First of all, Happy New Year!

The other day I received an email from a friend where she asked me if I thought that having excellent math skills were important in a programmers career. I’ve heard this question asked before and while I thought that might have been the case when I was a lot younger (when I had zero plans to go into the IT world)… I’ve not seen this to be true. My response to her was that it really depended on the types of programming work that one might want to go into. There are definitely programming jobs that require extremely advanced mathematical skills, but I’d guess that many, if not most, don’t really have that sort of prerequisite.

So, as I was saying. I think it really depends. It depends on what sort of programming you’re interested in pursuing. In general, when we’re looking to hire someone at Planet Argon, we’re looking for people with good research and problem solving skills. Programming languages are tools to help solve problems and build things. So, while math skills are useful, they aren’t likely going to make or break a developer.

Like any career, it should be something that you’re passionate about.

I’m curious. As programmers… how would you respond to the following question?

“Should an advanced knowledge of mathematics be a prerequisite in pursuing a career in programming?”

I can only answer the question from my own perspective and would like to share some others. Thanks!

Are you using PostgreSQL (the world’s most awesome open-source database server) with Ruby on Rails Do you have any interesting experiences that you might want to share with an audience? Well, you might consider submitting a talk proposal for PGCon 2008, which is taking place in Ottawa, Canada.

Details follow…

PGCon 2008

PGCon 2008 will be held 22-23 May 2008, in Ottawa at the University of
Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 20-21 May
2008.

We are now requesting proposals for presentations.

If you are doing something interesting with PostgreSQL, please submit
a proposal. You might be one of the backend hackers or work on a
PostgreSQL related project and want to share your know-how with
others. You might be developing an interesting system using
PostgreSQL as the foundation. Perhaps you migrated from another
database to PostgreSQL and would like to share details. These, and
other stories are welcome. Both users and developers are encouraged
to share their experiences.

Here are a few ideas to jump start your proposal process:

• novel, unique or complex ways in which PostgreSQL are used
• migration of production systems to PostgreSQL
• data warehousing with PostgreSQL
• tuning PostgreSQL for different work loads
• replicating data on top of PostgreSQL

Both users and developers are encouraged to share their experiences.

The schedule is:

• 19 Dec 2007 Proposal acceptance begins
• 19 Jan 2008 Proposal acceptance ends
• 19 Feb 2008 Confirmation of accepted proposals
• 19 Apr 2008 Final papers/slides must arrive no later than this date

See also http://www.pgcon.org/2008/papers.php

Instructions for submitting a proposal to PGCon 2008 are available
from: http://www.pgcon.org/2008/submissions.php

This

Happy Holidays!

Wow, 2007 has gone by really fast. I’ve been fairly busy wrapping up projects and getting ready to start new ones at Planet Argon. I’m sure that when many of you start a new project… you look back at what you’ve learned from previous ones. Even throughout iterations in a project, we try our best to have retrospectives to be sure that we’re all learning from what has and hasn’t worked. A few weeks ago, I decided to drop a note to the members of the Business of Rails community to ask people to share some of their lessons from the year. My goal was to get people to share their experiences from over the year with other members of the community and see where the dialogue takes us into 2008.

As expected… I got some great responses, which I encourage you to read for yourself. You might even participate in the conversation(s) and share your experiences. We’d love to hear them.

Side note… I’d like to thank all of you who have participated in the Business of Rails community over the year. It was an idea that came to me during RailsConf 2007 after I participated on a panel with other business leaders in the Ruby on Rails community. We now have over 800 members on the mailing list! I’ve learned a lot from the community and hope more of you decide to join. :-)

I’ve been using Tumblr off and on since early April. I tend to neglect it because I’ve found the interface a bit clumsy. The recent redesign hasn’t improved on the things that I consider obstacles in getting things quickly added to my tumblr. Since the concept behind the tumblr is to quickly share things with people, the interface doesn’t facilitate this workflow as quickly as I think it could.

In any event, I tend to not login to my dashboard very often (few times a week?), which means that I don’t post as often as I’d like.

A few months ago, I finally started to use the Feeds feature in tumblr, which will automatically add things to your tumblr from an RSS feed.

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The first feed that I started to use was my Flickr account.

Flickr to Tumblr

This solution for this was to tag photos that I want Tumblr to automatically with ‘to:tumblr’.

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Next, you just need to grab the URL for the Flickr RSS feed for photos tagged with to:tumblr.

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Next, you’ll want to add this feed to Tumblr.

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Voila… in a little while, your photos tagged with to:tumblr will start to show up on your Tumblr.

Del.icio.us to Tumblr

Links to blog articles, web sites, etc… are things that I generally use Deli.cio.us for… so doing it once for each was taking too much. So, I’m now using the same tagging formula with Del.icio.us to get Tumblr to automatically add links to my Tumblr.

