I’m in ur Mephisto, hackin ur pluginz

I spent several hours tonight correcting and fixing the way I was pulling a lot of data from various places like twitter, last.fm and flickr for my dynamic sidebar. A lot of the old stuff was lame javascript stuff and flash applets, and it was making the page load pretty craptastic.

I tracked down some simple plugins for twitter and last.fm that pull data from the rest apis and display it as simple text. And, I think they worked pretty good, with a little hacking. Since Mephisto is a rails app I was able to dive in and correct a few things, like the fact that the last.fm plugin caches for 24 hours, and I wanted it to display my recent tracks, as well as that the twitter plugin was way out of whack and needed some updates from when twitter phased out the relative_time from it’s API etc.

As a result of my work my page looks better (in my opinion) and the load time has dropped from ~10s to ~1s given a cache of the page. So that makes me happy.

Rails.

On the subject of rails learning, I’m moving right along. Things seem to be coming a little more naturally. I’m far from being able to realistically code something complex on my own, but little by little. I’m still working through Agile Rails Dev, albeit slower than I would have liked. I took a lot of Resting time over break.

Home work

We spent a few days tearing down Jenn’s bathroom so we could paint it quick the other day. Jenn did most of the work when it came to tearing down and painting, but I sure hand stuff to painters well!

During the tear down, we noticed that in lieu of electrical boxes (those metal boxes that you can mount switches and lights upon) they had just punched a hole in the wall and pulled an electrical line through the wall. Then they attached the fixture with some random screws into the wall (studs are for wusses), wired that shit up and called it a day.

So when we went to replace them with something that’s not ugly as sin, we were kind of SOL. as we have nothing to actually mount it to. My bathroom is even better, in Jenn’s the random hole is in the center of the wall, but in mine they punched a hole off center, and then cut a hole in the back of the fixture to jury rig that shit right up.

So painful. I’ll post pics later. We’re having a guy come give an estimate on some electrical boxes for mounting this weekend.

Camera.

So the saga of the camera continues.

I put in an order for my lenses (AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR and AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8D ) last month because when I went to buy them the first time they didn’t have any. So I put in the order and asked if I needed to worry about the camera, “Oh no, we always have D80s” was the response to that. So, I ordered my lenses and I moved on, not worrying about the camera itself.

However, last week I went in since one of the lenses had come in, and found that both had been in for a week+ which kind of annoyed me, but whatever. So, I ask for a D80 (body only) (I’m after a body only because the lens that comes with the camera ( AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED is not Vibration Reduction, and so is not really worth the $300+ it tacks onto the price of the camera, IMO. The lens I ordered is VR, but it doesn’t work w/o a camera! :P) and they don’t have one. Ok, that’s fine, when will you get one? Should be Saturday. Ok, fine, I can wait 3 days or so.

Saturday comes and goes, and no camera. I call today three times (so far) trying to get an answer from someone, with no luck. And, no call back, how rude (they did call back before now)! It’s beginning to get really frustrating. It should not be this hard to give business to local merchants! :(

Seems like seven years at UITS sort of killed my will to live learn.

I’ve been out of UITS for about four months, and it’s been one of the most humbling experiences of my life. Right now, I work at a wiki company directly interacting with clients like Symantec and SAP. I work alongside a lot of very brilliant development people who inspire. But, I’m almost at the bottom of the ladder.

I used to work in a cubicle answering the questions of John Q Student. Fixing his Linux problems, or showing him how to make the VPN work, for some reason it made me feel like I had a clue. I tricked myself into feeling like I was a programmer because I was the guy on the team who stepped up to hacking perl when the need arose.

Boy… ignorance sure is bliss. Because I sure as hell don’t feel like anything close to a programmer around the people I work with now. My grand programming feats at IU can and should be dismissed as minuscule acts hackery in the same way a web designer dismisses the childish attempts of MySpace users at dressing up their profiles.

I’m waking up to the fact that I didn’t really want to deal with… and that is that I’m fairly clueless. And while it’s understandable being that I’ve never worked with anyone on any kind of coding project, or had an official part of my job to actually code on a daily basis, that doesn’t make it any less intellectually crippling.

I’ve decided that unless I want to answer emails and do support for the rest of my life, I should wake my ass up and do something useful. I’m attaching a rapid drip of motivation to my vein and I’m going to get some shit done… or fail miserably.. but I’ll worry about that when and if it happens.

I bounced a random crazy idea off a friend of mine and he loved it. We’re going to work on developing it into Something Cool (tm), but first I need to get up to speed. I spent that last few days launching myself at ruby and rails. I read most of “Learning Ruby”, “Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby”, finished “Ruby on Rails: Up and Running” (not recommended) and I’ve started reading “Agile Dev in Rails”. I’m learning a lot, and it’s nice to have a goal… it was far too easy to put this stuff off when I didn’t have someone who knew it all essentially making fun of me while I take strides to catch my noobish self back up to speed.

Lets throw some learning at my brain and see what sticks.