road trip

All of our belongings are now in a 17' U Haul, and we will be hitting the proverbial road shortly, to head for sunny California. Goodbye, Seattle. We'll miss you.

functional tests

The first time I played with rails (two years ago), I was super sloppy about writing unit tests for my models - I wasn't working on a very complex product.

This time, I've been very diligent about writing unit tests - and it has definitely paid off.

Since my application structure is still in flux, though, I haven't written a single functional test. SO far, so good. But now it's getting to the point where things are just starting to blow up a little at a time. Which goes to show that any shortcuts you take in life will come bite you in the ass sooner or later.

So now I need to temporarily stop working on refining the product and go back and get myself up to speed on how to write functional tests, and start writing tests for all of the stuff I've done so far. Once I get over the initial inertia, adding new tests, and refactoring them as the application changes should be actually quite easy.

Better now than after I have customers, I suppose :)

Good old music

A few years ago when I got my iPod, I decided not to import all of the random mp3s that I had from college - mainly because they came from various sources and didn't have all the ID3 tags in a consistent format.

So I started by importing the CDs that I owned, and slowly grew my collection.

Eventually, I moved all those mp3s off onto a backup drive and forgot about them.

Then, the other night, I remember that I had a live recording of a U2 song - and I hadn't heard it in ages. So I found that stash of mp3s and started importing a lot of that music into iTunes; fixing up the ID3 tags as I went.

And now I have all this great music from when I was in college and high school and it's bringing back wonderful memories. What a gift.

startup lesson 1 of 496,324

Keeping quiet about my business idea has been very difficult for me. Anyone who knows me knows that you can't get me to shut up on something I'm excited about. But I've been trying hard to be pretty hush hush about what I'm working on.

Why?

For one I've found that, for some inexplicable reason, whenever I talk about something, my effectiveness at actually executing on it dwindles. I dunno why, but it's as if the energy expended in talking about it takes away from the energy required to do it.

Second, I really want to get a first customer on board so that I can hone in on the idea and also develop some comfort that I'm barking up the right tree.

Well this morning I had breakfast with a friend, who's also starting a company. He's a little further along than me, though, and has funding and a formal company structure. After some conversation where I was being my usual evasive self when talking about the idea, he offerd to sign a mutual NDA so we could talk more freely. That threw me off - it's the first time someone has offered that. So I accepted and we spent the hour talking about our respective ideas and challenges and stuff.

After leaving, though, I felt like a bit of a dumbass. Why? Because the reason I wasn't talking about the idea wasn't/isn't lack of trust. It was for the reasons above. And yet, by agreeing to talk after signing an NDA, I basically affirmed that I don't trust him enough to tell him about my idea without signing some stupid piece of paper.

Obviously I don't regret the conversation itself - I learnt a lot from it. And hopefully you (I'm assuming he'll read this at some point) didn't walk away thinking that I don't trust you unless I have a signed piece of paper saying so. I think I just have to be a little more aware in the future.

Maybe I'm being naiive, but I think friendships are much stronger than any signed document.

What are your thoughts?

Specifically: 1) would you sign an NDA with friends? 2) are NDA's even effective at all when talking to peopled you don't know that well?

(NDA = Non Disclosure Agreement)

table conformity in rails

I want all my tables to have certain characteristics. E.g. I want them all to be UTF-8, and all have a field called 'created_at'.

Instead of duplicating that code everywhere, here's what I'm doing:

class MyTables < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.create_table( table_name, options={}, &table_definition )
   options[:options] = "" unless( options.has_key?( :options ) )
   options[:options] += " DEFAULT CHARSET=UTF8 "
   super( table_name, options ) do |t|
     t.column :created_at,    :timestamp,     :null => false
     table_definition.call(t)
   end
 end
end

class Foo < MyTables
# use this like a regular migration
end

So now every migration Foo that inherits from MyTables automatically gets some default goodness.

browser plugin idea...

There are a lot of books that people recommend to me that sound awesome but I don't quite want to own or read right away.

Imagine if you could select an ISBN number, or just visit the amazon.com page for a book, and click on a button in your browser. The plugin would automatically add it to your list of holds at the Seattle Public Library. You'd have to store your library number and PIN, and preferred pickup location with the plugin.

