Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:15:00 GMT
It’s been a busy week at work. We launched Chrome to the world on Tuesday, after a last-minute change of plans. The launch managed to temporarily suck me back into my previous job at Google; I ran all of our download servers for about two years, so I know more about debugging download problems then just about anyone else around. We’ve been planning for this launch since early Spring, and it looks like all of the hard work paid off–I haven’t seen a single complaint from someone who tried to download it and had a bad download experience. Everything seems to have Just Worked, with is really all you can hope for in this line of business.
If you run Windows, then go give it a try. They’ve put a tremendous amount of work and creativity into it, and they’ve advanced the state of the art in a number of ways. Now if only the Mac version was available already…
(all opinions are mine, not Google’s, etc)
Tags chrome, work | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:11:00 GMT
The last few months have been kind of quiet here for two simple reasons:
- I’ve been completely swamped with launching something new at work. That’s finally done.
- Every spare non-work minute has been spent in my back yard, working on The Project That Won’t Die. I’m re-terracing the lawn, putting in a big planter/retaining wall thing with a couple sets of steps, putting in a new paver patio, and then re-planting the whole lawn. The end is finally in sight there, too.
Basically, I’ve been alternating between not having anything interesting to say and having lots of things to say that I couldn’t really talk about.
Hopefully that’ll be changing soon. I’m changing projects at work; I was the lead for the Google download servers (need a new copy of Earth, Toolbar, Sketchup, Gears, etc?), and I’m going to be taking over a new service soon. The new job’s going to involve a lot of travel; I’m going to be in either NYC or Mountain View at least once per month for the rest of the year, and will probably be visiting at least 2 other offices for one of my side projects. Considering that I’ve only flown 4 or 5 times for Google in the 2.5 years I’ve been here, this’ll be a big change in pace. The job’s starting quickly–I first heard about this yesterday, and I’m already booked to fly to New York next Monday. I’ve never actually been there before, so it should be entertaining. I’ll be stuck in the office for most of the time, but I’ll have a couple free hours per day to wander around and see the sights. I’ll try to hit a couple of the tourist high points this time, and then branch out on future trips.
Tags google, travel, work | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 28 Nov 2005 04:52:17 GMT
I have arrived! I’m in Mountain View now, and will be for about 4 weeks. Hopefully I’ll have time to post a bit more after I’ve tracked down dinner.
Tags california, travel, work | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 23 Nov 2005 04:14:27 GMT
So here’s my big news: I’m starting work as a Site Reliability Engineer for Google, starting on Monday. The job is based in Kirkland, WA, but I’ll be spending a lot of time in the very near future at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, CA.
So what does this mean for me and Typo? I have no idea. The next week is going to be completely insane, and I doubt that I’ll have time to finish the email notification code that I’ve been working on, much less fix the Flickr bug that’s been discussed at length recently. Once I get settled in at Google I’ll have a better idea how this sort of thing works.
Tags google, job, personal, work | 17 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 14 Apr 2005 21:59:54 GMT
The Rails app that I was working on a couple weeks ago for work is finally complete and in the hands of users. A couple higher-priority tasks kept me from getting back to it until yesterday, and the final push towards release was fantastically ugly.
For legacy reasons, I need two of my app’s controllers to use HTTP basic authentication, not form-based authentication. HTTP authentication with Rails isn’t well documented, but the ”teenage mutant ninja hero coders” have an example that works just fine with webrick. Unfortunately, it completely fails with Apache for reasons that weren’t particularly clear. It’s fairly well-known that Apache blocks CGIs from seeing HTTP authentication headers, but none of the workarounds that should have worked with Apache 1.3 (mod_rewrite, fastcgi, etc) actually worked.
In the end, I ended up upgrading to Apache 2 with FastCGI, and it worked flawlessly. Er, except the CGI variable that I was looking for went from being called HTTP_AUTHORIZATION to Authorization, so I had to tweak application.rb a bit.
Posted in Ruby, Work | Tags fastcgi, rails, ruby, rubyonrails, work | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 31 Mar 2005 01:48:38 GMT
My little Rails project at work is starting to wind down finally. I’ve been heads-down on this thing for almost a week, but it seems to be worth it–I have a nice UI around my database, along with a clean schema to replace the hacked-up one from the previous design. I have 8 models, 9 controllers, and 40-some views. Including tests and documentation, I currently have *90* files open in xemacs, a personal record.
Of the 4 days I’ve spent on this, at least one full day was lost to bugs in Rails that I had to find workarounds for. Probably another day was spent searching for examples and documentation on specific Rails features and generally learning how the system fits together. The remaining two days were divided between database/code design (there are some weird controller issues for this application) and HTML design. It’s been years since I last threw together anything more complex then a Movable Type theme, so my web-design skills were years out of date.
