AdamGreenfield.com

I have a three-year-old son, and being a father is a constant challenge for me. Growing up my relationship with my father definitely was not typical, so I don’t have a ton of first hand experience with how things are supposed to be. (Not that I would ever see that as an excuse to give anything but my best effort to my son)

It is hard to explain to other people. Being a dad is very different from being a typical mom (atleast in my mind, tho my mother frequently filled both roles for me). Lately he has begun to throw fits as a method of getting people to give in to him and whatever he wants at that fleeting moment. I try to walk the line of being kind but firm. I don’t want to encourage his behavior so I never give in. This frequently causes him to run to someone else hoping for a different response.

It isn’t that I don’t want to give him the world. I just want him to learn that crying at the drop of a hat to manipulate those around you isn’t the way to get want you want in life. I’m pretty convinced that he is just being dramatic to get a response from others, because when we go to the park or elsewhere just the two of us, he is very well behaved for the most part (he still crys, but normally only when he is scared or injured). I wish I had an easy way to explain to others that being firm is important, he needs boundaries in his world. Both to keep him safe and to shape him in to a productive child.

He is the center of my world and I just want to do everything I can to help him get a great start in this world.

A few days ago I turned 24. It was something of a dual-purpose holiday, because the birthday this year happened to fall on Father’s day. Now I know what my sister has to deal with every year having a birthday that falls so close to Christmas. My twenty forth passed with little fan fair. My son got me a few great gifts and (with no small amount of assistance from my grandmother) made me a great birthday cake. Birthdays definitely lose their flair after a while. Monday I took the day off work and went to the Delaware shore with my mother and my son. This day was without a doubt the shining point of my birthday/father’s day weekend.

Dean enjoyed the beach and the kiddie rides at the boardwalk. The day was almost entirely drama free (expect the small incident where my ex-girlfriend had some kind of panic attack in the middle of the day and called me like 5 times while we were on the beach). We had great weather all the way through dinner (Grotto’s Pizza, a beach staple) when it started to pour. I really could not have asked for a nicer day with my son and my mother.

In the hosting industry I’ve worked in a wide variety of positions – everything from front line support to upper management. Very few of these positions I would consider to be developer positions, but in almost all of them I’ve developed software in one way or another. I’m always coding to make my environment a little better or my job a little less repetitive. Over the past decade I’ve become a fairly active member in all of the organizations I have been a part of when it comes to the improvement or optimization of business processes using automation.

One of my good friends has been in the same industry I have been in for several years, and he doesn’t do any development at all. He regularly expresses frustration with his positions and becomes disenfranchised with what he does. I wonder if his frustration does not stem at least in part from the fact that he isn’t actively improving his environment. In saying that, I realize that not everyone has the opportunity to do so (and in many ways the fact that I can is a blessing), however his positions are very similar to the ones I worked earlier in my career.

In a discussion with a coworker the other day, they mentioned that they thought I might fit in to the Development department of our company. Currently, I work in an operational department, doing a fair amount of development work, but also maintaining several operational day-to-day responsibilities. Most of the really interesting development I am doing is very “domain specific” (which is probably why I am doing it, rather than our development group). Most of the development projects I’ve really enjoyed in the past were similar.

An oldie but a goodie:

My career has really been the one semi-constant in my life for as long as I care to remember. I got started working at a very young age, and when I found my career I quickly decided to forgo most of the other aspects of my life to pursue it. Almost our years ago I was blessed with the only thing that has ever been able to successfully compete with my career, my beautiful son Dean.

Here is sit almost 9 years later with very little to show for what has been my primary pursuit for most of the last decade. I have a good job, and many people my age would be thrilled with that. I get paid a fair wage for my work, I like what I do (and most of my friends can’t say the same) and I have real potential to continue to grow professionally in my position.

What is missing? More than a year ago the only serious relationship I ever had ended and I haven’t even remotely made an attempt at a relationship since. A few sporadic dates, but nothing serious. My family is pretty much sure that I must be on drugs or mentally unstable at this point (because I choose to spend every free moment I can when my son isn’t around elsewhere and because my sleep schedule doesn’t fall into their category of normal – I work noon to 9pm Monday to Friday and regularly don’t get home before 10 or 11pm).