But after that, SPL will just send a notification when the book is available. Takes the hassle out of borrowing.

Also cool would be a wishlist importer that takes books (and maybe even cds and dvds) off your amazon wishlists and adds them to your list of library holds...

If such a thing exists, or if you write one as a result of this post, please let me know as I'd like to use it :)

insight

I recently attended a 10 day meditation retreat in Onalaska.

The course teaches Vipassana (loose English translation: 'insight'), and comes with quite a rigorous code of discipline (including no talking/reading/writing) for the duration of the course - which makes it a bit of a daunting endeavor to undertake. Nevertheless, at the recommendation of a few friends, I decided to go for it.

In line with what I had heard from friends, it was probably one of the most difficult things I've done in my life. Also in line with what others experienced, neither the 'noble silence' (see code of discipline) nor the limited meals and early wake up time (scroll to the bottom of the page) were as difficult as I thought.

While I was preparing myself for days of peaceful introspection followed by tumultuous emotions, this was quite the opposite. It ended up being a harrowing mental and physical experience (lots of thoughts, and pain respectively) that made it exceptionally difficult for the first few days.

The course was really an introduction to a theory of consciousness as espoused by Gautama Buddha, along with a technique that allows you to validate portions of that theory for yourself through direct experience. Obviously one cannot hope to completely understand consciousness within 10 days - no matter how rigorous the experience - but I feel as though the things I experienced first-hand allowed me to validate enough small pieces of the theory that I'm willing to not disbelieve the rest and trust that continued meditation will allow me to validate it for myself.

It's a little hard to attempt to lay the theory out here. But from mentioning it to a few people, it seems that it has enough in common with modern neuroscience, that it doesn't sound completely implausible. Specifically, I was recommended the book On Intelligence and told that some of the theories laid out there are very in line with the parts of the theory that I learnt.

In addition to that, I had a really cool conversation with someone who knows a lot about bipolar and the framework provided some interesting and different (no comments yet on whether they are useful) insights on what bipolar may mean.

Anyways, I know 10 days is a long time to take out of one's schedule, especially to sit quietly in one spot all day. But I think it was a fantastic experience. If you are a neuroscientist especially, I think you'd absolutely love going through this experience.

On a very very different note, A thought occurred to me today which I had to share. There are people that say that you make your own destiny and yet there are those that claim to be able to predict your future. I think I have an analogy that helps reconcile these into something that makes sense to me.

I've read many times that time is like a river. Always flowing, but always 'there'. In a whitewater course, one learns the very very basics of reading a river. Diagrams like these (scroll down) help tell you how bends, rocks, and changes in width of a river can affect its flow. Presumably if you know enough about the topology of a river, you can make a pretty educated guess about the strength and qualities of the currents at various points along it. And yet, nothing is preventing a big rock from rolling down the cliff and into the river and completely changing its flow. Or from erosion increasing the width and thus decreasing the strength of the current in a given place.

So if time, and life, are really like a river; then maybe there are people able to see the entire river at once and make fairly accurate predictions about downstream currents, given its current topology. But nothing prevents you from throwing a big old rock at the point of the river that we call 'now', and completely changing the downstream currents.

On that note, back to coding and attempting to start a successful business...

breakfast instead

I recently set up several breakfast appointments with friends instead of dinner. I really like the idea and think I'm going to do more of this if possible:

• People generally have stuff planned in the evenings but not early in the morning
  
• it's much healthier to eat a big breakfast instead of a big dinner (and I usually overeat when I eat out)
  
• breakfast places are usually packed on the weekends (esp the good ones) - I'm guessing (hoping?) they're not as bad on the weekdays
  

So let's get together for breakfast sometime. There are a bunch of places that I haven't been to in a while, and a bunch that I haven't ever tried.

part of the seattle coffee shop scene

I guess one common way to get over the loneliness of working for yourself is to work out of a coffeeshop.

But, given my recent ergonomic adventures, I have been a little reluctant to do that for fear of my hands hurting from prolonged laptop typing.

Plus, it just seems superdorky to walk into a coffeeshop with your own keyboard.

Well, I'm a dork.