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Now, I can use the RSS feed for items tagged with to:tumblr on my del.icio.us account with Tumblr.

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Pretty simple. :-)

Google Reader to Tumblr

Another place that I find myself wanting to post to Tumblr is from within Google Reader. Well, it’s actually really easy to do this by taking advantage of the RSS feed that Google Reader provides for your Shared Items.

Just grab the RSS feed from here…

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Then add this RSS feed to Tumblr like the examples above.

Putting Tumblr to work for You!

I’m hoping to continue using this pattern with other sites as well. I’d be interested in hearing how other people are using Tumblr to aggregate focused content in an easy to browse way.

Update

It appears that Tumblr currently only allows you to use five feeds to import. Until they upgrade this limit, you can use Yahoo! Pipes to do some of the heavy lifting.

After reading my post on how we’re using Skitch at Planet Argon for adding some life to bug submissions and feedback, Ana Nelson came up with an ingenious idea for taking a collection of Skitch images and creating a slideshow an alternative to screencasts.

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In her post, Screencasts are so 2005, Ana walks you through her process of finding a useful slideshow tool for her Skitch slideshow.

I’ll take this a step further and call this… SkitchCasting! ;-)

It’s really great to see that people are finding all sorts of uses for Skitch.

For more information on Skitch, visit http://plasq.com/skitch or read my post, Skitch… my favorite desktop application of 2007?

For more examples on how our team is using Skitch… here are a few recent blog posts by my colleagues where Skitch was used.

• [The Sign In

Metaphor](http://allisbe.com/2007/12/13/the-sign-in-metaphor), by
[Allison Beckwith](http://allisbe.com)
```text
-   [Google vs
```text
Yahoo](http://andy.delcambre.com/2007/12/17/google-vs-yahoo), by
[Andy Delcambre](http://andy.delcambre.com)
```text
-   [Google Street View for Portland,
```text
Oregon](http://blog.planetargon.com/2007/10/10/google-street-view-for-portland-oregon)
on the [Planet Argon Blog](http://blog.planetargon.com)

Btw, I still have a few invites left. ;-)

Consider this part one of several posts on my thoughts of the art of embracing chaos.

Don’t let the books fool you. The construction of custom software is an unmastered and volatile cesspool of chaos. I don’t adhere to the belief that there is a perfect methodology or process that will work for every project… as I’m sure many of you don’t.

Unlike bowling, you’ll never achieve a perfect score. Even in bowling, It’s unlikely that anybody will learn how to bowl a perfect score and do so on every game for the rest of their career.

You’ll never meet every expectation that a client has on every project.

You’ll never meet every expectation that a user has when they interact with your application.

Expectations are an interesting thing.

Your project might get widely adopted and embraced, but you’re still trying to control chaos.

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It’s chaos. Pure chaos[^1^](#fn1){#fnref1 .footnote-ref role=”doc-noteref”}.

So, why do we bother? Why do we try so hard when the odds aren’t in our favor?

To be continued…

Related Posts:

• [Embracing

Failure](http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2007/04/10/embracing-failure-part-1)
```text
-   [Don't Over
```text
Promise](http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/11/18/dont-over-promise)
```ruby
------------------------------------------------------------------------

1.  ::: {#fn1}
```yaml
[Chaos Theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory),
Wikipedia[↩︎](#fnref1){.footnote-back role="doc-backlink"}
:::

A few months ago, I posted about an article that showed you how to colorize your grep search results. Since then, I’ve heard people talking about ack, which describes itself as…

“a tool like grep, aimed at programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code.”

It’s written in Perl, which is fine and dandy… but before I installed it, I heard that there was a Ruby version named rak, which describes itself as…

“a grep replacement in pure Ruby. It accepts Ruby syntax regular expressions and automatically recurses directories, skipping .svn/, .cvs/, pkg/ and more things you don’t care about. “

Sounds great. Let’s see what this thing can do.

Installing rak

Daniel Lucraft, the author of rak, was kind enough to package it up as a Rubygem. So, all we have to do is install it via gem install rak.

As a user of many web applications, I often find myself noticing little things that slow me down. One such thing is the use of checkboxes in web forms. It’s not the problem of checkboxes itself, it’s the face that checkboxes require the user to really focus their attention to a fairly small box on the page and perform a click inside. If you’re filling out a form really quickly, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll take advantage of you your tab key to get through each field quickly. Sometimes there are select boxes, which require the user to make selections with their mouse. Checkboxes drive me crazy because it requires more time to position the cursor and move on.

So, when I see a form like this, I don’t see it being very quick to interact with.

While I’m not in love with the date selection interface here, my bigger pain has been the checkbox in the form. Why? Because they forgot to use the <label for=""> HTML tag.

