Projects, rants, tech stuff, and other things to be filed under miscellaneous...

I’m not sure who originally thought this step in the online shopping process was a good idea or why many online retailers continue to do it, but it has to stop. True, they’re not explicitly notifying me of when they printed out a shipping label, but when I receive an email stating that my order has shipped including a tracking link to the respective shipper’s website, follow the link, and get this page:

what else are they doing? (Note: this screenshot was taken approximately 18 hours after I received the email)

Two solutions I see, send more accurate emails (e.g. “Label for you order has been printed!”, “Label affixed to your order’s package!”, “Your order’s package is waiting to be picked up!”, etc.) or only send an email when the order has actually been (the generally accepted definition of) shipped. I recommend the latter.

Wow, it’s almost been a year since I last posted here, what better time than at the beginning of the year to attempt to get into the routine doing so? So what excites me about 2011?

New Addition to the Family
My wife Val and I are expecting our first child, a little girl, at the end of April or beginning of May; feelings of joy and fear all wrapped into a miracle. I was raised by a great father so hopefully I can be one too.

Career Goals
In the next little while I will retake the second phase of a long application process for a job I really want. Without going into the details, I hope to go into it this time a little better prepared in order to ace it.

I am also well positioned at the moment to advance in my current job. I like where I’m at, but I’m keeping a watch on various job openings to see if any seem appealing and a good fit. Plus a little extra income per month would never hurt.

Project Goals
I have set a goal of developing a new application per month. I have a bunch of ideas floating around in my head and it’s time to stop being lazy and implement some of them. Some of the projects will also serve as an exercise in learning a new language, technology, application, etc. which is an added bonus.

Fitness Goals
About a year and a half ago I weighed approximately 65 pounds more than I do now. I went from being very overweight to slim with not much muscle definition and now I’d say I have a moderate amount of muscle definition. Currently I go to the gym regularly (but wouldn’t say I push it too much), play soccer regularly, jog occasionally, and don’t really adhere to any sort of dietary regimen anymore. I’m aiming this year to become considerably more muscularly defined. I’d also like to jog more and perhaps participate in some organized 5k/10k or half-marathon runs, but we’ll see how that pans out.

Writing Goals
I’m setting a goal to write posts more often. No specific topics though many may be technically leaning as that’s what I deal with most of the time.

And that’s about it for now. I hope you’re looking forward to 2011 as much as I am.

This may be common knowledge for folks who are much more versed in Django than myself, but here’s a short post of something I ran into today with a web application of mine that’s using Django.

Checking my website out in Google’s Webmaster Tools I noticed that it’s report on my sitemap.xml file contained a “Redirect error” warning because some of the URLs contained in my sitemap returned a 301 HTTP status code. This “error” apparently caused the Google crawler not to crawl the links on the pages that returned a 301 response (I assumed this because in the Webmaster Tools my “Pages crawled per day” numbers were significantly lower). Obviously not good for SEO efforts.

Doing a little searching online, I found that in the default Django setup the APPEND_SLASH setting from the CommonMiddleware plugin will (as it’s name implies) append slashes to the end of requested URLs if it’s not present, however this functionality redirects the visitor to the URL containing the trailing slash and returning a 301 response. The URLs in my sitemap.xml file did not contain a trailing slash.

Wanting to keep the settings in the application as close to default as possible, I simply edited my sitemap.xml file making sure my URLs had trailing slashes and the Google crawler balked no longer.

A couple months ago I finished up a Ruby on Rails course at Sierra College in Roseville, California. I’m usually a learn-it-on-my-own kind of guy, but being constantly busy but still wanting to _finally_ get my feet wet with Ruby, I figured registering for the course and having assignments, etc. would force me to stay focused on the task. My final project for the course was a basic version of what is now Hacker News Notify, this past weekend I was able to put some polish on it and get it to a point where real users could actually use the application.

Hacker News Notify (http://hnnotify.adamlum.com/) periodically scans the “New Links” of Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/newest) and matches submissions with a particular phrase in the title, submitted by a particular user, or from a particular domain. Users can either choose to be notified of matches by email or by subscribing to their watchlist’s RSS feed.

In any case, I plan on submitting the project to Hacker News for review tomorrow morning; hopefully a few people find the application useful.

Currently, I have a full-time job in the public sector which I don’t hate, an equity-compensated role which is exciting, a couple personal projects on the plate which are exciting, an online class at a local community college, and a bit of hourly work from various places that provide me with extra spending money for things like small trips and new laptops. Being married and having a couple extra-curricular activities that I’m not willing to give up makes it so I am sometimes spread pretty thin.

The fact is that the lowest item on the totem pole, the hourly work, is what seems to induce the most stress upon me. This work is mostly tasks such server maintenance, HTML updates, modifications to canned eCommerce systems, and things of that nature; nothing that really gets my brain in action like the programming work does. In an attempt to please all parties, I have usually agreed to take on all assignments. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy extra money (especially in the times we’re in at the moment) and also building upon existing working/business relationships, but I’ve recently started telling people that I can’t take on their assignments, both in the short term, i.e. “I won’t be able to get to that for at least 6 weeks” or at all, i.e. “That assignment isn’t something I’m interested in taking.”

At first I was nervous about responding in that manner, expecting to receive negative feedback and upset clients but actually received the complete opposite; folks did understand that I have certain priorities, am only one person, and that I have the same limitation of 24 hours per day and require at least some sleep. Also, folks also seemed to appreciate my honesty with the situation and left the door open for opportunities in the future; let them know if I get some free time soon, when my schedule will open up, etc., so I don’t think I’ve burned any bridges.

The bottom line (for me anyway, and not just work-related) is being able to say no limits the amount of stressors I introduce into my life and empowers me to better manage my time and relationships.

What’s funny is that I began drafting this post yesterday (3/11/09) and this morning in my RSS feed reader 37signals’ blog Signal vs. Noise featured a post called The most powerful word is no which motivated me to finish up my post.

This is definitely not tech related, but one of the joys of morning commute was listening to the Adam Carolla morning radio show, unfortunately last Friday (2/20/2009) was the last one.

Fortunately for fans, Mr. Carolla has decided to spend his personal time, money, and probably quite a bit of energy continuing his “radio” show, now in the form of daily podcasts. This format allows him to be more open, candid, and say exactly what’s on his mind without fear of FCC fines; so far there have been two, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed both.

He’s asked his listeners to “spread the word” about the podcasts, what better place than my little blog here on the web. Adam Carolla’s Podcast website can be found at: http://carollaradio.com.

That’s it, enjoy.

I have to say, I’m really enjoying creating this personal project (still not ready to mention what it is) while learning Python and Django. It has given me the chance to dive right into Python, getting familiar with the standard types, methods, etc. I’m not saying that I’ve become an expert or anything like that, or that the more in-depth tutorials would not provide further insight into the language, but it’s a little more interesting when something like a web application is being formed at the same time.

I have one more major piece that I’d like to get out of the way before I start applying some sort of design to my wire-framed application. After that I’ll search for and sign up for some message boards related to that market, do some Google searches and gather some contact email address to send information to, and the like. I’ll be having a couple friends and family members checking out the site to test and verify that the way I have set things up make sense to an average user.

Just to mention, the primary goal of this project is gain some experience in Python and Django, but again, I think it may be something a few folks in it’s particular industry may pay a couple bucks to use; not exactly a bad thing.