geeksam

You know about AckMate, right? It's indispensable. (No find/replace, but on the upside, it's ridiculously fast.)

I'm loving the documentation: http://us3.php.net/manual/en/yaf-loader.clearlocalnamespace....

Sweet! I'll add that to the resources page.

Site author here. I welcome all feedback on the site!

[There's more I'd love to write, but I found I was losing motivation to work on it in my Copious Spare Time(tm), so I thought I'd try promoting it -- knowing that others are paying attention to it will help me keep mine focused on it too.]

I make daily use of GitX for visualizing the state of a repo, and it's got a pretty nice UI for building commits as well. (It's Mac-only, though.) Apparently there are several forks that have added new functionality on top of the version I use, but I'm comfortable enough at the command line now that I haven't bothered checking any of them out.

I've struggled with helping others learn git as well; you can see some of my thinking at (http://think-like-a-git.heroku.com/#1) and (http://confreaks.net/videos/612-cascadiaruby2011-think-like-...). Currently working on a longish standalone website for those who (like me) can't stand to slow down enough to sit through an entire 20-minute video. ;>

For those who enjoyed this talk, Corey Donohoe gave an awesome presentation at Cascadia RubyConf that goes into more detail about what they use Hubot for, and also mentions deploying branches to a subset of their boxes. It was one of the best talks of the conference: http://confreaks.net/videos/608-cascadiaruby2011-shipping-at...

There seem to be enough of them to clog up I-5 on a daily basis.

"Your honor, did you see the way she was dressed? She was clearly asking for it."

[Tags: sarcasm (if that weren't immediately obvious)]

I moved to Portland from California in 2001. I love it here, and can't imagine ever moving back. That being said, the big adjustment for me (and for many folks moving from further south) isn't the rain. It's that the days are so much shorter in the wintertime, and even when the sun is technically up, you can't see it through the cloud cover.

It's easy to love Portland in the summer (and, having grown up in Sacramento with weeks of temperatures over 110 degrees, I was very surprised to discover that I actually like summer now). The real test is whether you still love it in the middle of your second or third winter. ;>

Also, this appears to suffer from what I like to call the "Razor-blade Singularity" fallacy: http://www.economist.com/node/5624861?story_id=5624861

Effort per interaction will only be zero when interactions require no cognitive overhead. In which case, why are we bothering with them?

There's also hackerbuddy.com, which exists to pair up wannabe hackers with wannabe mentors. Might not help you find someone local, though. For that, user groups are the way to go. Looks like there's an SF Python Meetup group that meets somewhat irregularly, and BayPIGgies down in Mountain View (which makes for a late night on Caltrain, but maybe once a month that's okay?).

The last such place I worked was in a relay service call center. It was right smack in the middle of your retail/food service to office/cubicle continuum.

But yes, "organization" would work nicely for both. Also: "team".

I hadn't heard of "gem server" until you mentioned it.

How is it not HN material? This reminds me of the 2006 Malcolm Gladwell piece about "Million Dollar Murray" that showed up here last summer ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1582582 ). Both stories pose a problem that has a well-known set of "accepted" solutions, and describe a novel and counterintuitive solution for an edge case. Which sounds like one definition of a hack to me.

Granted, the approach described here is more morally ambiguous than Gladwell's piece, because it has the added dimension of allowing people to continue to harm themselves. But I think there are interesting arguments to be made in both cases, and I'm glad to have had this piece brought to my attention.

Is there a correlation between "quality of work" and "hours [...] put in"?

If I had more upvotes, I'd give them to this statement. However, I'd be surprised if there weren't a nontrivial number of Rails developers who totally identify with that. The service is laughably simplistic for my day-job environment, but it isn't aimed at us. For hosting a four-hour app on Heroku, that for whatever reason needs to be client-editable, it's great.

Never mind that demographic -- I'm a web developer, and I typed in the .com version when I tried to view the site on my iPhone. Doh!

(And then the page load took 20+ seconds -- iPhone 4 on wifi -- and I stopped looking entirely.)

With the exception that this is supposed to be, y'know, fun.

Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E work in most input controls, and definitely work in the terminal.

That's an awfully bi chip on your shoulder. (Sorry, couldn't resist the pun.) My gender and orientation is irrelevant to the argument, as are yours.

I agree that scholarships for women would help, but I'm curious -- why is subsidizing students based on gender okay, but hiring professors based on gender "disgusting?"

From the above link: "According to the terms of the bequest, at least fifty percent of the awards go to Roman Catholic colleges or universities."

Oddly, I have yet to see anyone here with his boxers in a twist over the religious discrimination.

From _The Princess Bride_: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

From Wikipedia: "Sexism, a term coined in the mid-20th century, is the belief or attitude that one gender or sex is inferior to, less competent, or less valuable than the other. It can also refer to hatred of, or prejudice towards, either sex as a whole (see misogyny and misandry), or the application of stereotypes of masculinity in relation to men, or of femininity in relation to women. It is also called male and female chauvinism. Sexist is the adjective form of the noun sexism. Sex discrimination is discrimination on the basis of sex or gender."

Restricting an endowed professorship on the basis of any criterion is not sexist; it is discriminatory. And, frankly, I think it's totally justified: women are drastically underrepresented in the field, due to a wide variety of subtle discouragements that mostly fall under the broad label of institutional sexism.

The metaphor my partner uses is of a seesaw with one side on the ground. If you want to bring it back into balance, you have to make a deliberate change to the system by either removing mass from the side that's down, or adding mass to the side that's up. Continuing to pile mass on in the same proportions as before is, well, take your pick between "if we do not change our direction, we will end up where we are going," or "the definition of insanity."

Really, ezmobius nailed it. I feel compelled to chime in on Baby Stuff, though. (You don't need as much as you think you need, but a few things were really great.)

I emailed a friend with some advice on items we found useful (and a few things we didn't), but it's too long to just paste here, so I'll summarize...

My Brest Friend (put this one in your "OMG the baby's coming" bag!), a baby carrier (we love our Beco, but find a carrier or sling that fits you while letting the baby breathe), "Happiest Baby on the Block" DVD, specially-designed swaddling blankets, and (optionally) a "yoga" ball for bouncing babies to sleep. Big stroller may not be necessary (we mostly wore our daughter, and that big stroller will eat the entire car trunk), but strollers with pneumatic tires are really nice to push.

Later, Kiddopotamus makes fantastic rubber bibs and placemats. (Seriously, their placemat is genius.) We found that the $25 Fisher-price "Healthy Care Deluxe" booster seat beats the pants off of much fancier highchairs.

Ping me at geeksam at gmail if you'd like the long version. (=

+1 for the Happiest Baby on the Block. We borrowed the DVD from somewhere, and it was great. Simple and repetitive, too, which makes it great for parents of newborns.

+1 million on sleep being the biggest issue you'll face. My daughter just turned 2(!) and she's been sleeping 9-10 hours a night for a good long while now, but it took about a year and a half for my IQ to get back up to something approaching what it was before I became a papa. Totally worthwhile to hear her say things like "I want cheese on my mat" or "all of the trains went bye-bye" or "that fell on papa's head" or "I'm a robot monkey", though.

OT to Ez: Welcome to Portland! There's a fairly active Ruby community here, embedded in an extremely active tech community: see calagator.org if you haven't already. I'm happy to share what little I know about parenting in Portland (geeksam at gmail).