Chad Woolley › Comments

Apple’s developer website only links to the latest version of Xcode, which requires Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6). If you’re still running Leopard (10.5), you need to go to this alternative developer website: http://connect.apple.com/ Log in with your ADC credentials, click “Downloads”, then click “Developer Tools” in the right sidebar, and then search the page for “3.1.4″. You might also want to check the wikipedia list of xcode versions to see if 3.1.4 is still the latest version. - Chad Woolley

Teach Computer Science without a computer! Computer Science Unplugged is a series of learning activities that reveals a little-known secret: Computer Science isn't really about computers at all! CS Unplugged provides an extensive collection of free resources that teach principles of Computer Science such as binary numbers, algorithms and data compression through engaging games and puzzles that use cards, string, crayons and lots of running around. CS Unplugged is suitable for people of all ages, from elementary school to seniors, and from many countries and backgrounds. Unplugged has been used around the world for over fifteen years, in classrooms, science centers, homes, and even for holiday events in a park! - Chad Woolley

Browsera automatically detects cross-browser layout problems and scripting errors on your website. Try it for FREE! - Chad Woolley

This might be for newbies. It's about how to avoid getting tricked. If you've been in the business a few years, you already know there are corporate shenanigans out there. However, you could be in the business for a while before you run into the worst of it. A guy I know was recently shanghaied into a death march development situation after being promised an impressive title and the responsibilities to match. I actually envied him his shock and dismay; it meant there was innocence there for him to lose. For me, that was the first thing that happened to me, with my first job in technology proper, when I first arrived in San Francisco in the early months of 1997. They promised me a Perl job; they gave me HTML to do; and when they saw I was disgruntled, they called me surly and ungrateful behind my back. This is common practice in the Bay Area. It's why you should be very cautious any time you see an ad for a job which involves all the coolest technologies in the world and no necessity - Chad Woolley

This paper describes an advanced 3-way merge solution. First, it discusses the many problems that have plagued 3-way merge implementations -- test case kits are provided to detect their existence. Then, it shows how solutions for these problems were designed and implemented in a working product, Guiffy SureMerge - Chad Woolley

#carlhuda - Chad Woolley

From the beginning, the profitability and viability of popular Facebook social networking games Mafia Wars and Farmville were predicated on the backs of scams, boasts Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in this video. "I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues," he crows in the clip to a gathered bunch of fellow scumbag app developers. - Chad Woolley

Rely on bundler for gem deps instead of geminstaller - Chad Woolley

What if we port gcc to pure ruby and bundle it in the bundler? - Chad Woolley

I've tried a number of approaches for managing gem dependencies in a Rails project. Here's a quick round-up of what I've tried, and the pros and cons of each. - Chad Woolley

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet. - Chad Woolley

I am putting on grips for the first time. I took the throttle tube off, cleaned the bar end, and cleaned out the plastic throttle tube. The bar itself, has most of the paint worn off or it. My question is, WHAT TYPE OF LUBE do most of you guys use to keep the throttle from sticking? I have a stock plastic tube, with the very end cut off for my Moose bark busters. - Chad Woolley

Damn Small Linux is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution. Damn Small is small enough and smart enough to do the following things: * Boot from a business card CD as a live linux distribution (LiveCD) * Boot from a USB pen drive * Boot from within a host operating system (that's right, it can run *inside* Windows) * Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we call "frugal install" * Transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install * Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram * Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!) * Modularly grow -- DSL is highly extendable without the need to customize - Chad Woolley

BasicLinux is designed specifically for old PCs. It uses a small kernel and busybox to provide a low-RAM Linux, capable of browsing the web, doing email, and functioning as an X terminal. The current release of BasicLinux is particularly suitable for old laptops -- it has PCMCIA capability and includes MagicPoint (a presentation tool similar to PowerPoint). - Chad Woolley

the complete failure of Google Groups as an adequate purveyor of public discussion software. - Chad Woolley

