Rethinking “F@#$ You Money” – Tony Wright dot com

August 3, 2010 by Ryan Garver Leave a Comment

Rethinking “F@#$ You Money” – Tony Wright dot com.

This is a very interesting take on what retirement is starting to look like for a lot of people.  I have thought for a while that retirement wasn’t really a goal that I felt like I was moving towards, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to reach a point of financial security where money isn’t a concern.  It just means that i don’t want to stop doing the things that I love to do.  I’ve been lucky enough to find joy in my work and moreover find an entire category of employment that makes me happy to be a part of.

What’s interesting about this post is a look towards making that which you love sustain you (financially) for longer than just your job’s paycheck might.  Tony has a similar direction of thought as you see coming from Gary V in his book Crush It, which I highly recommend.  I can’t think of a better way to make a living than to share the things that I love to do with a broader audience.

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4 items that have reinvented my workouts

August 3, 2010 by Ryan Garver Leave a Comment

4 items that have reinvented my workouts.

I know Josh from our ELC days and he’s always been much better at maintaining a workout routine compared to me.  I’ve been struggling for a number of years now to find a routine that I could maintain for more than a few weeks.  This types of posts really inspire me to try again and keep it up.  I think staying active has a huge impact on my happiness.

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JustinFrench.com: Pagination Alternatives

August 2, 2010 by Ryan Garver Leave a Comment

JustinFrench.com: Pagination Alternatives.

Great description of some of the deficiencies of pagination as well as a number things to think about when presenting large quantities of data to users.

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New Job at ProFounder

May 20, 2010 by Ryan Garver Leave a Comment

In case you missed it on twitter and actually care about recent events in my life, I just started as CTO at ProFounder this week.  ProFounder is a really cool company and they have a very exciting mission.  We are helping small businesses raise money from their friends and family while still adhering to the law, which is way more complicated than you’d think.  I’ll be talking more about it in the future, as well as getting in to what makes this such an interesting business/tech problem.

One on my first tasks is to get an alpha released and a second developer to help me complete the app for a public launch by this Fall.  If you are interested check out our job posting.

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User Stories and Mind Mapping

February 2, 2010 by Ryan Garver 3 Comments

I read an article recently by Robert Dempsey about how he has recently discovered mind mapping as a way to manage user stories.  His technique was interesting and it gave me the excuse I needed to take another shot at mind mapping.

I’ve tried mind mapping in the past and it never really stuck for me.  It was a little too free form.  I needed some structure for my ideas, that’s why I was looking for something in the first place.  Robert’s post briefly describes the structure that he has used for forming user stories.  The method made the idea click a little bit better.  Basically he starts with the project in the center and then the ring out is the different actors.  Hanging off the actors are the actions that they should be doing.

I downloaded the 30 day trial of MindJet MindManager and tried Robert’s technique out on my current project.  It was a lot easier to get started that it had been on previous attempts with mind mapping, but I kept feeling like something was missing.  Here’s what finally clicked for me: what the user does is less important than why they want to do it.

In the classic user story we have an actor, an action, and a business value that the story provides (As an <actor> I want to <action> so I can <business value>).  I slightly modified Robert’s approach and added a level for business value — the “so I can” clause of a user story.  Now I have the project in the center, next the actors, and then I start listing out the business value that each actor wants to get from the app that we are building.  Under each of these leaves I can then start describing actions that would provide the actor with the business value.

This really make things click.  My ideas started to come together and I feel like the result is clear user stories that are customer business value focused.  I need to thank Robert again for convincing me to dig in to mind maps again.  I think this will be a big help in focusing my ideas in to something communicable and implementable.

Filed under agility, mind map, software design Tagged with , , ,

Up and running with MagLev

November 21, 2009 by Ryan Garver 3 Comments

The MagLev alpha was released recently.  Before I get too far in to this post I need to make it clear that I’m not affiliated with the MagLev development team.  I’m not really even much of a Ruby interpreter hacker.  I’m a curious ruby developer that has heard some interesting things about the project and wanted to get it up and running now that it’s available.  I decided to make this post because the install and setup procedure is anything but standard.  It’s not complicated, just not what you normally would expect.

First lets get the code:

$ git clone git://github.com/MagLev/maglev.git

Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/rgarver/Sources/maglev/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 28955, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (12671/12671), done.
remote: Total 28955 (delta 15669), reused 28427 (delta 15200)
Receiving objects: 100% (28955/28955), 14.97 MiB | 539 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (15669/15669), done.
Checking out files: 100% (2180/2180), done.
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/rgarver/Sources/maglev/.git/remote: Counting objects: 28955, done.remote: Compressing objects: 100% (12671/12671), done.remote: Total 28955 (delta 15669), reused 28427 (delta 15200)Receiving objects: 100% (28955/28955), 14.97 MiB | 539 KiB/s, done.Resolving deltas: 100% (15669/15669), done.Checking out files: 100% (2180/2180), done.

$ cd maglev

Great, we have the code.  Next step is to do a base install.  This installs the base libraries and GemStone which is the fabled persistence layer that MagLev has integrated.  GemStone is a object persistence layer originally built for Smalltalk.  If you haven’t ever played with Smalltalk or some of the variants (eg: Squeak) I recommend it.  It will turn your head upside down.

