Trello and Blogging

If you're following TechCrunch Disrupt, or have been reading the recent news from Joel Spolsky, you've probably heard by now about Trello.

If you haven't, let me bring you up to date. Trello is a note taking application aimed to replace ordinary to-do lists and sticky notes used in project management. Every note taken, dubbed "Card", can be much more than a sticky note, as it can contain background text, votes, embedded objects and even someone "assigned" to the card. Cards are organized in lists which are organized in boards.
If you've ever seen agile project management techniques, such as Scrum, you'll be familiar with the board filled with columns of sticky notes, and sticky notes being able to "move" between columns. That's exactly like that.

So far, in order to see what Trello is worth, I've been using it to manage ideas for this blog.
Up until now, ideas for posts where mostly in my head, with some starred items in my inbox that contains the research I did. Now, I have a board with "Ideas", "Collecting information", "Writing", "Follow comments" and "Done" columns. Finally, my ideas are organized and I have a place save the information and even order/rank the ideas before writing posts.

I can see now that I have two ideas I should be working on. If you have more ideas for stuff you want me to blog about, leave a comment, and I'll treat it when this post will reach the "Follow comments" phase.

Home Mercurial Server

I hope I'm not the only one who had this problem:
I've been working on some code demos and web designs and wanted to having it under source control, so I could keep track on changes, work from multiple computers and generally have a backup for everything.
For normal projects, I guess this should be done as an open-source project on bitbucket or github, but in some cases it's simply more convenient to have the repository at home.

So, I installed a Mercurial server. Want to know how?

The only thing you'll need is the Mercurial installation for your favorite OS (yes, Windows included). After installing it, run

hg init RepoName

this will create a repository called RepoName under the current directory.
For the next part, I'll assume the server is accessible only inside the home network, and there's no need to configure extra security measures. So, create a script that servers this repository inside the the repository directory:

hg serve --config web.push_ssl=No --config "web.allow_push=*"

All you have to do now is to schedule this script to run on boot time.
Now, from any machine on the network you can use commands such as:

hg clone http://ServerName:[probably_8000]

to work with your new Mercurial repository.
That's it.

Having a "development server" can be very handy, as it could also hold other documents (NAS functionality), personal wiki, local deployment server, etc.

People Skills

I've just read this great post which I found on Hacker News, and felt sympathetic.
For too many times in my short career I was forced to work with people that has no people skills. Those people held a programming, admin or other technical roles, which means they weren't "customer facing", so for the employer, there was no need to require people skills when hiring them.

But that's a wrong call in my opinion. Even if the people in question were among the top 5% of the most professional people I met, I'd rather not work with them at all, than suffer their presence. Even if that means spending a few more days on solving some technical issues.

Many things bother me with such people:

1. Some of them know they're so good at what their doing, and leverage their bad people skills in a way that no one would be able to learn from them. This gives them job security.
2. Some of them use the fact no one wants to communicate with them in order to get this quiet room "in the basement".
3. If there's a "dirty job" that involves communicating with customers, obviously they aren't tasked with handling it. That's an ugly way to get only the "nice" tasks.
4. They get away with ugly code, since no one wants to communicate with them and get them to beautify it or write documentation.

So yeah, I know many people don't go to work in order to socialize, but having people with zero people skills, no matter how professional they are, simply hurts the organization.

When it's time for me to hire employees, be sure that having decent people skills will be a criteria.

Twitter - part 2. Android.

Twitter

So my Twitter 30 days challenge is about to be over, and I think I'm ready to summarize it and write some conclusions:

• I'm following 17 people, and have 9 followers. Only recently I began to gain an audience. Just like with blogging, it takes patience and persistence.
• So far I made 43 tweets. I'm pretty pleased with this number.
• Except for once or twice, all of the replies to my tweets were done on Google Buzz, which is connected to my Twitter account. That's pretty lame, and makes me want to lock both services - more on that, later.
• Tweeting is fun. I didn't think I'd say that.
• The TwimGo client for N900 is great. The official Twitter client for Android is just perfect. Not having a Twitter mobile client renders is useless. This could be another reason for Google Buzz failure, as it doesn't have a decent mobile client.
• 140 characters limit makes a lot of sense when posting from mobile. Longer than that is cumbersome. When posting from PC - it's too limiting.