The truth is that for the most part I consider myself to be a happy person. I love my son more than words can ever explain and he fills my heart in a way that I never thought possible before he came into my life. I enjoy my job most days, even though recent events have shown me that I seem to have a growing choir of co-workers that would really love to see me fail (don’t worry, I have no intention of indulging them).

In both my personal and private life I’ve discovered people who either pity me or who would love to watch me fail are closer than I thought. I’ve tried to remain optimistic and give people the benefit of the doubt – but hey, if people want to look down upon me that suits me just fine – they will be all the more surprised when they are proven wrong.

-Benny Hinn

In my local SSH client configuration (.ssh/config)

ServerAliveInterval 60

Generally, this will prevent my SSH connection from timing out because my workstation is NAT’ed behind a Juniper ISG2000 cluster. Connecting to OpenSSH on Linux servers (and SSH on Cisco devices) this works like a charm. However, when connecting to Juniper devices I was getting kicked out after 60 seconds of inactivity with the following error

dispatch_protocol_error: type 99 seq 9

The rest of the guys in my department use the same SSH config file (it has been passed around a bit to alleviate the other annoying issue of having inactive ssh session get silently killed by the firewall). Consensus was that it was some timeout in ScreenOS that was not configurable or documented. However the error message bothered me (rather than calling it a timeout calling it a protocol error) and sure enough logging in from a host without that SSH client configuration does not exhibit this behavior.

So, the solution that I started using was bouncing through a trusted host that is not behind a ScreenOS firewall when connecting to ScreenOS devices. That being said, I wanted to put this out there so that it might save someone else in my situation from losing a little hair, and see if anyone has a better suggestion for connecting to a ScreenOS device from behind a ScreenOS device.

I was surfing the massive interwebs and happened across a video by two of my friends from a previous job. It was good to see that they appear to be enjoying things at their new place and gave me a laugh in the process. Brought back a few memories including one involving a flame thrower purchased at home depot and a stack of old dead hardware.

Guess I’ll have to make my way down to Texas to visit some day :)

My day-to-day work has transitioned almost completely away from development, however I’ve been working on a tool in my personal time for my group to use (potentially). Getting back in to development has reminded me of a few small truths:

• I still love Safari
• Rails has changed a lot in the last year
• I really don’t spend much of my free time at the computer these days
• script.aculo.us is still pretty cool

As the last truth might hint, this app has the most JavaScript intensive interfaces that I’ve ever done. I’ve made small hacks and effects using JavaScript and AJAX before, but never got far enough into it to get beyond eye candy. The interface to my application has been through a ton of iterations so far, basically as I learn more and more I keep trying to go back and improve my older code (even though in many cases older is only a few days or a few hours old). As this is a free time project, I don’t have any kind of deadline or anything so I get to really develop something that I’m very proud of without external pressure to sacrifice on some aspect of it.

Coding as work often times results in the need to make trade-offs as a result of external factors, but some of the coolest things I’ve ever made spawned out of tinkering in my spare time.

do things like make nuclear gummy bears in science class?

So after a stint of running Vista on my desktop, I’m back to Ubuntu and when checking out the lay of the land as far as IDEs go for Linux now it seems that a growing number of people are using NetBeans for their Rails development. Installing Net Beans on the latest Ubuntu is fairly painless and so far I’m enjoying it.

It isn’t TextMate by any stretch of the imagination, but it has it’s own set of pros and cons. I still jump into VIM for quick changes and tend to use the command line for most svn operations.

The news is a few weeks old at this point, but it isn’t really a secret considering that Wikipedia knows. I’m no longer with Site5. I’m not going to get into it very much, except to say that leaving was my decision and I honestly wish the crew at Site5 all the best moving forward. There was no falling out, no fireworks, no huge fight. It was simply time for me to move on to something else.

Another decision that I’m making at this point is that I will not be going out of my way to talk about my new employer by name. I’m extremely proud of the new organization I’m working for, but I don’t want anyone to confuse my rantings with the official position of the company. As always, my musings are my own.

With that said, I’d still like to talk about what has been going on in my world for the last few weeks. Upon starting this new job, I had a week of orientation and got the opportunity to meet several of the members of the department I’m going to be working in. Both the training staff and the staff in my department were very welcoming and really helped take the edge off being “the new guy”. I got the chance to go out after work with a few of the people I’ll be working closest with as well as my new manager. Everyone seemed easy to get along with and it was great to get a feeling for these guys outside the office.

