Work Politics and the Stationary Career Path

Work has been a pain. There’s really no other way to describe it. Everyone is getting pissy because of tight deadlines and it’s only a matter of time before the finger pointing begins. I’m OK with that. Finger pointing doesn’t affect me as much. I just shrug it off and laugh. Usually in front of the person doing the pointing.

One of the things that really bugs me though is the fact that my career there feels stagnant. I’ve asked for a title increase once and been shot down. It’s not the fact that I was shot down that upsets me. It’s the response I received from upper management. Something about “implications” surround the idea of promoting me. I’ve been told by several people at the company that my name comes up often as the “go-to” person when it comes to getting things done and picking up where others left off. I’ve been told by higher paid employees that I am far more knowledgeable than they are and that I am highly regarded.

I don’t get it. I think they want me to quit. I’ll ask again, but I fear I will either get the same response or worse, no response.

Ruby

I was all gung-ho the other night about diving into Rails. I still am. I am just running out of steam these days. Between the nine hours at the day job and a couple hours after on the side gig that doesn’t pay, I just can’t find the time.

It is going to happen though. It is. Shut up.

VMware and Unity

Is it me, or is VMware really giving Parallels a run for their money? I’ve been using VMware Fusion as my virtual machine of choice for the past several months. I’ve always felt that VMware has had a slight leg up on Parallels in the performance department. Now with Unity, I think VMware has a solid lead in the VM race. It is just an awesome product. I highly recommend trying it out. It’s still in beta, but so far, I haven’t had any issues running XP or Ubuntu (Feisty). Best of all, if F R double E whilst in beta.

Cable vs. DSL

We’re cutting back on the spending around the house lately. One of the things I’ve chosen to sacrifice is Cable to DSL. As much as I hate the pone company, I’m willing to save $20 or so bucks per month for (what I thought was) a slightly slower interweb. Slightly was a total understatement. While downloading the latest VMware, I really felt the pain. First off, my download speed was a measly 68Kb/s and then to top that off, the transfer died 50MB into the download. Luckily, I just hooked this all up tonight and have not canceled cable just yet. I pulled out the cable modem and finished the download in four minutes (averaging ~700Kb/s). Pathetic. I think if I do a cost per bandwidth, I’m actually getting ripped off by DSL.

There was a whole host of other mishaps with the DSL order, but, I’m not going to get into that.

The time has come. I need to discipline myself to learn Ruby (on rails). It’s been around for quite a while now and I just have dig in. So I’m making a new personal goal: learn Ruby or bust.

The problem is that breaking the PHP habit will be dificult. Although, I’ve become more OOP aware and always try to create objects instead of random functions. I suppose I could stick with PHP and use Cake or Zend’s Framework to build MVC style applications, but, that sounds increasingly boring these days. I need something new to obsess over.

So, I’m off to learn. I can’t really learn by book; it just doesn’t work for me. I have to get my hands dirty. What better way to do that than to build something. I’m not talking about building a blog in 15 minutes (especially since there several other blogging type applications written in RoR already). It will have to be something somewhat unique that will keep me interested enough in the language and challenging enough to keep me busy. I’m open to suggestions and always open to collaboration (if anyone is interested).

I know it’s been a while. I’m sorry. I went through a phase where I just didn’t feel like contributing very much (hence the Tumblr episode). Don’t worry, the vast void of meaninglessness is still available and I’ll still be posting uninteresting tid-bits I find on the intertubes there.

So, last night I took it upon myself to give this site another chance. This time, with the help of Mephisto (another RoR blogging app). The install went smoothly. The conversion was a little bit of a pain, but I managed to make it work with a little help. So far, I like Mephisto. Better than Typo. It has less ‘bells and whistles’ but manages to have the essentials. And, it feels faster on my poor little 256MB VPS. It’s been running over night (granted with minimal to no traffic) and it’s currently sitting at ~40MB of memory (compared to the 60 – 80MB that Typo would suck on regularly).

Don’t get me wrong, Typo is a wonderful product. However, because I’m limited on RAM, I became frustrated with Rails thinking it was a complete memory hog. But that’s not the case really since I’m running Mephisto wich uses the same framework and the memory consumption is almost half of what Typo was using. If I had twice the memory, I’d probably still be using Typo… but I don’t and I can’t afford to throw more money into a site that doesn’t reciprocate.

I’m hoping to really dig into Ruby now. My crappy side gig with .e is winding down and I’m pretty much fed up with my day job so I’d like to move completely away from the Java/.NET environment I’m forced to work in everyday. Nothing would make me happier than be able to work on my Mac (or any Mac for that fact) doing PHP or better still, Ruby/Rails work. Call me snoby, I don’t care. It is what it is.

Wow. I’ve been testing the possibility of running Typo on my VPS with the pre-notion that it just wouldn’t work very well. I think I may be wrong. It’s been running for about a week while I tweak some shit and so far, my memory performance has been stable. Of course, thing would probably be different if I threw some real traffic at it… but, then again, I don’t get a lot of that.

The Setup

Initially, I was going to use lighty + fastcgi to serve up the Rails application. So, I had setup lighty to serve up my PHP/MySQl sites and that worked just fine. Then I started reading up on Mongrel and wanted to see what all the hubub was about. But then I got to reading the Mongrel site (more specifically the part where he says don’t use lighty and mod_proxy).

Crap.

Aight, so back to Apache and their proxy setup. no biggie. I racked my brain for several hours one night trying to figure out why the hell I kept getting these 403 Forbidden errors in Apache. Hours. After the millionth Google search, I finally found the issue: The mod_proxy configuration in Ubuntu is turned off by default (well, not really turned off… it just denies traffic to the proxy server).

 8     <Proxy *>
 9         Order deny,allow
10         #Deny from all
11         Allow from .randys.org
12     </Proxy>

Line 8 was initially not commented out. I had to comment that out and add the Allow from .randys.org bit.

Once I got that changed and reloaded Apache, everything is working nicely together.. even PHP.

The Tweaks

So far, the only tweaks I’ve managed to make is to the flickr Sidebar plugin. It now uses Lightbox V2. That was a bit tricky, considering I don’t really know Ruby but, it all worked out in the end.

As I figure out more stuff to do, I’ll post more.