I'm at a cofeeshop right now with my keyboard sitting comfortably on my lap and mostly out of sight under the table. You'll have to ask the other people here how dorky they think I look.

For the most part I've been pretty productive, minus the distraction of listening to some startup deals taking place (that was very informative)

an unbalanced life

I remember when I was in college, more so in grad school, I had to try really really hard to take time out of my day to go running or to work out.

Whenever I actually got myself into the discipline of doing so, I'd usually be more productive and creative, but deciding to take that time out of my day was very hard.

A few weeks ago I was thinking that, now that I can choose my own hours, I'll be very good about going to the gym or at least going for a run. But somehow it's been ridiculously hard to pull myself away from the computer; I've been spending most of my waking hours getting up to speed on ruby on rails, and getting started on building my application. It sucks; I can even feel my energy levels dropping.

I think the commonality between grad school and now is that I own my own time. Maybe subconsciously in undergrad and at work I was able to say "you know if you're going to make me work this hard, I'm going to damn well make sure I have 'Hemant-time' to go be healthy". Whereas now (and to a large part in grad school) the entire day is 'Hemant-time' so it's harderer to justify taking time out of that.

Either way; I'm at the point today where my productivity is going to suffer if I don't get in some solid exercise. Hopefully, having written this, I'll make it out to the gym today.

dvorak, anyone?

this is probably an incredibly stupid idea, but i'm thinking of trying to use a dvorak keyboard layout. has anyone tried that? anyone using one right now?

a simple tcp server

In the past, I've found it really useful to have a simple server that is able to listen on a TCP socket and print out everything it receives. It's a great debugging tool.


The following ruby snippet (adapter from an example in 'Programming Ruby') does just that:

require 'socket'
port = ARGV[0] || 80
server = TCPServer.new('localhost', port )
while( session = server.accept)
  while !session.eof?
    puts session.gets
  end
end

Probably cooler would be if it took everything on STDIN and echo-ed it back to the socket as well.


Update: Thanks pooja. I couldn't think of netcat at the time but that does exactly what I want. I'm such an idiot for not remembering.

open source and deployment

I apologize in advance for those of you who don't particularly care to read any code.

But one of the things I'm going to try to do while working on my startup is to post as many code snippets as possible.

Why? Because I'm a believer in open source. My startup is not focussed around building great deployment tools. By posting my code, I'm helping other people who also need to solve similar issues. At the same time, there's a good chance that someone smarter than me will read this and tell me a much simpler or more elegant way of achieving the same result.

If it starts taking up too much of my time, I might post less stuff. If I start to see value in posting code, I might try to do more of it. Either way, I'm running as fast as I can to build an amazing product.

The following script should help me to write common config files and test them out on my mac first and then deploy them with no changes. See the usage function for more info.

Oh - and I'm still a newbie ruby programmer. So if you have code suggestions, or if there's a tool that already does what this does, then let me know. I have no qualms about throwing away my code and using someone else's. Less code = less bugs.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'yaml'

def usage( msg )
  STDERR.puts msg
  STDERR.puts <<EOF

USAGE
        generate <config_file> <stage> files..

DESCRIPTION
        Given the following config.yml:
--
test:
 base: path1
 user: name1
prod:
 base: path2
 user: name2
--
        and a lighttpd.conf:

--
server.username            = "$user$"
server.document-root       = "$base$/public_html"
--

% generate config.yml test lighttpd.conf 
 will create the file lighttpd.conf.generated which looks like:

--
server.username            = "name1"
server.document-root       = "path1/public_html"
--

EOF
  exit
end

usage() if( ARGV.size < 3 )

config_file = ARGV.shift
stage = ARGV.shift

usage( "config file #{config_file} not found. " ) unless File.exists?( config_file ) 

all_config = YAML.load_file( config_file )

unless( all_config.has_key?( stage ) ) 
  usage("config file #{config_file} doesn't specify stage '#{stage}'.") 
end

config = all_config[stage]

# build up the regexp to match all identifiers:
regexp_string = '('
config.each_key { |id|
  regexp_string += '\$' + id + '\$|'
}
regexp_string.chop! 
regexp_string += ')'
matcher = Regexp.new( regexp_string )


