Getting it straight.
Not the most scintillating material for those who don’t sling code, but I thought I’d write a quick post extolling my new development workflow for 2010. Having spent most, if not all of 2009, in a coding frenzy for my clients, small and large inefficiencies really slowed me down. I have a variety of projects and spend time coding in many different languages and platforms including Python/Django, Ruby/Rails, PHP/Wordpress/*, Javascript/CSS/HTML, and even some Perl now and then. Some of these projects have development environments, some do not. Some are under version control, and others are not. Some I develop on local machines in my office, others I have to develop on remote servers. Somehow it all worked, but I knew I wanted to streamline and optimize things a bit from a development perspective and really gain efficiencies from a common toolchain.
So first I decided to consolidate all my development locally on my HackPro workstation, which is more than up to the task. But running all these different platforms and frameworks on my mac was a bit daunting; using the stock apache has always been a bit of a pain and compiling and configuring my own builds on the mac just seemed masochistic. Enter Bitnami stacks — self-contained development environments including Apache + MySQL + Rails/Django/PHP, with an amazing selection of every major platform built using these frameworks. Excellent… an atomic Apache + MySQL build for every development environment was exactly what I was looking for. And, as a bonus, once it’s installed, it’s portable: I can easily zip it up, copy it over to my MacBook, and take it with me without missing a beat. Bliss.
Oh, they also provide VM images and EC2 cloud instances if that’s more your thing.
Nice Parking Job
Over the weekend, while I was out running an errand with Arlo, we both witnessed an impressive feat of driving, performed by a rather elderly woman who perhaps should have turned in her car keys a few years ago.
Having trouble negotiating a turn off the main boulevard onto a side street, she got stuck after making her turning radius too wide. After attempting to straighten out and back up, she must have gotten flustered due to the fact that someone was waiting behind her.
Well, either she mistook the gas for the brake or she experienced the worst case of road rage I’ve ever seen, because, next thing I knew, I heard the squealing of tires and turned around just in time to see her backing up, full throttle, and drive her car up onto the hood and over the roof of the car behind her.
Madness: windows shattering, engine whining as she was still stomping the accelerator flat out, wheels spinning crazily in the air, and occupants of the car underneath throwing themselves out of harms way. Luckily no one was seriously injured.
It was very impressive and a bit freaky. I mean, that’s kind of the last thing you expect the car in front of you to do. Arlo was sure surprised.
It was fairly reminiscent of this gem of a video: