Today marks the end of a major chapter in my life: I’m no longer employed at Integrum Technologies. I’ve worked at Integrum for about 18 months as a contractor, then a rails developer and finally as the technical lead. I’ve enjoyed my time there and learned a lot, but decided that now was the time [...]

On Wednesday, February 18th, Phoenix is getting a new coworking space: CollabLab!

Mike Montalvo, the CEO of automotive electronics company Digital Tuning is opening up two of the four rooms in Digital Tuning’s office suite as shared space for creative collaboration. Mike’s vision for CollabLab is to provide a space in North Phoenix where people can [...]

A few weeks ago Chris Chandler and I started a podcast. Almost every Wednesday at hacknight we were having interesting conversations ranging over a wide variety of topics. After listening to Evo Terra give a presentation on podcasting we decided to start recording these conversations and publish them for the benefit of humanity.
The name we [...]

Chris Irish and I have been hard at work making another release of Freebootr. We released it in mid-December with improved search and speed as well as a redesigned look and feel. Shortly after this release, we got a write up in the Phoenix Business Journal.
To date we have over 23,000 listings in 17 states. [...]

Matt Gist tagged me as part of “The 6th Meme” and challenged me to post the 6th photo of the 6th page of my Flickr. So, here it is:

Over the summer, my dad (the big guy pictured) and I did some work on my backyard. In this picture, we’re laying the header for the brick [...]

We’ve been using God to monitor our Thin processes on Freebootr and set it up to notify us through our Google Apps account. Thought our God config file might be useful to anyone trying to use God with Thin and Google Apps.
Thin configuration

# == God config file
# http://god.rubyforge.org/
# Authors: Gump and michael@glauche.de
#
# Config file for [...]

The transition team for Obama is doing a pretty good job keeping things transparent and open, but they need your input to truly effect change. I submitted on Change.gov a while ago, but kept the transcript of what I submitted:

As a software engineer, I appreciate your focus on technology and how it has helped shaped [...]

I received a wrong number text message today that stated
U arent going to give up on me n stop talking to me bc things r complicated on my end, r u?
This person was trying to make a connection with someone who might not be talking with them anymore. They’re having some difficulties in their relationship [...]

We’ve been playing around with the Sphinx full-text search engine and Ultrasphinx, the Ruby on Rails configurator and client to the Sphinx full text search engine. Sadly, it was giving us a warning about spell checking:
ultrasphinx: spelling support not available (raspell configuration raised “uninitialized constant Ultrasphinx::Spell::Aspell”)
This is pretty easy to get rid of, though. You [...]

If you happen to see this error after upgrading your SliceHost account, be calm.

ActionView::TemplateError (Define INLINEDIR or HOME in your environment and try again)

The simple solution is to add an environment declaration to your environment/production.rb file:

ENV['INLINEDIR'] = ‘/path/to/.ruby_inline’

Once that was set, we were in business again… whew!
References
Here’s a relevant reference that took a while to [...]