And while the rest of the civilized world responded to last year's catastrophes with sweeping measures to rein in the corruption in their financial sectors, the United States invited the wolves into the government, with the popular new president, Barack Obama — elected amid promises to clean up the mess — filling his administration with Bear's and Lehman's conquerors, bestowing his papal blessing on a new era of robbery. To the rest of the world, the brazenness of the theft — coupled with the conspicuousness of the government's inaction — clearly demonstrates that the American capital markets are a crime in progress. To those of us who actually live here, however, the news is even worse. We're in a place we haven't been since the Depression: Our economy is so completely fucked, the rich are running out of things to steal. If you squint hard enough, you can see that the derivative-driven economy of the past decade has always, in a way, been about counterfeiting... - Chad Woolley

Ruby Central has agreed to support RubyGems.org in becoming the default gem host for the community. We’re still in the process of working out all of the details of this migration, and it will involve several moves: * http://rubygems.org will replace http://gems.rubyforge.org as the default gem host in RubyGems. * Gem publishing off RubyForge will continue to work for the time being. * We’ll be merging user accounts from RubyForge, so you’ll be able to log into RubyGems.org with your RubyForge login credentials. Your gem ownerships will also be transferred over. So, what does this mean for RubyForge? The Ruby-specific functionality and data will be moved into RubyGems.org, and the parts that other hosting sites (GitHub, Google Code, SourceForge) can do better will be pruned away. Migration paths for those projects will be provided, we’re not throwing any switches without warning. RubyGems.org will not be gaining any “bloat” from rewritten RubyForge features. - Chad Woolley

Chad was a very nice guy! I thought the toast was very special! I laughed and also teared up... That is when you know a toast is good... - Chad Woolley

What causes the "washboard" effect on unpaved roads? Dear Straight Dope: We live in a rural area and on many of the unpaved roads a washboard effect develops. Others I've asked an explanation say it's a result of bumps causing tires to leave the ground and then land, and erosion takes care of the rest. This answer doesn't seem to account for varying speeds, car weights and tire sizes. The ruts seem pretty uniform in their depth and spacing--wouldn't erosion create a more haphazard effect? — mileary The phenomenon you refer to is known as "washboarding," a wave-like pattern on unpaved roads that might more aptly be called speedbump hell. As you've observed, the ruts occur with striking regularity, belying a chaotic event like erosion. According to Tom Pettigrew, a Forest Service engineer, the cause is an unlikely source: your car's suspension. - Chad Woolley

since a war file and a jar file are of the same format, wouldn't it be nice if I put a little bootstrap code in hudson.war, so that you can just execute it like java -jar hudson.war? - Chad Woolley

Psychology is one of those subjects that everybody likes to think they know something about. We love to go around diagnosing our friends and co-workers, both to make sense of the world and to make ourselves feel like we're smarter than they are. But like any science that makes its way into the pop culture, a lot of the "common sense" statements we hear every day are so wrong that they border on raving idiocy. Such as... - Chad Woolley

Additional insiders have stepped forward to shed more light into Microsoft's troubled acquisition of Danger, its beleaguered Pink Project, and what has become one of the most high profile Information Technology disasters in recent memory. The sources point to longstanding management issues, a culture of "dogfooding" (to eradicate any vestiges of competitor's technologies after an acquisition), and evidence that could suggest the failure was the result of a deliberate act of sabotage. - Chad Woolley

the Internet is more like a giant cascading multiplayer game of pachinko. You pour some balls in, they bounce around, lights flash and —usually— they come out in the right order on the other side of the world. - Chad Woolley

"In theory Variance was going to be a tool for tracking the difference between how long I think it'll take me to do something and how long it actually takes. I didn't finish it because I didn't realize how long it would take to do." - Chad Woolley

