m. I think it sounds pretty good.

Anyway that was my day yesterday. Hope you had a good one too.

It appears that igor, my file and print server, is well and truly dead. After about seven years of service I finally pulled the plug on it last night. It was not only not booting from any hard drive I tried in it, it may have been actively clobbering the hard drives and/or USB drives I was booting it from. My time is worth enough, and computer hardware is cheap enough, that I can't justify putting any more time into trying to figure out what's going on.

Now it's time to play musical computers:

* My laptop will become my primary development/ham radio machine. As I type this on the laptop I am doing some maintenance on the hard drive, after which I'll be installing my ham radio programs. One bit of lemonade in this saga of lemons is that I have igor's monitor hooked up to the laptop, giving me a dual screen display. This will let me run propagation software, DX spotting sites and the like in the background while I do primary tasks in the front.

* My daughter has a computer she inherited from her brother that she isn't using. The plan is to put a new hard drive into it and install Windows 7 for my wife, whose computer is at least as old as igor, is still running Windows XP and hasn't had a registry cleaning in all that time.

Yeah. So, finally she will have a computer that will run her Gaia games at a reasonable pace. This is her Mother's day present from the two of us.

* My wife's old computer will, hopefully, become the new igor. It's of the same vintage as igor – in fact it uses the same motherboard – so I don't know how much longer it has left to run or whether it too will start acting berserk, but at least with any luck I'll be able to pull the files off the RAID arrays and onto an external drive.

And that's my Saturday. That, and figuring out why the cable was out at our house (answer: it wasn't, someone had just switched channels). And taking a nap. A nap is definitely on the agenda. And watching Classic Arts Showcase, which I highly recommend. I just learned that there's such a thing as a "Liverpool Oratorio" that Paul McCartney had a hand in. Presumably it's that Liverpool and that Paul McCartney. (I just checked. It is, and it is.)

Not long ago I got the bright idea that I wanted to put a Windows XP partition on my laptop. The reasons for this are as boring as they are tedious, but basically they boil down to my wanting to run some software that doesn't play well with my 64-bit copy of Windows 7.

So, I dug through my stash, pulled out my XP install disk, reconfigured the disk to have a 30 GB XP partition, booted up the install disk, and . . . BLUESCREEN!

Um, whut? I'd never had a bluescreen on installation before, and that included dogfooding pre-release versions of Windows. So I went and looked up the stop code, and it turns out I'm a bit too clever for my own good.

My laptop was designed to be run with Vista. This of course means it runs Win7 just fine, but it also means that it includes the latest and greatest in computer technology. Including SATA hard drives.

Guess what technological innovation had either not yet been invented or was not yet in common use when Windows XP was developed and released?

There are workarounds and slipstreams that will allow you to install Windows XP with SATA drivers, but they look like a major pain, and there are enough other newer devices on the laptop that I think I'm going to try something different. I do have VirtualBox and that might be a solution, but I've had problems with stability running VirtualBox. Virtual PC might be an option if it will run with my copy of Windows 7.

On another note Igor the Younger is at his parents' this weekend and his sister will be joining them after school, but things are going to be exciting anyway, as my other son's kids will be here. Maybe I can put them to work as temporary Igors if the sun will stay out long enough for me to put up a temporary antenna.