$ ./install.sh
[Info] Starting installation of MagLev-22578.MacOSX on sirius.local
Password:
Sat Nov 21 09:22:44 PST 2009
[Info] Setting up shared memory
  Total memory available is 4096 MB
  Max shared memory segment size is 4 MB
  Max shared memory allowed is 4 MB
[Info] Increasing max shared memory segment size to 2048 MB
kern.sysv.shmmax: 4194304 -> 2147483648
[Info] Increasing max shared memory allowed to 2048 MB
kern.sysv.shmall: 1024 -> 524288
[Info] Adding the following section to /etc/sysctl.conf
# kern.sysv.shm* settings added by MagLev installation
kern.sysv.shmmax=2147483648
kern.sysv.shmall=524288
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=32
kern.sysv.shmseg=8
[Info] Setting up GemStone netldi service port
[Info] Adding "gs64ldi  51456/tcp" to /etc/services
[Info] Downloading GemStone archive using /opt/local/bin/wget
--2009-11-21 09:22:44--  http://glass-downloads.gemstone.com/maglev/GemStone-22578.MacOSX.zip
Resolving glass-downloads.gemstone.com... 207.171.185.197
Connecting to glass-downloads.gemstone.com|207.171.185.197|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 74858717 (71M) [application/zip]
Saving to: `GemStone-22578.MacOSX.zip'

100%[==========================================================================>] 74,858,717   847K/s   in 1m 45s

2009-11-21 09:24:32 (694 KB/s) - `GemStone-22578.MacOSX.zip' saved [74858717/74858717]

[Info] Uncompressing GemStone archive into /Users/rgarver/Sources
[Info] Linking gemstone to /Users/rgarver/Sources/GemStone-22578.MacOSX
[Info] updating MSpec, RubySpec, and RBS submodules
Submodule 'benchmark' (git://github.com/acangiano/ruby-benchmark-suite.git) registered for path 'benchmark'
Submodule 'spec/mspec' (git://github.com/rubyspec/mspec.git) registered for path 'spec/mspec'
Submodule 'spec/rubyspec' (git://github.com/rubyspec/rubyspec.git) registered for path 'spec/rubyspec'
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/rgarver/Sources/maglev/benchmark/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 7332, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (5521/5521), done.
remote: Total 7332 (delta 1595), reused 6917 (delta 1274)
Receiving objects: 100% (7332/7332), 9.90 MiB | 578 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1595/1595), done.
Submodule path 'benchmark': checked out 'd807eea7f7b2f38240bc177a0c22e599081882ea'
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/rgarver/Sources/maglev/spec/mspec/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 2745, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1080/1080), done.
remote: Total 2745 (delta 1848), reused 2484 (delta 1644)
Receiving objects: 100% (2745/2745), 378.57 KiB | 383 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1848/1848), done.
Submodule path 'spec/mspec': checked out 'bcec47c70e0678a29fd0c1345358c4daf7b971a3'
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/rgarver/Sources/maglev/spec/rubyspec/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 26787, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (8705/8705), done.
remote: Total 26787 (delta 18332), reused 25672 (delta 17482)
Receiving objects: 100% (26787/26787), 3.71 MiB | 520 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (18332/18332), done.
Submodule path 'spec/rubyspec': checked out 'b0a18cf80dc706d39ee550831b8b941224b60fb6'
[Info] Creating new default 'maglev' repository
[Info] Generating the MagLev HTML documentation
[Info] Finished upgrade to MagLev-22578.MacOSX on sirius.local

[Info] MagLev version information:
maglev 0.6 (ruby 1.8.6) (2009-11-20 rev 22578-1067) [x86_64-linux]
GEMSTONE: 3.0.0 Build: 64bit-22578
MONTICELLO: MagLev-ao.1067.mcz
MAGLEV: commit e2a4fe2e0f7ca85cdcb141e6b56913eba802eefd
        Author: Allen Otis <otisa@abaco.gemstone.com>
        Date:   Thu Nov 19 19:57:09 2009 -0800
[Info] GemStone version information:
GemStone/S 64 Bit
3.0.0 Build: 64bit-22578
Fri Nov 20  8:22:00 2009

[Info] Adding these to your .bashrc will make it easier to run MagLev
export MAGLEV_HOME=/Users/rgarver/Sources/maglev
export PATH=$MAGLEV_HOME/bin:$PATH

[Info] After you complete this upgrade and verify MagLev is working, run
  rake stwrappers
to generate the .rb files for the GemStone/Smalltalk FFI
in MAGLEV_HOME/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/smalltalk/

As you can see on OS X it will build everything for 64bit which is pretty cool.  It also downloaded a bunch of support libraries and updated all of the submodules.  If you ever update the code locally you are supposed to run ‘$ ./update.sh’ to rebuild everything and get it all up and running.

Once you have it installed you should add the following lines to your .profile or .bashrc

export MAGLEV_HOME=/Users/rgarver/Sources/maglev
export PATH=$MAGLEV_HOME/bin:$PATH

You’ll need to make sure you run those lines on the command line also.  Once the environment is setup you can run ‘$ rake maglev:start’.  This command apparently boots up the core MagLev engine.

$ rake maglev:start
(in /Users/rgarver/Sources/maglev)
startstone[Info]: Starting Stone repository monitor "maglev".
startstone[Info]: GemStone server 'maglev' has been started.

Once that is started you are good to go:

$ maglev-irb
/Users/rgarver/.irbrc
error , no such file to load -- readline,
          during /Users/rgarver/Sources/maglev/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/completion.rb
error , no such file to load -- readline,
          during /Users/rgarver/.irbrc
irb(main):001:0> puts 'hi'
hi
=> nil
irb(main):002:0>

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