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?

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.

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

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?

That is all.

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?

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.

To move to a new API version, I copy all of the existing integration tests and rename their prefix to the new version. Instead of renaming the files by hand, there is a nifty UNIX command that handles it for me. For example, to rename all the “v2_*.rb” files to “v3_*.rb” I would type:

for file in *; do mv "$file" "v3_${file#v2_}"; done