Very impressive. Just downloaded this to find out where my precious HDD space is going to. Nice easy and fast, what more do you want ?

Click here to get the goods

Damn .trash folders…. gotta remember to empty those out!

Friday night, I was cleaning the house I had one of those moments which resulted in hitting up the blackboard scrawling lots of slightly out of the box thinking. Rather than put together a horrendously long post, I’ve thrown up this video giving a backgrounder on what I’m thinking about, and hoping to put into action….

Pontificating on Dynamic UX from Rowan Hick on Vimeo.

The basic premise for those that don’t watch the video is - the core web experience over the past number of years, really hasn’t changed - however what we do have, is substantially enhanced productivity through the use of many great frameworks and languages. So let’s look at the core web experience, and how can we alter that based on the behaviour of the user, change the layout and content shown to suit the individual user.

Next Episode, mapping out a system for profiling the behaviour of the user. Look out for a github repo soon.

So last night was the first Rails project night of the year and you know what ? I don’t think I talked to one person about Rails itself other than the cursory “what do you do?” type conversations.

What *was* interesting is I had no less than 4 different conversations with people about their professional development, be it their ideas or their careers - challenges they’re facing, how to tackle things etc. It was kinda amazing, and made me realise just how important these project/pub/*camp evenings are. Being in a startup, or freelancer you don’t have access to people to bounce ideas off, nor have access to professional development or HR teams. Last night really hammered this home.

So if you’re a team leader, a seasoned development vet, have built a business or two, etc and have a passing interest in Rails, you could do much worse than head out to one of the RoR related events, or any tech events, in Toronto. Ask someone what they do and you never know what kind of conversation you might have..

Following on from John Nunemakers post. I’ve been wanting to share this for quite sometime. I should preface this with, I’m one of *those* guys that loves to tweak, tinker, prod and play with things. It drives my fiance nuts.. So here goes. I recently just put the finishing coats of paint on my home office.

Software for profit:
Textmate - what can I say
NetBeans - @adamw523 is convincing me slowly that maybe this is the way of the future. Haml plugin needs some work though. I sincerely hope there’s a Textmate2 in the works.
Rescuetime - I’m competitive as hell. Apparently for this week I’m in the Top 1% of users for efficency.
Jungledisk - no nasty catastrophic disk failures here
1password - what, you put your passwords in a text file ?
Expandrive - mounting your server to your local filesystem over SSH …
Mailplane - saved my life
iTerm - put your production servers on a red background, white foreground profile, never again will you forget you’re on a production server…
Skype - one of these days I’m going to give the “laptop handheld video tour” and it will end in tragedy… I just know it. Plus everyone seems to talk to the cats over skype video.. it’s amazing.

Online services:
“rails ourapp” - Tend to build what we need, not a big fan of paying out for something invariably you have to change your processes to suit.
Photos - Flickr Pro Account. Please never let Flickr die
Devguard - kinda rocks for subversion hosting, if you’re not into this whole git hotness yet.

Now, for the fun part..

The brains:
MBP - for profit
Tower - Watercooled (both GPU and CPU), overclocked, beast. C2D E8500 @ 3.59ghz, 4GB DDR2-1000MHZ, EVGA 8800GT, 15′000RPM Velocripator drive. *always* put your money into fast drives, money well spent.
Backup - Lacie BigTriple in Raid 1 config.
Routers - Hacked (DD-WRT rocks)
Mouse - A logitech thing that has outlived currently 3 or 4 Mightymice I’ve used at various co’s …

Video:
BenQ 24″ - 1920 x 1200, anything less is a crime against multitasking, as good as you can get without spending stupid money.

Audio:
NuForce Icon - I like detail (USB, outputs clean audio)
Sophia Electric Baby tube amp - I like detail and warmth, plus, VALVES ROCK.
Energy RC Mini’s - kick ass
Mirage Omni 8″ Sub - when it’s not downstairs

The brawn:
Maple desk - all hand made. Had immense amounts of fun turning stock maple lumber and ply into this. Took approximately two months. Cost a lot more than what any rikety piece of Ikea cardboard would cost (don’t ever think you can build furniture to save money). Amazingly when moving house, I didn’t trust the movers, so I managed to get it all into a VW Golf in one go (albeit I was driving with the top of my head underneath the top of the desk - visualise that!). Comes apart in 3 pieces, only way to lift it.