All things considered, 4 days doesn’t strike me as amazingly fast for this project, but I doubt that I could have been much faster using any other framework. The big thing that’s impressed me with Rails is the amount of polish that I’ve been able to put into this in a very small amount of time–things like pagination and live searching were nearly trivial to implement. With a bit of practice, I suspect that I could churn out similarly-complex applications in a little over a day, and that would be just astounding.
Posted in Ruby, Work | Tags rails, ruby, rubyonrails, work | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 25 Mar 2005 08:53:41 GMT
I’ve started to pick up Rails a few times, always to be interrupted by something–usually either a missing feature that I really needed, or a change in project priorities at work. I finally sat down with it today in an attempt to finish a little project that I’ve been avoiding for months at work.
It was all going well until suddenly one of my classes stopped working right. My Host class belongs_to my Group class. At one point this afternoon, host.group stopped working from inside of my web app. It worked perfectly with the unit tests, but I got a method undefined exception whenever I tried to access the group method on a Host object. Here’s a snippet of the code involved:
class Host < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :group
belongs_to :customer
has_and_belongs_to_many :messages, :order=>"id"
end
class Group < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :packages, :order=>"pkgorder"
has_many :hosts
validates_length_of :name, :maximum=>40
validates_format_of :name, :with => /^[-0-9a-zA-Z.]+$/,
message=>"may only contain letters, numbers, ., and -"
end
These two classes were in their own files, as generated by Rail’s generator script. Can you see what’s wrong? The line right above end in the Group definition should start with :message, not message. That missing colon in group.rb broke the Host class, but only when it was used after Group was defined. So the unit tests worked, because they tested each class separately, but it failed in a bizarre way when the two were used together.
Things like this make me wonder if maybe Rails isn’t getting just a wee bit too clever for its own good.
Other then that, though, it’s been working great. I’m spending too much time searching the Rails docs for help, but I’m moving right along.
Posted in Ruby | Tags rails, ruby, rubyonrails, work | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 22 Oct 2004 21:43:31 GMT
One of the things about startups is that you tend to outgrow office space fairly rapidly. At Internap, I think I had 5 different offices in my first two years, and my current job hasn’t been far behind–we moved into office number 4 last week, just in time for my 2-year anniversary. This is the first time that we’ve been in our own space, though. The previous places were all in Regus’s temporary office space in the Bank of America Tower in Seattle–the tallest building in town, and a pinnacle of impersonal 1980’s corporate architecture. It’s full of lawyers and bank workers. I’m glad to be out.
The corporate website hasn’t been updated with the address of our new office, so I won’t mention it here, but it’s a nice art-deco building from the late ’20s. We have a floor to ourselves, and room to spread out. It feels like home, which Regus never did.
The combination of the move and a couple big projects at work have kept me from blogging much over the past few weeks. Hopefully the next few months will be more productive on both fronts, now that we’re settled in at work and back into the normal flow of work.
Posted in Work | Tags office, seattle, work | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 29 Jul 2004 01:24:49 GMT
I was in the COO’s office at work talking over phone system issues, and noticed that there were 3 peregrine falcons playing or fighting or something right outside the window. I’ve seen a couple here over the past few years, but never more then one at a time. Three is a personal record, and they were coming within 30 feet of the glass.
Among other things, it makes me wish I had a window office again. Presumably I’ll end up with one during the next move. Right, Mark?
I should have lugged my D60 into work today.
Posted in Phones | Tags falcon, photography, work | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 24 May 2004 00:40:07 GMT
The whole funeral thing has thrown me off stride a bit at work, and I discovered that I’d left a few things undone that needed to be done before I’m planning on being into the office tomorrow. So I headed into the office for an hour or so this afternoon.
Of course, it’s never quite that easy. I brought Gabe with me to the office, and he’s busy asking me about everything on my desk, and I’d made it 5 minutes down the road before I realized that my laptop was still sitting at home. Then, when I got to the office, I realized that I’d lost my office keys somewhere (they’re probably under the bed in my parents’ guest room), so I had to get the security guard to let me in. Amazingly enough, I was able to get and and get work done.
The fun thing about big office buildings is that they never run the air conditioning on the weekends. As I mentioned once or twice before, I share an office with a rackload of Cisco gear, including a Catalyst 6500, a 7505, a 7200, and a bunch of smaller stuff. I’d realized that it gets hot in here before, but never quite how hot–it was at least 95° in here when I walked in. It was sweltering. Ten minutes after walking in, I asked the 7200 what temperature it was reading, and it claimed that it was 96° F at the inlet. Since it’s in an open rack, that’s probably not that far from the truth.
Posted in Work | Tags weekend, work | no comments