# Iterate through each file
ARGV.each { |filename|
  unless( File.exists?( filename ) ) 
    STDERR.puts "file '#{filename}' not found. continuing"
    next
  end
  g_filename = filename + '.generated'
  if( File.exists?( g_filename ) )
    # TODO: move old file out of the way instead..
    STDERR.puts "file '#{g_filename}' exists. OVERWRITING!"
  end

  generated = File.new( g_filename, "w" )
  # check each line
  File.open(filename).each_line{ |line|
    # replace each instance of a token
    line.gsub!( matcher ) { |match|
      id = match[1..(match.size - 2)]
      # with the value specified in the config file
      config[id]
    }
    generated.puts( line )
  }
}

Stepping over the edge.

After five years (well, technically about four years, eleven months, and change), I'm leaving amazon.com. It's been a pretty awesome time, and I've learnt a lot from some really smart and passionate people.

But sometimes, it's just time to move on. In my case, I'm stepping off the cliff of getting a paycheck to living on my savings and attempting to create something meaningful and with monetary value. I'm starting a company.

It's scary thinking about it.

Stay tuned here for more info, if you so desire.

-Hemant.

Update: I suppose, technically, the title should read stepped over the edge. I can feel the wind rushing by.

Growing Up!

A few weeks ago I got the first DVD in the Up series, 7 Up!

The series is a set of documentaries, filmed every 7 years starting 1964, chronicling a bunch of British children from different backgrounds.

7-Up was funny, interesting, and boring at the same time. The kids were super cute, and their differences (most notably along socio-economic lines) were stark. At the same time, it was a little boring to watch the whole thing.

Yesterday I watched 21-Up (they skipped 14 apparently) and that was a whole lot of fun. It was amazing to see how the 7-year-olds had turned out 14 years later. And 21 wasn't so long ago that I don't remember what it's like! :)

The wonderful thing is to be able to see myself in many of the kids chronicled; and to try to remember back to when I was seven and fourteen and twenty-one and what my views were on life, politics, society, sex, class, opportunities, marriage, family, ... (the list is long).

I'm really excited to see the rest of the DVDs in the series. It goes all the way up to 49 Up, which was released in 2005.

Highly recommended viewing.

playing with ruby

It's been a while since I played with ruby.

I have a Subversion repository that contains stupid stuff like my .emacs file, and then I have some personal wiki's and blogs that use files or mysql dbs under the covers.

I haven't been very diligent about setting up a backup process for all that crap, so I've been playing a bit with some scripts to automate all of that stuff using Ruby. My ruby skills are quite rudimentary and based entirely on some playing around I did with rails two years ago. But it's been exciting (and tedious) learning about stuff.

First off, the AWS S3 ruby libraries look cool, but don't work unless you have a ruby version > 1.8.4. I had 1.8.3 and it took me forever to find the root cause of an obscure error.

I also never knew about ri - the perldoc for ruby. Check out RI for emacs which lets you run ri from within emacs.

Also loading inf-ruby.el allows you to do M-x run-ruby and get an interactive ruby shell within emacs. This is great for a ruby beginner like me, because I can experiment with stuff from within emacs while I'm coding.

The S3 Rake file is a great starting point for backing up mysql databases and svn repositories, but is specific to a rails setup. I'm not working on a rails app; just trying to backup wiki databases and an arbitrary svn repository; so I'm rewriting it as a class that should be callable either as a command (from cron, which is what I want), or from rake. If I get it looking decent, I'll put it up somewhere.

To पद्मामावशी from सुनंदा

(If you can't read the following all you can see is boxes or question marks, check out this site for help. (If you can see the fonts but can't read it, I can't help)

कै. ती. सौ. पद्मामावशीची श्रीसाई महाराजांवर खुप भक्ति होती आणि महाराजांची पण तिच्यावर कृपा होती. त्यामुळे ती गेल्यावर तिला त्यांच्या पायाशीच जागा मिळेल अशी मला श्रध्दा वाटली आणि त्यावरुनच मला ही कविता सुचली. हे तिच्या तोंडचेच शब्द आहेत अशी कल्पना इथे आहे ...