For the last few days I’ve actually started working in my regular department and am learning the specific processes and procedures involved. While most of the technology stuff is review, learning how things are done around here is invaluable. It is also a great opportunity to work side by side with almost every member of my department.

Working from home for the last few years was great at the time, but working in an office again is such a great change. Both options have their upside and downsides, but because my personal life has turned me into a bit of a hermit getting out into the world every day is a god send. The commute isn’t nearly as bad as I expected and having a regular East Coast schedule is also awesome. Oh, and the other great part about this job is that I actually can get holidays off, and currently (even though it will likely change in the future) I’m not on any sort of call list. When I go home, I don’t have to cringe every time my phone rings. Anyone who has ever worked for a computer/internet company can probably understand where I’m coming from on this one.

For the first time in years, I will BBQ with my family tomorrow (Happy Memorial Day those in the US) and there is pretty much no chance that anyone will call me for anyone will call me for anything related to work. I can’t explain what a big deal that is for me :) It will be great!

For anyone interested in using the Prototype Javascript Framework, you should checkout the latest Peepcode screencast “Javascript with Prototype.js”. Geoffrey Grosenbach has been making these screencasts for a while now, and there are several of them that I’ve found to be worthwhile. Even if you work in Rails on a daily basis, it is always interesting to see Tips and Tricks others have come up with.

Justin Palmer served as the technical advisor for this screencast and made a brief post about it on the Prototype blog

While my primary workstation is a Mac, I do maintain a relatively current PC as well for a number of reasons (Testing, Gaming, and those annoying sites that require IE). I decided the other day that is was time to make the upgrade to Vista. I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor utility. It was concerned about a few of the older applications I had installed (Remember Groove?), but didn’t have any serious warning. The machine was currently running Windows XP Professional and I looked at the available flavors of Vista and decided Home Premium was most likely the best fit for my needs.

I headed out to my local BestBuy and picked up a copy of the Vista Home Premium upgrade. I took a quick glance at the packaging to make sure I was buying the correct version and I was headed home. When I got back and tried to begin the Upgrade, the first few steps went flawlessly. Put in my CD and got to a screen with two options “Upgrade” or “Clean Install”. The only hitch was that the “Upgrade” link was grayed out. The bottom of the dialog box explained that because I was running XP Professional not XP Home I could only perform a clean install to Vista Home. At this point, I more carefully examined the packaging the Vista Upgrade came with and discovered a similar statement in fine print on the bottom of the back of the box.

I wish the Upgrade Advisor would have made this clear, but I figured it was a good excuse to complete a re-install (which I hadn’t done in a few years). However, their “Clean Install” option was not really a clean install at all. It wouldn’t allow me to perform a clean format of my system partition as part of the re-install. I really didn’t want to clean a bunch of XP legacy garbage sitting around my drive, so I booted off the CD and began the process of a true clean install. I assumed that I would be able to use my XP Media as a way to validate my upgrade copy of Vista. This is no longer the case. You have to use a installed, activated version of Windows XP to validate yourself for the Vista upgrade. After poking around on the Internet for a few minutes, I found a workaround (that would enable anyone, not just valid XP owners) to install Vista cleanly from the upgrade DVD.

I don’t understand what anyone gains for this sort of “security” in the upgrade process. It essentially forced me as a valid Microsoft product owner to go through this kind of hastle just for the privilege of using Microsoft’s latest operating system offering.

Several of my projects recently have involved Mephisto from Rick Olsen and Justin Palmer, and from time to time I receive requests for help installing Mephisto. I’ve create a quick and dirty bash script to install a trunk version of Mephisto on a shared hosting account using FastCGI. Obviously, this script was made using using a Site5 account, however it should work without modification on any hosting platform based upon Cpanel or DSM. It does assume that the tzinfo gem is already available on your hosting system.

Currently, it only installs mephisto at the top level of an account, but this is a very early version. If there is interest in the community I’d like to develop this into a more robust system with additional options (installing mephisto into a sub directory, etc). Love it? Hate it? Think it’s pointless? I’d love to get some feedback.

You can download it here.