The new site is under construction so please be patient as I add more features to it, such as RSS feeds etc.

I use Ruby on Rails to create the site from scratch.

This site will no longer be available starting from tomorrow.

I was getting the following error:

Error: uninitialized constant MysqlCompat::MysqlRes

Then I uninstalled the mysql gem and tried to install it again only to get the following error:

Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError)
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

Then I issued the following command:

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev

and then installed mysql gem and it installed with no problems. Finally, rake db:migrate worked again.

1. My current hosting provider stops supporting Wordpress. (my blog runs on a shared hosting account)
2. 7deeds doesn’t represent what I do or who I am anymore
3. I want to include more activities that don’t really belong here but I don’t want to start 10 different blogs
4. I want to promote my personal business(es)

As a programmer, I want to be a wise guy and also break the rule “Don’t reinvent the wheel”. I will not use any blogging or CMS platform. I will rather create it from scratch using Rails. Please feel free to call me names.

More about the move later. When everything is ready, I will notify you through the last post for this blog.

The body language is important in situations where there is confrontation, opposition and reaction. It is also very important even for simple and relaxed chats. When two people try to discuss a difficult subject, it is very easy to get the wrong signals reading plain text. It would be a whole better if people were chatting face to face or even using voice.

What plays a key role is whether a person is generally pleasant when you are around them in the same room. When people smile a lot and generally approach things in a positive way, they are likely to transmit the same feelings even when someone is chatting with them using plain text. What helps, is the image of that person in the mind of the other chatting party. It’s the memories of the mood that person is in when interacting closely with the other party.

For example, when I chat with a person that is very distant and negative when I am around them, I get the same feeling when chatting with them using IM. It takes some effort to perceive what they type in a positive way even if they don’t say something in a negative way.

Being pleasant, smiling and open to your colleagues is a key factor towards a better communication even using text messaging.

After reading “Zsh Prompt Magic” I created the zsh_vcs_info file which you can download. You place it in your home directory and open .zshrc and add the following line:

source /home/user/.zsh_vcs_info

Notice that I added a . (dot) in the filename because I want it to be hidden. Also, notice that “user” in the path above, is the username of the account you use to log into Ubuntu.

The Daily Scrum is:

Daily Scrum
Each day during the sprint, a project status meeting occurs. This is called a “daily scrum”, or “the daily standup”. This meeting has specific guidelines:

• The meeting starts precisely on time.
• All are welcome, but only “pigs” may speak
• The meeting is timeboxed to 15 minutes
• The meeting should happen at the same location and same time every day

During the meeting, each team member answers three questions:

• What have you done since yesterday?
• What are you planning to do today?
• Do you have any problems preventing you from accomplishing your goal? (It is the role of the Scrum Master to facilitate resolution of these impediments. Typically this should occur outside the context of the Daily Scrum so that it may stay under 15 minutes.)

We are a remote team and we had to tweak it a little to fit our needs:

• Every morning at 10:00am we go to a Skype group chat that is only used for our Daily Scrum Meetings
• Each one of us says what they did yesterday, what they plan to accomplish today and mention any problems they have.
• Problems are then discussed after the meeting.
• The meeting never lasts more than 20 minutes.

Results are positive so far. First of all, we feel that someone hears what we do everyday. If we have any problems or questions we can ask our fellow team members for help. We are committed because we promise a daily plan and we want to deliver it. We stay focused. All that, by spending 20-30 everyday to plan our day and present that plan to our colleagues.

References:

1. Scrum (development)

First you need to install the gem:

sudo gem install pabarcode

then the example in the previous post needs to change so as it uses the gem instead of the plain Ruby file:

require "rubygems"
require "pabarcode"

include PAbarcode

file = File.open("apog.txt")

file.each do |line|
  bc = line.slice(0..11)
  bc13 = Barcode.new(bc).get_ean_13
  puts bc13 + line.slice(12..line.length)
end

file.close

Yesterday, a colleague of mine asked me to take as input a file with 12 characters long barcodes and add a check digit assuming the barcodes are EAN13. I decided to do it and also start maintaining a set of barcode helper classes written in Ruby. I haven’t created a gem yet, cause the functionality is … lets say limited , but I plan to do so later.

You can go to

http://github.com/amiridis/rbarcode

and just download the barcode.rb file.

Here is how I used the barcode.rb file in order to transform the file:

require "barcode"

file = File.open("apog.txt")

file.each do |line|
  bc = line.slice(0..11)
  bc13 = Barcode.new(bc).get_ean_13
  puts bc13 + line.slice(12..line.length)
end

file.close

The file had the following format:

520532435284;1;09
520532435285;1;09
520532463580;1;09

and for the three lines above it produces:

5205324352841;1;09
5205324352858;1;09
5205324635807;1;09

Update: I have changed this project to a gem. You can read about it in my PAbarcode gem post.

We are 4 and we work 4 days per week remotely.

We do roughly 32.000 kilometers to go to work and get back home, so that’s 32.000 less per year.

Assuming our cars emit 160g of CO2 per kilometer on average.

We emit 5.120.000g less CO2 per year!!!

That’s 5.12 tonnes less CO2 per year!!!

And this is our action for the environment.