Mike Perham

I didn’t write TuneUp (Brian, Bruce and Matt McCray did) but it’s a great tool and it’s nice to see compliments like this in the blogosphere. Thanks Mr. metajack!
Finally! A Modern Development Tool « metajack

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Just when you think you are doing well, someone comes along and points out how dumb you are. I was discussing my need to patch ActiveRecord with Bruce today and mentioned how I would patch the Ruby files in the activerecord-2.0.2 gem on staging, test everything and then patch the same files on production.
Bruce [...]

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Looks like my talk “How NOT to Build a Service” has been accepted by the LSRC organizers. I really enjoyed the conference last year and it’s an honor to be chosen as one of the speakers this year.
The great thing about the LSRC is proximity: it’s two miles from my house. If anyone [...]

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With the rise of Flash-based video, screencasts are arguably one of the best things to happen to the Internets in the last 3 years. As they say, a picture really is worth 1000 words and having an expert show you how to do something is far better than describing the same thing in text. [...]

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This prints out “1″:

begin
a = 1
raise RuntimeError, “foo”
rescue => e
puts a
end

I would think that a would be out of scope inside the rescue section but I guess Ruby considers the rescue section part of the begin/end block?

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If you have a Rails application in production, you need to try out the latest version of our Rails monitoring service.
FiveRuns Manage

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There’s an interesting article on Ars Technica about one developer’s journey from Windows to OSX; this is becoming an increasingly common journey. Microsoft’s decline in influence seems readily apparent to me as Apple’s offerings have matured. The analogy I draw is to that of the US itself. In 2000, Windows was completely [...]

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I wrote a little mini-essay about the sometimes fleeting nature of a knowledge worker’s skills for the FiveRuns blog. As a sidenote, the idea for the article was born in trying to write the array init code in my previous entry.
Changing with the Times

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I’m trying to test my pet project in IE by using VMWare Fusion with an WinXP virtual machine.  The problem is one of networking.  How do I get the XP guest to see the server on the OSX host?  I’ve got my site running at http://localhost:3000 but that address obviously doesn’t work.  Neither the host’s [...]

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I salute you, anonymous prankster!
COBOL ON COGS

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