Yet Another Great Ruby on Rails job
Aug/070
These folks, wis.dm, are in my building in Cambridge, Mass., and have been doing Ruby on Rails and Facebook integration for quite awhile. They have a great team. Now they’re hiring.
Another interesting Boston area web-based product
Aug/071
James McElhiney, the CTO of Second Rotation, was also at the Boston Ruby Group; they have a service where you can give them your old gadgets, and they sell them for you on EBay. Sounds like a good place for me to get some cash for my unlocked Treo 650 once an iPhone comes out that’s on a faster network . . . Their careers page asks for experience in J2EE and LAMP; wonder if they’re hiring for RoR?
Brontes is hiring Ruby on Rails developers (et al.)
Aug/070
Brontes Technology bought the pizza for tonight’s Boston Ruby Group. Rajiv Aaron Manglani, their Enterprise Architect, showed a neat movie of what they’re doing — Brontes has hardware that makes it possible for a dentist to get a 3d model of the inside of your mouth without using plaster (goop). They need Rails expertise to build out their workflow software. It looks like interesting stuff. The code that runs the device is in Python. They considered some other platforms for the web app, including Django and the J2EE stack, but they like Rails. They’re hiring for a variety of positions.
And the pizza was from Beauty’s. Good stuff, especially their new experimental recipe for a plain cheese pizza.
But John, what does 7fff mean?
Aug/070
Well, 32767 is a number I’m quite fond of; it brings back some interesting memories of doing 16 bit arithmetic when I was young. 32767 is also java.lang.Short.MAX_VALUE. In hex, 32767 decimal is 7fff. Which reminds me, did you hear about the programmer who celebrated Christmas on Halloween? (’cos 25 Dec. = 31 Oct.). It’s also nice to have a short domain name to reduce the typing. A downside is that Java package names can’t begin with a number, so I had to register sevenfff.com as well. Sheesh.
Facebook Java client is Java 1.5? Blech
Aug/070
Gee, Facebook, give grandpa a break! Do you really need need those whizbang Java 1.5 features for your sample client? How annoying. I guess you all learned 1.5 in college. I suppose I should count myself lucky that a Java client even exists.
Use ssh tunnel to provide access across a firewall
Aug/070
Hmm, Facebook applications work by calling back to a URL. So that means that if you’re developing a Facebook app, you need to open a port so that Facebook can get to your developer machine. That seems a bit reckless. Another way to do it is to create an ssh tunnel to another machine that is more exposed on the Internet. So say I have a server myserver.com where port 8081 isn’t blocked. I can do this:
ssh -g -R 8081:127.0.0.1:8080 -N myserver.com
Mo’ better.
Welcome to “think max value”
Aug/070
YOU don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of Java Enterprise in a Nutshell, Third Edition; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Jim Farley and Mr. William Crawford, and some other people, including me, and we told the truth, mainly. There was things which we stretched, but mainly we told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. EJB and JDBC and JPA and SOAP and Struts (I did the Struts) is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.
Now the way that the book winds up is this: We didn’t find the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it didn’t make us rich. We got some money apiece — all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round — more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers and ride the rails, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.
