Matthew Bass

I just returned from BizConf (a fantastic experience which I’ll be summarizing in a future post) and I have to report one very sad thing: out of four airports I passed through, RDU is still the only one that doesn’t offer free wi-fi. Nashville, Tampa, and Jacksonville all have it. RDU charges. This just doesn’t seem right, especially given that out of the aforementioned cities, Raleigh is known as a high tech mecca. This is RTP for cryin’ out loud. Please fix?

I’m curious about something. If you’re an independent contractor, consultant or freelancer, are most of your projects one-time gigs or do they more frequently involve long term maintenance? There is a lot of different thinking out there about how to handle ongoing work: batch it up and get it done all at once (and pay for it in one chunk too) or spreading it out over a longer period of time (the pain isn’t as severe, but lasts longer).

Most of my projects start as one-time gigs and then evolve into ongoing maintenance work (assuming the client is pleased with what has been produced, which they generally are). I can think of only two instances where a one-time gig was just that… one-time… and didn’t involve ongoing maintenance. What has your experience been?

July 29th will mark the fifth anniversary of this blog. I realized today that I have never properly thanked you, my readers, for continuing to support this endeavor. There are so many other things you could be perusing, but you choose to patronize my humble programming blog. For that, I am grateful. Thanks for reading!

For the past few months, I’ve been exploring the fascinating world of iPhone development. I have several application ideas and am working pretty hard on getting something to market. My first app will be free, though I hope to work up to a level where I can develop a solid paid app eventually. I’m enjoying learning Objective-C. It’s a mind bender in a lot of ways. Having to handle memory usage, for example. That gets annoying pretty quickly.

My timing has been good since Terralien just launched its own full-stack iPhone development service last week. I’ve enjoyed developing solid Rails-based APIs for iPhones to interact with. I’m looking forward to flexing the skills I’m building on new projects. Learning is fun. The only difficulty is finding the time to learn everything I want to. It’s a never-ending pursuit.

I’m participating in the 2010 Walk for Life this month to support Pregnancy Support Services of Wake Forest. The walk is a family-friendly event that raises awareness and funding for the center. The cool thing is that you don’t need to walk or even live in Wake Forest to support the center. You can help by sponsoring me as a walker. It’s quick and easy to do. (There is more information about the center and what you would be supporting on my walker page.) Thanks so much for your help!

A $25 check from Federal showed up in the mail yesterday. That more than covers the cost of a new box. It’s always nice when a company makes things right for their customers. I intend to continue buying their products since I know they’ll take care of me.

Time Warner Cable: are you reading this? Learn something, please.

I was enjoying an IDPA match at the Durham County Wildlife Club this past Tuesday evening and, aside from it being pretty cold, I had a great time. Except at the end of the fourth stage.

I was almost through my first mag when I experienced a failure-to-fire. The round had fed properly and the slide appeared to be fully closed, but all I got when I squeezed the trigger on my Glock 23 was… nothing. No click. Just… nothing. I racked the slide again to eject the unfired round and I was able to finish the stage, but it cost me at least 2 seconds, perhaps more.

After retrieving my ejected round, I noticed it looked a bit odd. Comparing it to another round, I discovered the rear of the case hadn’t been trimmed properly. It was a few millimeters too long, as you can clearly see in the photo I’ve posted here. My guess is that it prevented the slide from fully engaging. This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this, and talking with a few other shooters at the match, this was the first time they had seen anything like this either. Cool!

I’ve sent the questionable round to Federal’s service department to see what they have to say. Hopefully they’ll make things right. The delay ended up costing me first place in the Novice class. What did I learn from this? First, that even quality factory ammo shouldn’t be relied upon to function flawlessly every time. Malfunctions will occur. Practice for them. Second, that every malfunction is different. I’ve practiced my failure-to-feed drill pretty consistently, but running into a situation where the slide closed and the trigger didn’t even click was something I just wasn’t expecting. Instead of treating it like any other failure, I let my surprise delay me from taking action.

Final note: I’ve been extremely happy with Federal ammo thus far and would be surprised if they don’t make this right for me. This post wasn’t intended to criticize their company in any way, it was just a fascinating occurrence that I thought might interest others as well. Has anyone else seen a factory round that was too long like this?

1. Compiling Apache and PHP from scratch in DSO mode is a nightmare
2. Slicehost’s ability to restore a server image from a backup is incredibly useful
3. I’m glad I’m a developer and not a sys admin

That is all.

I recently upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.9.1 and I’m very pleased with the results. The upgrade itself was very straightforward. It was just a matter of replacing the correct files in my project. I have my project checked into GitHub so I was able to immediately see what had changed. I also had a safety net in case I wanted to back out of the upgrade.

One nice benefit to upgrading was that I’m now able to leverage the Syntax Highlighter plugin. It does nifty stuff like this:

class HelloWorld
  def say_hello
    puts "Hello world!"
  end
end
HelloWorld.new.say_hello

If you run a WordPress blog, I would definitely recommend checking it into some sort of source control. Also, being able to run the blog on my development system is very beneficial. I was able to verify that the upgrade hadn’t borked my layout before making everything live. I use Apache to serve it up locally.

What platform do you use for blogging? What do you like about it?

If you’ve ever performed a fresh install of Ubuntu, you’ve probably noticed that the delete/backspace key doesn’t work correctly in nano. This is frustrating, but easy enough to fix.

This problem also occurs quite frequently for me when logging into a remote server. For example, a default Slicehost instance usually suffers from this behavior.

If you truly want to understand what causes the problem, check out this article.