साश्रुपूर्ण नयनांनी तुम्हा सर्वांचा निरोप घेतेय
निघायची वेळ झाली माझी गाडी शिट्टी देतेय ।

पुनः पुन्हा डोळ्यात आणू नका पाणी
गेली बिचारी असे म्हणू नका कुणी ।

विरत चालल्या आहेत सर्व आठवणी
आता इथे माझे उरले नाही कुणी ।

गाडीने सोडले आहे ठिकाणं
पुसत चालली आहे एकेक खूणं ।

समोर दिसताहेत वळणदार वाटा
मऊशार माती इथे न काटाकुटा ।

फेसाळलेल्या समुद्रावरचा सुखद गार वारा
सोनेरी रेतीचा सभोवती किनारा ।

रंगबिरंगी फुलांचे तारवे फुललेले
सुगंधाच्या लाटेवरती मन माझे डोले ।

कवितेतल्या कल्पवृक्षांची गर्द गार सावली
ह्या गावाची हवा मला फारच बाई भावली ।

थांबू का जरा इथे, घेऊ का थोडा श्वास
नको! नको!! अत्त्युच्च सुखाचा मला लागाला आहे ध्यास ।

कसल्या तरी तेजाने उजळले आहे आकाश
दिसला! मला हवा तो दिव्य तेजस्वी प्रकाश ।

चिरंतन सुखाचं भांडार मला गवसलं
हाती आली माझ्या सद्गुरुंची पदकमलं ।

नको पुनर्जन्म, नको नाती-गोती
नको मोहमाया अन् पाप-पुण्यांची खाती ।

एकच मागणे देवा एकच द्यावा वर
पडू नये कधीही ह्या पाऊलांचे अंतर ।

- सुनंदा अभ्यंकर

pumpkin soup

I experimented with pumpkin soup yesterday. I think it turned out quite well - though you'll have to ask some of the taste testers for an honest opinion.

Basically I cooked a bunch (turns out that half a pumpkin serves way more than 6 people) of pumpkin in the pressure cooker along with some carrots. On the side, I sauteed onions and ginger.

Mashed the pumpkin, mixed it and the carrots with whipping cream, some milk, nutmeg, black pepper, and a tiny bit of cinnamon and cooked in a pot for a little longer.

Finally, put it through the blender and garnished it with some parsley.

I want to try adding some celery as well - I think that'll give it a nice bite.

data modeling

attended a pretty good presentation that Pierre gave on data modeling. Some things I learnt:

• since 3nf captures most business rules, each subsequent denormalization that you may do should be countered or linked directly to a piece of code that implements the business rule that was lost during the denorm process. It'd be supercool if there was a way to document that in the code/model somehow.
  
• successful normalization requires that you understand your business, whereas successful denormalization requires that you understand the runtime nature of your service (reporting, metrics, partitioning, performance, etc).
  
• it's easier to backfill into a simple, crisp model than into a "flexible" model that probably doesn't work anyways and may be full of incorect business rules. Resist the urge to put random opaque fields (or arbitrary key/value pairs) into your data model.
  

Having worked almost exclusively on framework-level code, I haven't had to do much modeling of business problems. So I learnt a lot.

lamb

I need a web enabled cellphone. Everytime I go to the grocery store I randomly decide what I'm going to cook but then never have a recipe handy and have to guess how exactly I'm going to make it. Here is yesterday's impromptu lamb recipe, concocted from several recipes on epicurious, as well as a bit of creativity:

Ingredients:

• Shoulders of lamb
  
• Yogurt
  
• Fresh mint
  
• Garlic
  
• Rosemary
  
• Thyme
  
• Balsamic Vinegar
  
• Sea salt

Repeatedly stab the lamb with a fork on both sides. Sprinkle on some sea salt, spoon on some yogurt and let it sit for a bit. Turn on the broiler in your oven.

On a cutting board, chop some garlic and fresh mint. Add in the rosemary and thyme, and keep chopping until you have a finely chopped green mixture.

To the herb and garlic mixture, add in a little bit of vinegar and more yogurt and mix again. Spoon this onto the lamb and stab again repeatedly with a fork to help it absorb. Cover and let it set in the fridge.

Put it in the oven, about 3-4 inches from the broiler, for 6-7 minutes on each side.

Improvements? Ingredients that I mixed that shoudln't have been mixed? Let me know. I just made this up as I went along.