Remote Island

A great post from Rob Sanheim describing his experiences of working from home. I agree with most of the points that Rob makes, productivity goes up, but there are still those distractions such as the family pet trying to jump onto your lap.
The closing paragraph should sell it to anyone…

All in all, for most knowledge workers it just makes more sense to work from home. I think in ten years we may see a good third or even half of all programming work done by workers from home as more companies figure it out and realize that “eight hours in an office” doesn’t equal “eights hour of productivity”.

The cartoon strip ‘Dilbert’ never fails to amuse me. Scott Adams has just started a series about the PHB employing a more senior member of staff, and continues to patronise him not understanding that he is bringing a great deal of experience into the team. Today’s strip was typical, “Mature Employee – I was a chip designer in my old job. PHB – Really? Chocolate or Poker?”. This isn’t far from the truth in organisations today from what I’ve read on the ‘net lately. On the BBC News website a week or two back, there was a piece about the impending doom or crisis for the UK IT job market. It seems that we don’t have enough skilled people out there to fill the vacant positions. But reading many comments on the message boards that accompanied news article, it appears that ageism is prevalent throughout the UK IT industry.

I learnt a useful but very simple thing with Ruby today. Using backquotes, you can return the standard output of running cmd in a subshell.

e.g.

> `date`
> "Wed Nov 22 19:11:32 GMT 2006"

Now think about how you could use this in Rails to display the subversion revision of your web application. Simple, using YAML and the svn info command.

The svn info command returns the following output.

Path: .
URL: http://myrepository.tld/svn/projects
Repository Root: http://myrepository.tld/svn/projects
Repository UUID: bab91cb8-3837-db11-9351-0014220fd224
Revision: 143
Node Kind: directory Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: goatley
Last Changed Rev: 143
Last Changed Date: 2006-11-22 17:57:18 +0000 (Wed, 22 Nov 2006)
This looks like YAML to me, so we can load the output into the YAML object.

> REVISION = YAML.load(`svn info`)['Revision']
> 143
Very useful!

Design isn’t a language I speak often, but I’m always out for a bit of inspiration now and again. In my RSS reader, I subscribe to Web Creme for the latest in web design. Imagine my shock when I realised that a site that Fire-Island wrote a few weeks back made the shortlist. The head of tea operations at Fire-Island must be very happy with himself.

I’ve decided to move away from the Rails powered blog engine Typo. I’ve been happy with Typo, it’s had some teething problems, but I wanted to give Wordpress a go. So far, the experience has been a great deal richer from an ‘bloggers’ point of view. Only time will tell.