get ewakened

Fly Porter... seriously... whenever you can

Recently got home from a nice weekend vaction in Quebec City and had a fantastic time.  This was mainly due to the great company, but partially because of how easy it was to get there.  We decided to fly instead of drive and we made the best choice by choosing Porter.

Porter’s tagline is “Flying Refinded” and they are right.  You actually feel like a VIP when you fly Porter.  Here is a brief rundown of our trip.

Our flight left at 12:00pm.  We arrived at the Toronto City Centre Airport at 11:10am.  Yes that’s right.  Only 50 minutes before the flight.  We were not panicked or running, we casually rode the escallator up to the second floor, showed our drivers licenences and received our tickets.

Now here comes the most annyoing part… you have to take a ferry across the bay to get to the actualy airport.  Yes it kina sucks and is a little annyoing, but for 5 minutes who really cares.

11:25am.  We check our bags hassel free and enter security.  Instead of pulling a Pearson airport and trying to shove 50 people into two lines while 10 lines remain closed.  Porter services 15 people with 4 lines!  Security is just as strict and tight as Pearson but took a fraction of the time.

11:30am.  We enter the Porter Lounge and I start to cry a little.  The couches, the chairs, the floors and walls are all beautifuly designed and scream comfort!  They have a bank of iMacs just asking to be used and a free Cafe where you can have pop, juice, coffee, espresso, cookies, biscotti, water, magazines… anything you want.  You can also get free wireless internet without a stupid WEP or WPA key.  It’s really amazing.

11:45am.  Our flight is called for boarding.

11:50am.  We enter the very spacious and luxurious plane.  It’s a smaller plane equipped with two propeller engines, but don’t let that fool you. These are quality machines and have the most leg room and comfortable seats I have ever sat in.

11:58am.  The propellers start spinning and we get ready for takeoff.  2 minutes ahead of schedule.

12:20pm.  The flight attendents come around with free food and drinks.  The food was great except for the fact that I don’t eat mayo, but, the free Stella more than made up for that.

1:20pm.  We land in Quebec City 10 minutes early.

There is nothing like starting a vacation off with a trip like this.  If you get the chance Fly Porter.

They fly to Quebec City, Ottawa, Chicago, New York and more … So if you can, do it.  You won’t regret it.

PS.  Oh did I mention the flight was $100 less than Air Canada?

Reading a Book in Progress

Just posted some thoughts about reading the Real World Haskell.  It’s a really cool concept and something I have wanted to read for a long time.  I learned Haskell in R.D Tennant’s class at Queen’s back in 2004 and really liked it, but never fully understood it.  Now that I know more about functional programming and programming in general its a much easier read.  I think Queen’s should put this class in third year and make it more applied rather than theoretical.  Students would get more out of it.

It’s amazing how all of these older languages and paradigms are making such a comeback.  Must be crazy for all of the people who have been around a lot longer than me.  To see the ebb and flow, the rise and fall of these languages.  Let’s hope the good ones stay good and are around for a long time.  My top three are still.

1. Ruby

2. C#

3. Javascript

However, I think that Haskell is closely rounding third.

Anyway, take a look at the book and the review and tell me what you think.

Kent

Happy and Confused with Mozilla's Bespin

I am sure that clairity will come.  Needless to say I am very eager to learn more and experiemnt with Bespin.

A Really Simple SDK

So I have finally gotten past all of the hurdles of making an iPhone version of my thesis software called Friend Forecaster.  Well, let me be honest, I didn’t write an iPhone app in fact I wrote a lot of Ruby and HTML to make this happen.  I used the most basic API and I think the powerful one… I used the web.

It’s not a new idea to think of the web as a platform or as an SDK… just look at where Chrome is going and you will see that the browser and the web are the future platforms.  The great thing about this is that for people like me who love making websites, I have intemate knoweldge of the basic API languages, HTML, CSS, JavaScript.  Knowing a backend language is essential in today’s dynamic world so I have learned a handful of those too.  However, there is the little problem of the interface.

The interface is not something to be overlooked since it is the gateway and gatekeeper to your app.  The last time I checked there were a lot of browers.  Of these browsers, here are the ones I care about: Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and IE7+.  This is what scares people away from the web.  The fact that you have no guarentee that what you make will look the same or behave the same for all of your users.

This will have to change… and it already has.  IE has a lot of catching up to do and webmasters are punishing them for not being standards compliant.  Should this punishment continue, they will have no choice to make a better browser.

So what’s my point… learn how to make websites!  learn the old fashion way and the modern way.  Get to know the web and get to know it’s limitations.  With frameworks like Rails, JavaFx, Django and the dark horse Cappuccino there is lots to learn and lots to explore.

Here’s to a web based API!

K

Super Simple Rails Database Data Dump

So after searching for a long time and trying to become an expert using mysqldump, I have found, yaml_db. 

yaml_db is the easiest, fastest, most reliable way to transfer your production data to your development database and vice versa.  It runs a rake task that pushes everything into a file called data.yaml, then loads it back into another database using a similiar rake task.

Dump :: rake db:data:dump

Load   :: rake db:data:load

It’s that easy and it works!  

I copied a MySQL production database to my development machine and this worked in all of 5 minutes.  Remember, this is only transferring data, not schema or structure!  This is great, since Rails handles that using migrations.  mysqldump always seems to screw up my structure if I don’t use the right encoding and params, but this works like a charm.

The only trick is that once you dump the data, you will have scp it to your local machine with something like

scp -P [PORT] user@domain:/path/to/railsapp/current/db/data.yml \ /User/local/username

I wrote some capistrano tasks to handle that for me.

That’s it!  Great job Heroku!  Wonderful plugin.

Great night for ProspectLinker

Just had a great night of coding and working on ProspectLinker.

Look for some big stuff landing tomorrow!

ProspectLinker

Intentions are the new resolutions

Resolutions are so 2008!

Well no, not really, but I feel like people see resolutions as a chance to convince themselves that things will be different, but that’s counterproductive.  The simple truth is that nothing is wrong.  There is nothing broken in your life, there are no problems, everything is perfect, it’s all a matter of perspective and mindset.

Everything is really two subjects: The thing, and the lack of the thing.  So if you set the intention of loosing weight, you are attemping the impossible since what you are really saying is that you want to be healthier or to look better, but you are focusing on the lack. “I don’t like the way I look, so I want to look this other way that might make me feel better”.  Why not state this another way, “I want to be healthier in body, mind and spirit then I was the year before, each day I want to feel and be healthier than the day before and loosing weight will be a very welcomed side effect.”

The easiest way to achieve your goals and meet your resolutions is to focus on what you want, not what you do not want.  It’s a simple shift, but it makes all the difference.  Make the intention to see what you want to see, make the intention to do what you want to do.  Approach everything from a place of wanting not of lacking and you will find that you effortlessly attain and reach all of your goals.

Life is supposed to easy, so why do we try and make it so hard?