Food on the Table is hiring – I’m looking for a great developer to work with us.  Read more at We Are Growing! | Food on the Table Blog.

On the 28th, I’ll be MC’ing the Austin On Rails meeting - (Meeting: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 @ 7-9 PM).

There’ll be four talks:

• Technical Feedback Loops – Marcus Irven
• Product Feedback Loops – Ash Maurya
• Process Feedback Loop – (me)
• How My Community Saved My Life – Mando Escamilla

My talk will be a short version of my recent Lone Star Ruby Conf. talk “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please” or why I love continuous learning with continuous deployment. (video)

Check out the talks and hope to see you there!

Gotta love this…

Progress Trackers in Web Design: Examples and Best Practices – Smashing Magazine.

FYI – we have a google voice number for Food on the Table -and forward it to our SkypeIn number.  However, at some point we realized that it wasn’t working. No matter what we did, we could not get a call to go thrugh Google Voice to SkypeIn.

Fortunately, I found an answer we had Skype set so that it  would only”Receive Calls to my online number” from people in my contact list.

http://screencast.com/t/OTMwNzUyM

via Skype Will Not Verify Phone – Google Voice Help.

Now that 37signals centralized their user management, my existing Fluid-based campfire doesn’t work. Specifically, I can’t login because it keeps opening a new window in my regular browser to login, instead of completing the login within Fluid.

I googled for “can’t use campfire with fluid” and similar, and no luck.  A little more digging and I found reference to Making Fluid Ssbs Browse Only Pages You Want – fluidapp | Google Groups.

All I had to do was to add *launchpad.37signals.com* to my whitelist of URL’s to browse in Fluid and it worked.

I’m posting this here so the next person may have a shorter route to find the answer.

Here’s the steps to get nokogiri installed;

1. sudo apt-get update
2. sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev
3. sudo gem install nokogiri
4. sudo gem install racc
5. sudo gem install rexical
6. (at this point, when I tried “gem install how”, it complained I didn’t have RubyGems >= 1.3.1. which is required for “hoe”)
7. sudo gem install rubygems-update -v=1.3.4
8. sudo update_rubygems
9. sudo gem install hoe

via Mark Howe » Rails requires RubyGems >= 1.3.1 you have 1.2.0. Please `gem update –system` and try again..

Given I’ve installed sphinx

And I’ve used mac port for the install

When I run sphinx  indexer

Then it expects the mysql socket to be in /opt/local/var/run/mysql5/mysqld.sock

Given I’ve installed mysql

And I’ve used the binary from mysql

When I run mysqld

Then it use the mysql socket in /tmp/mysql.sock

To get sphinx indexer to use my installed version of mysql, I have to change make a change in the sphinx.conf file to tell sphinx indexer to use the mysql socket in /tmp/mysql.sock:

in some source …

{

sql_sock = /tmp/mysql.sock

…

}

Check  sphinx_docs [SphinxWiki] for reference.

Last day to vote for my SXSWi panel; please vote! “Lean Startups: Beyond the Hype, Successes, Failures & Techniques” http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3884

Noticing that I haven’t received any new voicemails in over a week – and hearing rumors about problems with voicemail on the iPhone… I reset my iPhone and after a reboot – ta-da! Over a weeks worth of voicemails suddenly appear. Grrr. Never seen this before and I’ve had my 1st generation iPhone for a couple of years

Lots of buzz lately about kanban / lean in software development. While  watching this from the sidelines, I’ve also been looking at my current team and previous teams and gauging applicability.

With my current team (at FiveRuns), we hit a point a while ago where the team began to reject the extra formality and overhead in some of our scrum practices (e.g. sprint planning, release planning) and began to smooth our rhythm out until we ended up, more or less, as continuous-flow.

The great thing is, I’ve looked back on earlier teams and seen similar trends – but different results. This time (for me) reality & results were stronger than dogma & fear – so we went with what made us better.

Then, I stumbled across Kanban Development Oversimplified and passed it out – it’s a great quick & simple overview.

It’s not good enough to be doing something… I’ve got to build something related. So, combine this with the desire to get some more experience with some new shiny bits (standalone apps on couchdb) and ta da: a simple board with cards + columns to represent our worfklow (surely a cliched application, along with blogs); the board will be a centralized service and a de-centralized service (ref: git) so that people can take their own copy of the board with them – keep using it – and sync up with either the centralized service or another instance, as needed. More later: I’ll post some cucumber scenarios and then a link to the project on github.