Category: Technology

Categories
Life Technology

Baskets of Eggs

The phrase “putting all of your eggs in one basket” has always appealed to me.

Even in High School, I didn’t really hang out with a single crowd or do only a single category of things. I played intramural sports, was a part of every music group  I could find, did well academically and was a part of Knowledge Bowl … essentially splitting my time up in multiple “baskets”.

Who knew that it would be the thing I was doing at home that would become my career.

Then in college I was working on my “Education Degree” (scare quotes for effect) but then spent more time working in Network Services and learning that line of work. Multiple baskets (and I should pay attention to what I spend time on … it tends to lead to where I should go).

Now I’m again splitting my eggs up between technology and agriculture. Farming and iPhones. They might seem an oil-and-water sort of thing, but I think that is good (and where real “innovation” happens — again with the scare quotes).

You are always going to have questions on where you should be spending your time and right now I’m looking at not just technology and agriculture, but between the web and iOS. It is common for the choice to never be one of mutual exclusivity, but many times of complimentary area with no right or wrong answer. This is another case of that.

I’ve simply been blown away by the reception of iOS by my family members since I encouraged by mom and brother to purchase iPhones last year. So far they are up to two iPhones, an iPod touch, and an iPad. All of them will be receiving iOS 6 updates tomorrow and I have no fear of letting them just update on their own. That, to me, is freedom. They install and uninstall software themselves and just, overall, use the devices as they are intended without my intervention.

I could not say the same for the Windows boxes and Blackberry phones that they were using before.

That makes me excited about possibly jumping into iOS development with more than just my little toe. However, iOS without the web is pretty bland and so I also continue to look at Ruby and Ruby on Rails for the backend work. However, how much time and effort do I spend on each, especially knowing that I do not know nearly enough of either to be of any use yet.

I know the platform zealots out there who declare iOS-only or web-only and they both sound silly. There is room for both and a need for both as well. However, where do I toss in an extra egg or two to get started on doing more advanced stuff? I just really don’t know.

Categories
Business Technology

The Need for a 37signals

37signals has been one of the most influential companies to how I think about software, software development, and business. It is amazing how it has even crept into how I think about the family farm that I grew up on and am now working to become a larger part of.

One thing has become abundantly clear since getting more involved: the software space for agriculture is terrible. Not that there are not options (there are plenty), but that the options look so terrible or offer no ability to work on anything other than Windows 95 (exaggeration on my part) as to be almost considered criminal. The sites don’t show pictures of the software working, there are very few web options that are easy to find, and mobile? What is mobile?

Farming is in need of a 37signals. A small firm to come in and blow up the farm management space with a lean, attractive, small farm software option that takes some of the pain away. The “big win” here is that any metrics or historical record keeping would be a huge step up for many operations, and digitizing the whole thing and storing it “in the cloud” (I hate that term) would mean that backups would be handled and it would be a simple thing to get up and running on a new machine.

Do I know what this software would do? No, not yet, maybe not never. However, I do see a need and with the farming economy where it is right now I also know that there is money available in the industry. I hope that someone, anyone, will fill this void.

Categories
Life Technology

The Little Things

Sometimes you can make small changes that make your entire setup feel that much better.

In this case, it isn’t even something that I touch every day, but it something that I do see.

The cable modem for the house is currently in our laundry/utility/bathroom in the basement. The reason it is there is so that I can have the shortest run possible of coaxial cable from the splitter to the modem.

I’ve had it sitting on the top of a built-in shelving unit since I evicted it from my office (due to connectivity issues with the longish cable run). However, it has always bugged me that it just sits up there … just sitting.

So today I mounted it on the wall and started routing the cables a little better (that too will be changing, so I didn’t spend much time with that). It took maybe ten total minutes and cost me four screws (since I also mounted a power strip near it as well), but I already feel better about the entire networking setup in the house because it looks … better. It looks like I actually care just a little bit about the entire setup.

Mainly, I need to just remember that even the small things can make a big difference in perception. If it works for cheap networking gear, where else in my life can it make a larger, more meaningful difference?

That’s a rhetorical questions, in case you were wondering.

Categories
Technology

Happenings in TextMate 2

While looking around at the open Issues on GitHub for TextMate 2 I happened upon a discussion about redoing the UI for the main TextMate window. Here is what they are currently working on:

So pretty. Just an all-around awesome update for the main window. There is also a little bit of discussion about extending theme support to the file browser so that some customization can take place. That’s pretty cool.

Maybe more exciting is the talk about a split-pane feature being brought to TextMate 2. Here is the mockup (I’m not 100% sure if they have code in place for it yet) of what the split-pane feature might become:

Very cool. It ties into the redoing of the main window because the tabs would be combined together so that they are grouped within the panes, which is a nice touch. Overall, I like what I am seeing.

With these two things, seemingly, coming in the future and the recent 64-bit build being released I am a very happy TextMate 2 user and the amount of transparency from the development group is very appreciated.

Categories
Technology

Changes to Backups

Back in Rethinking Backups I spoke at length about some plans I had for backing up the machines we have in our house.

Well, over a year later, it is time to both rethink the system and finally implement the entire thing.

 What’s Changing

I’ve been backing up to a FreeNAS box for the past few months and then making a single clone to a 250 GB hard drive periodically. However, a couple of things have changed since then.

  1. My wife has started taking photos for clients again, which is awesome. What that means is that we are keeping GBs of client photos on her laptop at the moment and I want to make sure that nothing happens to those photos.
  2. I want to start integrating AirPlay speaker systems into the house, which requires rethinking the networking infrastructure a little bit.

So I’m ditching the FreeNAS box for a Time Capsule and moving on from there.

What Is It Going to Be

It is a three-tier system that will be used on the most sensitive device: my wife’s MacBook.

  1. Time Machine backups to the Time Capsule.
  2. CrashPlan backups to “The Cloud”.
  3. Two rotating external hard drives for bootable clones which will be triggered by two events:
    1. One week since last backup.
    2. Client photos loaded onto laptop.

That hard drive will then be taken off-site and stored for emergencies (probably at the farm). That’s in case everything else fails or the house burns down. Neither of which I want to happen.

For my own machine, it will be much more subdued. I already backup the important documents to Dropbox (since I’m not dealing with image files), and any important code is on GitHub or Dropbox as well. This leaves mainly some less important documents, my few images, and any customization I’ve made to my machine.

I’ll be using CrashPlan and a single external hard drive for a period clone to handle that part.

I’ve been burned once before by losing data, I’m doing what I can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.