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Jarinheit

Jarin Udom's blog for programming and other nerd shit

2009 recap, and my goals for 2010

2009 was pretty rough overall, but things really started to pick up at the end of November.

The Bad:
  • Sold much of my stuff to cover expenses (TV, Xbox 360, Rock Band, etc)
  • Didn't manage money very well
  • Struggled with managing time (mostly due to bad sleep habits)
  • Barely exercised all year
  • Ate out about 90% of the time
  • No money invested

The Good:
  • Went to Japan and Thailand for 2 weeks with family
  • Canceled cable
  • Paid off about 1/3 of my remaining debt
  • Managed to avoid getting a "real" job :)
  • Greatly improved sleep habits by the end of the year
  • Cut down about 20% on smoking with the help of electronic cigarettes
  • Switched from energy drinks to coffee and tea (most of the time)
  • Quit Internet discussion forums (big time-waster)

For 2010 I'm setting reasonable, attainable goals, some of which I'm really intending to exceed rather than meet.

Business/professional goals:
  • $80,000 or more in revenue from Robot Mode-owned websites and/or apps
  • $20,000 cash on hand by the end of the year
  • Pay myself a modest salary
  • Test-driven development on 100% of internal and client projects
  • Bring at least 1 additional developer on board
  • Hire an accountant to handle finances and taxes
  • Two open-source projects or libraries
  • Redesign Robot Mode website
  • Develop at least one iPhone app, one Palm Pre app, and one Android app (and one Apple tablet app??)

Personal goals:
  • Turn 30
  • Pay off remaining debts by the end of August
  • Pay taxes in full, on time (penalties suck!)
  • Visit family in Hawaii, Olympia, and Lake Chelan
  • Trip to South America or Europe
  • Cut down on drinking, except for special occasions
  • Cook at least 3 days a week
  • Quit smoking by the end of March
  • Exercise at least twice a week
  • Move to a cheaper apartment
  • Invest at least $200 per month
  • One personal artistic or creative project every two weeks
  • One blog post every two weeks
  • New MacBook Pro (or Apple tablet??)
  • Call it "twenty-ten", not "two-thousand ten"

Post your good/bad for 2009 or your goals for 2010 in the comments!

Written with Ommwriter

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Posted January 1, 2010
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Reminder - Switch your environment.rb gems to Gemcutter

GitHub just announced that since their move to Rackspace, they’ve completely disabled gem building (and it isn’t coming back). They’re hosting existing gems for about a year, but it’s probably a good idea to update your Rails apps before you forget.

Gemcutter is the new hotness in gem repositories, and is the new GitHub-recommended source for gems.

Here’s what you need to do:

Before:

After:

Note that on GitHub, the gems were prefixed with the GitHub username. On Gemcutter, the ‘canonical’ versions of gems often drop the prefix. Be sure to do a quick search on Gemcutter if you’re not sure.

Don’t forget to run rake moonshine:gems afterward if you’re deploying with Moonshine.

On a side note, Gemcutter is hosted on Heroku. I checked out Heroku when it first came out, and it has made an amazing transition from a gimmicky in-browser Rails editor to a full-fledged Amazon EC2-backed power hosting provider with unbelievably simple Rack app deployment. If you are still in the dark like I was up until recently, I highly recommend checking them out.

Do this before you forget, and remind your Ruby / Rails / Sinatra / Merb / etc. pals to do the same by retweeting this post! Or like, Google Wave it or something.

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Filed under  //   Gemcutter   Heroku   Ruby on Rails   rubygems  
Posted November 23, 2009
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SD Ruby talk - Deploying Rails apps with Moonshine

Here are the slides from my Moonshine talk at SD Ruby. I’ll update it with video of the presentation once it goes up on the SD Ruby Podcast.

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Filed under  //   deployment   Ruby on Rails   SD Ruby  
Posted October 5, 2009
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Downloading large files in Adobe AIR using Flex

Everyone is probably familiar with the method for downloading files provided in the Flex documentation:

 

The only problem with this is the file data is stored in memory until you write it to disk. Obviously this will not work well for large files (on the order of hundreds of megabytes).

Here’s a better way to download large files that works by using the progress event to write bytes to disk as they come in:

Enjoy!

 

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Filed under  //   Actionscript   Adobe AIR   Adobe Flex  
Posted June 5, 2008
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