Category: blog

Lately, I’ve been dabbling in ruby programming. I’ve mentioned it a few times recently. I’ve also been thinking that what I’m doing would make for a decent beginners book. I’ve seen a few of the ones out there. The projects are much more involved and tend to focus on web applications. This would be more of a beginner-to-beginner style project.

I’m thinking there might be a place for a smaller, focused book. One that follows a project from beginning to end. Along the way it could touch the incidentals like git, text editors, the basic ruby gems, and such. The result would be a small app that interacted with a web service.

Last week I got sucked into a small coding project. I wanted a quick way to upload files to AWS S3. S3 acts like a FTP file server. But traditional upload methods like SFTP aren’t allowed. This makes the service tricky to use from the command line.

I wanted a simple tool that I could use in three different ways:

There are several file transfer program that have a graphical interface. Filezilla doesn’t support the S3 protocol. The built-in uploader in Hazel also doesn’t speak S3. Cyberduck is able to connect to S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files. But it’s not scriptable and must be used manually.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been plagued with sleep problems. This was more than not being sleepy around bedtime. This was not being sleepy plus not actually sleeping when in bed.

I think it started with a few late nights. From there, I spiraled into becoming semi-nocturnal. I would be okay with the good kind of nocturnal. The kind where I could sleep peacefully and wake up as evening fell. That would be a schedule that I could live with. There’s a chance I could even stick with it. I’d have to plan for certain waking hours to overlap with the rest of the world. Overall, it would doable.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

There’s a slight uptick in total words. This actually surprised me. I had called this a worthless week in a previous post. But looking at the numbers now, I was wrong. Having my average WPH go up by 128 was nice to see. I think this is because I’m doing more planning beforehand.

“I’m sorry sir. The medbay is out of bodies.”

I looked at the corpseman. He was about my son’s age, but breathing. “How long until the next batch of clones come online?”

“Soon. The vats are scheduled to pop tonight. We can start reanimating once the memories are trimmed.” He turned and walked towards the lift, not waiting to be dismissed. The damned Personnel Restoration unit didn’t respect the chain of command. I wanted my troops alive again, my son included. So I let them be arrogant as they wanted.

This has been one of those weeks where I’ve done lots of stuff. I’ve also failed to accomplish anything worthwhile.

The highlight of the week was on Wednesday when the city decided to turn off the water to install new meters in the building. We got warning letters stuffed in the doorframe on Monday. So it wasn’t a surprise. I thought about toughing it out. But then I decided that having a working toilet for those six hours would be a good thing.

I already yell at my computers. I don’t want to yell at them just to make them work.

I’m not quite sure how it happened. Somehow I wound up on the night shift. I’m sitting here at 3:22 a.m. writing this. Over the last few days I’ve been staying up later and sleeping in.

Tonight learning how to use ImageMagick was the culprit. Earlier today I posted about how I automate resizing my screenshots. This got me thinking if I could do it better. I saw few examples online and dove in. I finally figured out what I needed after too many hours.1

I’m not sure what happened to the world.

https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod/status/562416681260027904