The last word:

Watch.

I’ll have something web app related next post (just say no to scratched out ToDo lists, forget GTD solution #127 - roll your own ticket tracking in a couple of hours). But for now, just check this bad boy out..

If that intrigues you, follow this link … Sophia Electric Baby. Gorgeous wee thing, and it sounds pretty darned tasty.

If there’s one thing that’s saved me no end of heartache it’s including Apache conf settings for a Rails app or Merb/PHP/whatever, in the app’s config folder. You get versioning for free. You don’t forget your settings. You know where to find it every time. No other process can mess with it (not looking at anyone in particular CPanel…). Just make sure your web app can’t mess with it

i.e. create a file /var/rails/myrails/app/current/config/httpd.conf in which you place your host pointing to your rails app.
Then in your apache conf file (normally /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf) ensure you include the file above.

On my main app config file I try to pop in the top of the file the passenger config settings, as again it’s easy to find, then any of the required vhost(s) that the app uses.

Nice clean and in one place.

So after ‘Fringe it appears I’m not the only Rubyist with a deep love of music. I love music, listening to it, making it hmm not so much (I can’t) - thus thought I’d blog about further adventures in audio-listening-land. I needed some replacements for my desktop system after a minor technical glitch, and have been temporarily using some Def Tech Pro Monitor 800s with a NuForce Icon - see at end.

I’ve looked at Totem Mites, Def Tech Pro Cinema 1000’s, and been pouring over product reviews of everything under the sun, trying to find something in the sweet spot of sounding good, but not going to get strung up by..err.. yeah you can complete that one.

After an audition the Totems were honestly gorgeous, and sounded wonderful but just too expensive, and still quite big. Deciding losing my left nut wasn’t an option they were quickly ruled out. ProMonitor 1000’s were a step up from the 800’s but getting quite bulky for the desk and lost their appeal. Given that I don’t really like the 800’s for music they were off the list. Numerous product reviews and “my speaker choice is better than yours” leads you down a rabbit hole.

So Saturday I went to “go get the cat food” and ahem well we alll know what that means don’t we?, came back with a pair of these…

(note the bling gloss of the desk I made.. a year on it still looks hot)

My new home town (not just the place I live, but now HOMEtown) rocks. The unspace crew did a freaking amazing job on RubyFringe. Joey has a huge list of notes on his blog if you want some nitty gritty.

For me personally, here’s the stand outs…

- I have to say Damien Katz’s presentation was extremely raw and powerful. The story of how CouchDB came to be will stick around in a lot of peoples minds for a very long time I’m sure.
- Giles Bowkit’s talk was just an assault on the senses. Wow. Almost want to go to Burning Man now. Looking over the shoulder of my cohort’s laptop on the backchanel it seemed dead quiet in the 5 secs I peeled my eyes off stage.
- Nick Sieger’s Jazz presentation taught me more in 30 mins than any music class ever has (not that I attended many) did in school. Even though I love music. Love it to bits. But he broke it down so well I was stunned. Wow. Thank you.
- Mr Grigsby. Resourceful. What more can I say. This dude plays the system hard.
- Leila had a hard job having the last talk of the day, but her essence was on the money, do something people love (and therefore value) and you’ll do well. If your customers love the stuff you build. You’ve got it made. She showed an extremely hard core passion for her company. Fantastic.
- Less than 200 people seems a perfect number for networking. Not large enough that you’re anonymous, not small enough so you’re talking to the same people. Met so many great people. Hope to stay in touch.
- Libin, my man, you should be THE official Canon product tester. I believe he was trying to hit 1k photos. at time of posting 413 odd photos were up on Flickr but he hasn’t uploaded Sunday’s yet…

Surprisingly technology was less of a focus of most everyone’s presentations. Instead of the usual tech stuff every day on blogs, to mix things up the talks really got into the hearts, minds, and souls of the presenters. All of which just can’t be conveyed in the web medium. The tech presentations that were given were solid as well, it felt like just the right mix between screeds of cool innovative code and deep talks.

It’s amazing what can be achieved in just 30mins !

Opening night and day 1 are over. Just about to go pick Krispy and head down for day two. Truly, my mate mates down at Unspace have done an AWESOME job. The vibe is amazing. A lot of “best conference ever” comments going round.

Yes.. those are laptops waving in the air, and yes that is Zed on stage. Just look out for the mp3..