"In theory Variance was going to be a tool for tracking the difference between how long I think it'll take me to do something and how long it actually takes. I didn't finish it because I didn't realize how long it would take to do." - Chad Woolley

We are entering an age where we will have to deal with facts instead of ignoring them. We can no longer afford to exist and function at low psychological levels associated with limbic responses. We can no longer afford a government that believes lies are necessary to maintain order. (Emphasis added: CHS) In the times to come we must know that it is in our best interest to do what is right and just despite our fear. And if one does not know what that means, go talk to a Vet whose buddy threw himself on a grenade to save his friends. - Chad Woolley

We are entering an age where we will have to deal with facts instead of ignoring them. We can no longer afford to exist and function at low psychological levels associated with limbic responses. We can no longer afford a government that believes lies are necessary to maintain order. (Emphasis added: CHS) In the times to come we must know that it is in our best interest to do what is... more... - Chad Woolley

The real parties in interest concealed behind MERS have been made so faceless, however, that there is now no party with standing to foreclose. The Kansas Supreme Court stated that MERS' relationship "is more akin to that of a straw man than to a party possessing all the rights given a buyer." The court opined: - Chad Woolley

I think pair programming is one of our most important competitive advantages at Hashrocket. My teams produce some of the highest-quality code I've ever seen in 15 years in the biz. We are able to effectively leverage XP-style client acceptance in our process because our code is so defect-free. I'm damn proud of what we do at Hashrocket and talk about it often, but usually while trying to stress the supreme importance of context and talent in making it work. My homepage still says "Helping to evolve the world of software into a more fun and productive place to live, work and play", but pair programming, especially all the time, is one of those things where increasingly I have to advise most Agile idealists that it probably won't work for them, and here are ten reasons why: - Chad Woolley

If you launch Keychain Access (in /Applications/Utilities/), and remove the entry for your ssh keys, you should be prompted for your password, and have the option to not save it. To ~remove ssh-agent you can could run.. launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/org.openbsd.ssh-agent.plist ..or use http://lingon.sourceforge.net/ Or unset the SSH_AUTH_SOCK env variable Or, look at the ssh-add command - ssh-add -D forgets all identities (including removing relevant entries from Keychain), ssh-agent -t 123 sets it to remember identities for 123 seconds ssh-agent is shepherded by launchd, so you might be able to stop/unload/disable the org.openbsd.ssh-agent.plist entry, either manually through launchdctl or via Lingon. Install the MacPorts version of ssh. It doesn't do this. In fact, IIRC, annoyingly unnecessary integration of the ssh client with OS X was why I started doing this myself when Leopard came out - Chad Woolley

what is it The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method that can be used for any kind of task. For many people, time is an enemy. The anxiety triggered by “the ticking clock”, especially when a deadline is involved, leads to ineffective work and study habits which in turn lead to procrastination. The aim of the Pomodoro Technique is to use time as a valuable ally in accomplishing what we want to do in the way we want to do it, and to enable us to continually improve the way we work or study. what do i need to start how can i start The basic unit of work in the Pomodoro Technique can be split in five simple steps: 1. Choose a task to be accomplished 2. Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer) 3. Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper 4. Take a short break (5 minutes is OK) 5. Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break - Chad Woolley

Our style of working is called pair programming, which has been popular for years. Two of us sit side by side at a computer workstation to develop a program that is the backbone of a Web site. One person does the actual writing, or coding, and the other person checks it, corrects it and offers suggestions as it’s being written. Programmers refer to these roles as driver and navigator. It might sound as if the person writing the programming code would find it distracting to work this way, but it’s not. It’s a collaborative effort, and that’s the beauty of it. Proponents believe it saves a company time and money. Bugs can be found more quickly, and the code is written more efficiently when two people create it simultaneously. In this case, two heads are definitely better than one. To me, pair programming is the only way to work. Writing code is not only scientific, it’s also a creative process. I get writer’s block sometimes. To be able to collaborate with someone is great. - Chad Woolley