So, am I going to keep using Twitter? For following people - yes. For replying to people - yes. For publishing stuff - probably no.
I guess most of the stuff I publish today on Twitter, will be published to "public" or "extended circles" in Google+ instead.
This means that my short "romance" with Twitter will probably end soon. While it's a lot of fun, it provides little gain compared to Google+. Perhaps had I joined 2 years ago, I'd stick to it until I know my followers would follow me to Google+.
It doesn't mean I'm going to generate too much noise in Google+ either, since I believe posts that complains about the Israeli heat will probably be published only to "Friends".

As a final note for this topic: I just removed the Google Buzz tab from my GMail and disconnected all of the accounts associated with it (Twitter, Google Reader, this blog). Since I never bother looking at the Buzz tab in Google+, this means I will ignore everything going on in there. I don't see the point of having a place where I need to follow people's comments on stuff published in other places. Comments for this blog should go here. Comments for Google+ should go there.


Android

This week was a happy and sad week in terms of mobile devices. Not sad as in tears, but somewhat sad. After 10 years of owning 5 different Nokia devices, I switched to a brand new SGS2 running Android Gingerbread. My last Nokia device was the N900, which is by far the geekiest toy I ever owned. No other smartphone can be tinkered by modifying things under /etc, and get updates using apt-get. A truly open-source device.

In the past few days I had very little time to dig into Android. They say it's Linux. IMHO, it's barely noticeable. No glibc, different filesystem structure, etc. I learned about odex, kernel versions and other fun stuff that will surely waste (in a fun way) many hours of my time in the near future. Can't wait.

P.S - if you want to follow me on Google+, you can use gplus.to/mosh. I don't know how long this link will last, though I hope forever.

When the Safety Net Fails

It's been quite some time since my sysadmin/DBA skills were put to test. Usually, when they do, it means something bad has happened.

Recently, a server I'm responsible for, suffered some a catastrophe in the form of a power outage. Usually, when such things happen, and the UPS (if such exists) fails, one is still relatively safe, since corruptions to the data itself will be handled by the RAID. This means that if one HDD fails - you can pull it out and push in another - and everyone's happy.

Not my case. In the last power outage something far worse has happened - the RAID controller died. As you may know, with many RAID controllers this means long nights of data recovery, since rebuilding the RAID will cause initialization of the disks, which means total loss.

This is the kind of the events no one is planning for in terms of redundancy. The only redundancy possible is a second server in a cluster configuration, but it doesn't solve exactly this problem, and has its costs. Backup is another form of "redundancy".

So, the component that was supposed to save us in case of failures - failed us.
Luckily, with some witchcraft, we managed to reconstruct the RAID, losing only 1 of the logical drives. That drive had to be restored from backup. Yet, that was the easier thing to do, as another drive, containing the DB, appeared to be alright, while it actually hid a far worse problem - corruptions in the DB. Did I already mention it's good to have backups?

My conclusions were also applied on my home equipments - have a detached (as in "doesn't require power 24/7") backup, and get yourself a good UPS.

Why I Love C# and Mono?

Let the comments in the code do the talking.
--------------------

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public class Iter
{
    public class Book
    {
        //short way to declare a property:
        public string Title { get; set; }
        public string Author { get; set; }
    }

    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        // implicit type, yet still a strong type:
        var books = new List<Book>
        {
            // inline initialization:
            new Book { Title = "Book1", Author = "Moshe" },
            new Book { Title = "Book2", Author = "NotMoshe" }
        };
       
        // closure, lambda expression:
        books.ForEach(book => Console.WriteLine(book.Title));
    }
}

--------------------
Did you know C# has all of those cool features?
This is why I think that even if you're not going to write code in C#, you should get familiar with it.

30 Days. Twitter.

A while ago I started considering doing those 30-days challenges. The benefits are obvious, and the fact they're published gives motivation to actually stick to the plan.
So, I already have several such challenges in mind, and some were already started. For example, taking the stairs instead of the elevator in the building I'm living in. I'm on the 4th floor, so it is a "free exercise".

Another thing I had in mind for a while now, is using twitter. It happens to me every day: There's some new technology I want to blog about, but when I start thinking about the actual post, I realize it would take me no more than 2 lines. For example: I installed Firefox 5, and thinks it's great.
So instead, I opened a twitter account (@technomosh), and I'm planning to post those short musings there. Hopefully people will follow me, and discussions would develop.

What does this have to do with 30 days challenge? Simple. Basically, up until now, I wasn't a big believer in Twitter/Identi.ca/Buzz/etc. So my first instinct is to ditch the Twitter account a second after I opened it. Instead, I just installed the wonderful TwimGo on my N900, so it would be easier for me to post some tweets. Hopefully, in 30 days I'll know whether Twitter helped me in getting those musings off my head, or didn't.