My wife Naoko wrote a reply to this post. It was fun comparing how different the podcasts we listen to are. 🙂
First, I’d like to plug a podcast that I’m a semi-regular guest on, techsTalking(5417), a podcast where technology people just talk about whatever is on our mind.
Here are some other podcasts that I’m currently subscribed to:
The Incomparable — a podcast about anything geeky. Star Wars? Check. Star Trek? Check. Silly drafts? Check. Crazy movies? Check.
The Incomparable Game Show — born from The Incomparable proper, regular panelists play crazy games for your entertainment. On the podcast.
Incomparable Radio Theater — The Incomparable podcast, once upon a time, liked to do funny things on April Fools. Like, say: release a full-length episode in the format of old-time radio drama. Including equally funny sponsors (some fake, some real). Now, they’ve spun it off in to a separate podcast.
Random Trek — Incomparable regular Scott McNulty hosts a podcast with non-random guests talking about random episodes of Star Trek.
As you may know, I am a big PostgreSQL user and fan. I also use Homebrew to manage 3rd party software packages on my Mac. PostgreSQL 9.4 was just released a couple days ago with some really cool features — a binary-format JSON datatype for speed and flexibility (indexes on JSON keys? Of course.), and some really good performance improvements. Read the release blog post and release notes for more information.
However, if you’ve used PostgreSQL before, you know that upgrading can be a little difficult. Here’s what you have to do to upgrade your Homebrew-installed PostgreSQL 9.3 to 9.4. Keep in mind, these steps are for a standard Homebrew installation — as long as you haven’t configured custom data directory paths, it should work.
Kerbal Space Program — KSP for short — is an incredibly addictive game about… Space exploration! In the game, you are in charge of the space program on planet Kerbin. Kerbin is located in a solar system quite similar to our own solar system, with a few differences. I’ve been playing this game for a few months, and finally decided to write a blog post about my experiences and thoughts.
Note that KSP is still being developed with regular updates. Consider it alpha software — feature set is incomplete, and there may be bugs along the way. Regardless, KSP has fostered a very strong community of fans, players, and even modders. I haven’t developed a mod / plugin for KSP myself, but it is architected to be easily extensible. My favorites are MechJeb – autopilot and maneuver assistant and Kethane – in-situ resource utilization, but there are many more to choose from.
As of version 0.23.5, there are two modes of play – “Sandbox” and “Career”. Career mode is relatively new to the game (since 0.22), and is still being heavily developed. The point of the game in Career mode is to build rockets, use those rockets to send Kerbals to space, and gather science! In return for these science points, you can unlock additional parts to make bigger and faster rockets.
Rocket Science
When I was a kid, I often enjoyed constructing and flying model rockets with my father and brothers. I never understood the phrase “it’s not rocket science” — I thought building rockets were relatively easy. Make an aerodynamic body, attach the motor, and light the fuse!
I was wrong. I can’t begin to start on how many ways I was wrong. KSP taught me not only where I was wrong, but how wrong I was.
New words, words I have never heard before, words like “periapsis” and “apoapsis”, became not only familiar, but required knowledge. I realized that rocket science is not only about building rockets, but also about controlling them.
Periapsis. Apoapsis. Hohmann transfer. Plane-change maneuver. Gravity assist. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. Specific impulse. ΔV.
These words all mean something in KSP. You can play the game without really knowing about them, but if you want to get good, you probably should.
I wish I had this game when I was a child, not only because it would’ve been great fun, but also because it would have taught me the importance of physics and mathematics from an early age. In elementary school, our teachers would always tell us that math was very important! But they didn’t have any concrete examples. KSP changes all of that. NASA has already seen the potential in this game — the latest version was actually a collaboration between the KSP developers and NASA. While entry into the classroom may be difficult, I believe that this game has incredible value for children. How many times have you heard “<insert product here> makes math fun!”? KSP is one of the few games that actually makes math fun.
And now, here are some photos of me “researching” and “preparing” for this blog post 🙂
This is where we will be going.
Thankfully, my booster engines separated without incident.
Alone. Sort of. There are 2 other kerbals about 30 meters away.
Lined up to capture…
And capture. It actually took me a few times to grab it correctly.
Note to self: solar panels break off during re-entry. Even in real life.
Personally, I’ve noticed quite a few speedups, and it seems like they’ve fixed a large memory problem I was running in to on pre-release staging environments:
fix memory consuming issue on RGenGC (r43532 and r43755)
I have been a proponent of pre-commit hooks for a very long time. After doing some searching, I found this lovely gem. It consists of a bunch of checks before you commit your code into the repository. A couple of my favorites:
php – Runs a PHP syntax check on all PHP files
merge_conflict – Makes sure you aren’t about to commit merge conflicts (you know, >>>>>>>> HEAD, stuff like that)
ruby_symbol_hashrockets – Prevents you from committing old-style Ruby hashes ( :hello => 'there' )
Rails Turbolinks is pretty cool, right? I thought it would be pretty cool to use it on WordPress, too.
There are probably a lot of bugs, and it probably doesn’t work well with JavaScript-heavy sites. I’ve included the jQuery compatibility layer, but it’s still not perfect. Use at your own risk.
To install, just search the WordPress plugin repository for “turbolinks”
I’ve been playing around with Vagrant recently. It really is a great tool for setting up development environments quickly and cleanly – no more local MySQL databases with 100 separate databases!
There are a few ways to solve this problem that many WordPress developers have:
Regularly clean your databases up and delete old ones.
Use a common WordPress install, switching themes.
Use Vagrant.
I’m going to be talking about the last option, Vagrant, in this blog post. I’ll list out a few reasons why Vagrant was attractive to me in the first place:
Isolation – this was appealing not only to reduce my database clutter, but also to be sure that the development and production environments were as similar as possible (within reason – of course).
Portability – another killer feature of Vagrant. Check out the repository, vagrant up, and you’re ready to go.
Coolness – don’t you love the idea of having contained, automatically managed environments for your projects? No? Well, I do.
It’s a template based on Underscores (_s), a template theme for WordPress themes. I’ve made two modifications: convert the CSS to SCSS, and the JavaScript to CoffeeScript. Grunt, an excellent automation tool, is used to compile the sources into CSS and JavaScript.
I’ve made the template compatible with _s, so just follow the instructions for _s regarding naming your theme, then the directions for getting your development environment set up. If you want to use an existing theme, just drop it inside the theme folder (and don’t forget to update the name in the Vagrantfile!)
I’m always open to new ideas and pull requests – please don’t hesitate to contribute!
If you aren’t familiar with Marshal.dump and Marshal.load, you probably should be. It’s used to serialize Ruby objects into binary data – mostly caching.
my_data = Rails.cache.fetch('an_object') do
MyData.where(condition: 1).includes(:user).first
end
my_data.user
# On cache miss:
# => SELECT "my_datas".* FROM "my_datas" WHERE "condition" = 1 ORDER BY "id" ASC LIMIT 1
# => SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "id" = 1
# On cache hit:
# => SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "id" = 1
So, I wrote a quick module to make Marshal.dump and Marshal.load dump and load the association data, as well.
There have been more than a few times where someone needs to send a big file to me. So, I made a quick and dirty tool to allow anyone to upload files directly to a S3 bucket.
No more shuffling links around, worrying about them expiring, and wondering whether the data stored is safe or not.
