AdamGreenfield.com

At some point today when I was using GMail today (in Safari 4 Beta), I was greeted by this wonderful error:

I switched to Firefox and noticed it worked fine. A few other folks on Twitter confirmed they were having similar issues, and I was in the middle of getting a few other things done - so I didn’t look in to it any further until this evening. Seemed like a decent time to give the new Safari Develop menu a whirl. I couldn’t find any obvious way to observe request details, but tried changing my user agent string to a few other browsers and had the same trouble.

I noted that after clearing all Google related cookies, GMail would load one time - but never again. After checking out the known issues section of GMail’s help I saw that this issue appears to be a known problem. Google suggests either switching browsers or restarting Safari. It also seems to point to Safari in general on the latest OSX rather than an issue with Safari 4. I never hit it until today and I have been using Safari 3 for months as a primary browser

Anyway, if you bumped in to this issue - be sure to let Google know so they can get it fixed. In the mean time, I can confirm that restarting Safari cleared up this issue for me, however I suspect that is a temporary fix.

The end of the year is generally a time for reflection, and this year is no different. 2008 has turned out to be a good year for me both personally and professionally. I’m coming up on two years at my current employer and settling in to my most recent position. Technically I’m a Senior Network Engineer, but functionally I’ve spent a large swath of the year doing technology development (which is what I’ve grown to love). This year at work I’ve gone through my first acquisition (we were acquired by a private equity firm) and that has gone far better than I expected.

In my personal life I feel like I’m finally starting to come out of my shell a little more. This year has found me using the computer a lot less in my personal life and I think overall that is a good change. I spent several years of my life without getting enough offline time. I’ve also stopped carrying a BlackBerry or portable e-mail device of any kind, which has been a huge improvement as well.

I’m still more or less constantly on call, but thankfully I work with some of the most impressive technologists I’ve had the pleasure of encountering and we are very well known within my organization for building systems that work 24/7 without our intervention. Most of the calls I field are related to customer issues, which are generally much more quickly repaired than fundamentally flawed systems.

In thinking about New Years resolutions this year, the usual bunch comes to mind (save money, get in better shape, i.e. the usual suspects). I’m not sure which one I’ll end up going with. Overall, I’m very pleased with the course I’m on. I probably need to put some more thought in to career path, but I’m in no urgent rush to do that.

Looking around there is so much to be thankful for. I’ve grown closer to my family this year, and I’ve been blessed with a small but loyal group of close friends. I’ve been able to expand my social circle to include some great new folks. My son is growing in to a great little boy and is still the light of my life. I have a good job with some of the most intelligent folks I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with (and I still like to go to work).

In closing, 2009 is going to be about what I want to continue to improve, rather than what I want to drastically change.

The holidays have rolled around yet again. This was a very exciting Christmas in my house because Dean is finally old enough to really understand the entire holiday. He was very excited for the last week or so about the upcoming Holiday. He had a great time opening gifts this morning and I posted a few pictures of him opening presents on my Flickr account. Big hits this year included a robotic dinosaur and Roary the Racing Car.

Roary was quite the adventure. It is Dean’s latest favorite cartoon on PBS Sprout, but relatively new in the US. This means that there are not many (if any) Roary toys and books over here. I had to order them from the UK and had a heck of a time getting them here in time. The original place I ordered from on December 3rd notified me rather tersely on the 16th that they were unable to fill part of my order, so they canceled the entire order. Obviously, this left me scrambling to get the toy Dean wanted here in time, but luckily I was able to find RoaryTheRacingCar.com and they came through!

For anyone paying attention I did finally spend the hour or so required to resurrect most of my previous blog posts. I think my last backup was prior to a few posts, but that is what I get for not being better about backups. Looks like Eric Kidd picked up development of Mephisto, so hopefully that means I don’t need to make a change in platform any time soon.

Let me open by saying I’ve used Python for a number of automation, systems administration, and other projects, but I’ve never made (or substantially modified) a Python web application. During some of my recent efforts at work, I’ve been trying to extend an existing Zope application and the experience has left me a bit weary. I’ve extended at least moderate effort to locate, documentation, examples, and tutorials to help speed the process along, but I’ve had mixed results.

Coming from (most recently) a Ruby on Rails web application development background this has been a source of frustration, because despite shortcomings Rails documentation is fairly easy to come by and easy to get your feet wet with.

Part of this process has been embracing constraints, and because my ramp up time has been this substantial with trying to expand this application I may end up going a different direction with the project by building an application on top of the existing Python project, rather than extending it. My gut tells me this is the wrong technical solution, but it feels like it is likely the right overall decision.

Someone I’ve grown to trust suggests that I try a different web development framework for Python like Pylons. If I start my own Python web application, I think shopping around for the framework might be a good call.

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.