What’s the problem? Well, I don’t have the convenience of clicking on the label text, which would toggle the corresponding checkbox.

I know, many of you know all about this… but I run into this problem everywhere. This is an accessibility issue for people and really just increases the chances for a frustrating user experience. When you use the label tag properly… it will provide a larger amount of the screen for people to click, which reduces the chance of not clicking in the right spot. The label tag was designed with this in mind so that people could click close enough to trigger the desired action.

Here is an example of where it becomes really useful.

So, the lesson? Please remember to use the label for tag. :-)

There was a post the other day on Signal vs Noise about the pain of opting out of mailing lists titled, Redonkulous unsubscribe delays, which I was reminded of after the following experience.

Earlier today, I got an email notification from my old Friendster account, which ended up being spam. I hadn’t logged into the account in ages and looked around at my profile and others. No meaningful interaction between my friends in a few years. It’s felt like a ghost town. So, I thought… “should I just delete my account?” I was thinking about doing the same thing with my Facebook account as well, because I’m getting tired of being invited to applications a few times a day due to a friend leaving my name checked when they sign up for a game. (this is getting old…)

So, I decided to kill the Friendster account, which I’ve had since February 2003. Oh… the good ole days of social-networking sites.

Upon filling out a form I got the following error with the notification, “Please list the other social networking site you switched to.”

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The tone of this error message is very rude and helped support my decision to leave the site.

While I appreciate that they’re looking for feedback, they shouldn’t demand it out of me. As a result, my response was…

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Wait a minute. You’re demanding that I list the sites that I’m switching to… in 20 characters or less? Thanks for giving me the opportunity to LOLBUG you. Sigh. Who makes these interaction decisions there?

If they really wanted to get some useful feedback, perhaps they could have asked me nicer.

So, I decided to head over to Facebook and compare their process.

At first glance, this looks very much like the form that I was presented with on Friendster. Except that I can only select one reason why I am leaving and I can think of a few. However, when I made a selection… something surprised me.

Okay, so maybe I’ll leave my Facebook account around for the time being. Perhaps there is a Facebook application out there that will be get my attention.. but to date, this has yet to happen.

[This post is dedicated to the memory of Robby Russell’s Friendster Profile. Feb. 2003 - Dec. 2007. R.I.P.]{.small}

It’s been about a year and a half since I wrote about my wrist pains that would often occur at work, which was being caused by something I bet many of us deal with from time to time… Repetitive Strain Injury. So, I’ve been wearing these gloves when I’m at work on my normal Apple keyboard. I knew that they helped to some degree because on the days that I forgot them, my wrists would begin to hurt after a hour or two of coding/writing emails. Not much fun.

A few months ago, I attempted to start typing with Dvorak, which started off with requiring myself to do it for about three hours each morning to start the day and then switching back. After about a week and a half, I forgot to continue doing it. The Dvorak keyboard sits next to my desk… whispering to me, “play with me”… but I haven’t had time to get back into it.

So, the strain continues from time to time. Over the course of a few months, I began to notice that most of the strain seemed to be in my right wrist and I started to wonder if the mouse movements were a bigger culprit than the keyboard itself. So, I spoke to a guy at Macforce (a cool and local Apple dealer) about the mouse pad that he was using. He said that it really helped him out and so I bought myself one.

It’s a Belkin WaveRest™ Gel Mouse Pad and cost me less than $30 USD. It’s been a few weeks and I’ve noticed that I can go almost the entire day without the gloves that I wore before. So, I think that there is still some strain occurring, but a lot less than before. So, I’m hoping to give Dvorak another shot and hope that combo helps alleviate a lot of pain that I’ve been experiencing at work.

If you’re experiencing wrist pains and it’s focused on the hand that you use your mouse with, you might consider something like this to help out.

I’m sure that I’m not the only one that has/is experienced motion strain at the computer.. so, what has been your experience and have you had any success making improvements to your work space to help?

One of the reasons why I’ve been too busy to write on my blog lately is that we recently moved into to a new studio. We had a lot of preparation to do before we moved in and are finally getting settled in the new space.

We took the space from…

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To this…

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As you can see.. we have lots of natural light for the entire team…

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I think that Chris Griffin shares the same excitement that I do about the new space. ;-)

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We’ll be posting more photos on the Planet Argon flickr stream over the coming weeks as we get the studio organized. :-)

In a new article on A List Apart, Jeffrey Zeldman writes:

“Some who don’t understand web design nevertheless have the job of creating websites or supervising web designers and developers. Others who don’t understand web design are nevertheless professionally charged with evaluating it on behalf of the rest of us. Those who understand the least make the most noise. They are the ones leading charges, slamming doors, and throwing money—at all the wrong people and things.”

He goes on to describe Web Design as, “as the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.”

Read the rest of the article, Understanding Web Design on alistapart.com.