Turning the Corner to 27

I started this post on the last eve of my 26th year and now four days have flown by. For me a birthday is always a time of reflection. What happened? Did it turn out well? What's ahead?

The biggest milestone of the year was the birth of our son Milo on January 12. He's 6 months now and is growing twice as fast as we expected. This "little" guy is almost in 1-year clothes already! He warms our hearts with his cheerful smile and loves watching his older brother Skyler run and dance!

We also brought a puppy into our family in the spring. Luna is a Pembroke Welsh Corgi, born just a couple weeks after Milo, and fits right in with the boys as she chases Skyler and makes Milo giggle. The cats still aren't big fans of her, but they're learning to keep their distance.

Even though each day has its challenges, it's a blessing for Kasey to be home with the kids.  She gets to be there for them as they grow and learn, which is priceless. A couple years ago I had a hard time imagining us having two kids and a dog, but here we are. It's been great so far and I can't imagine going back.

My job has been going pretty well and I can see myself staying where I am for a while. I'm grateful to be able to work on a variety of projects while pushing the limits of my skills. Like any job, there are ups and downs, but overall I think I'm on a good team. The University of Minnesota is a pretty unique place to work and some days I have to remind myself to not take it for granted.

So, my 26th year was pretty great. I have a lot to be thankful for and I look forward to what this year brings!

Enjoying the Silence

Quiet.

Since becoming a parent of two and adopting a puppy, I've developed a great appreciation for this concept. If you were to sit in our living room during a typical hour of the day, you would hear the sounds of our older son shrieking as he runs around the living room, barks of our puppy as she follows close behind him and the cries of our younger son as he reminds us that it has been long enough since his last feeding.

With so many little ones in the house, chaos has become the new normal for us. I don't know how my wife handles it day in and day out, but I am infinitely grateful that she does. The small windows of time when all of the planets are aligned and all of the kids are asleep are precious. No one is screaming or stomping or throwing things or getting into things they shouldn't. It's just pure, blissful silence.

If you have kids, I'm sure you know what I mean. If not, then you will. When moments of quiet come, just sit back and enjoy them. They allow for reflection on the blessing that kids are, however noisy they may be.

Image Link: https://i.imgflip.com/o6fx0.jpg

Adventures in Web Development: Grousing at Git

Abstract:

If you're in a situation where you want to use an IDE to work on a Git project hosted on an enterprise version of GitHub, EGit will save you a lot of headaches. 

The long version:

An exciting part of my new role is assisting my team adopt Git as our version control solution. I have very little experience with it and have been wanting to learn it for years. Everything I read and heard about it gave me the impression that it's an easy-to-use yet powerful tool (plus all of the cool kids use it). Why wouldn't I want to use it too?

My team is in the process of transitioning from a strictly server-side development environment to a hybrid of client-server development. To do this, we're setting up project directories on our dev server and mounting those directories on our workstations as extra drives using sshfs. This allows us to develop with IDEs and other tools while still being able to see our changes immediately.  Granted, vim and emacs have their charm but I'll take a GUI over memorizing cryptic shortcut commands any day.

A nice feature of most popular IDEs is integration with a version control system like Git. My current IDE of choice is Aptana (emphasis on current) since it's free and seems to have decent syntax support for web languages. Aptana comes with Portable Git which is a lightweight version of Git. I assumed this would be all I needed, but boy was I wrong.

When trying to clone a repository from GitHub enterprise, I got an error saying "Bad credentials". I was sure that I put in the right information so I was very confused.

I thought perhaps I had to point the URI to my repository for the validation test, but that didn't work. Then I tried alterations of my username, adding in the domain. No luck. The Git options in Aptana were less than helpful too. After some research, I came to the conclusion that Aptana's Git plugin just assumes that any repository you want to work with is on github.com. There appears to be no support for working with GitHub enterprise repositories.Very frustrating.

Next I tried GitHub's desktop client because a coworker got it to work in his OS X environment without a hitch. After I put in my information, I saw my repositories show up. This looked promising since the client was actually able to authenticate with the enterprise account. I selected one of my repositories in the "clone" menu and hit the go button. The transfer seemed to be working until the progress bar reach halfway and hit an error. I knew the client was able to reach my repository so I was doubly confused.

After failing with two GUIs, I figured that Portable Git's Bash wouldn't let me down. I tried cloning the repository onto my network dev directory using Git Bash. This actually worked, but trying to stage changes resulted in a similar credentials error.

At this point I knew my problem wasn't a random bug. I dug into the logs for each of these three situations and found a similar symptom: "insufficient permission for adding an object to repository database .git/objects". Answers on the Web said to change permissions on the objects directory to give my workstation user read/write access. The problem was that my user didn't have privileges to change that access. It seemed that I was at an impasse.

Then, I found out about the EGit plugin for Aptana and figured it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot. After installing it, I was surprised to see that I was able to clone a repository, make changes and push them to my remote repository flawlessly. If only I had tried it to begin with!

My coworker tweeted Aptana asking why enterprise repositories aren't supported and got the response "I would expect GitHub would provide support through the EGit plugin." This make me wonder why the EGit plugin is not included by default or at least clearly referenced in the help docs? This would have saved me a lot of wasted time.

Pondering a Pond

Having been in a new role for three weeks, I am starting to sorely miss being able to regularly enjoy a stroll through nature. For over two years, I had the privilege of working at an office that was right next to a park with a walking trail going around the pond pictured above. I used to have the pleasure of seeing views like that one every day. It was a refreshing escape from the stress that came from the day-to-day task juggling. With music flowing into my ears, walking that trail gave my mind some space to daydream.

Now I work in a basement office without windows, which is a bit of a shock. I can still take mental breaks outside when I need some fresh air, but now that the snow is flying, I won't be doing that for quite a while.

Leaving that trail feels like leaving a part of myself behind. To me it represented a place to breathe, think and explore. It was always there when I needed it and I never regretted taking a walk around it. I hope to find a similar place by my current place of work. The snow just started flying today, so it's going to be a long winter.   

Adventures in Web Development: Getting Started with node.js

After being a Web Dev for over 3 years now and still using primarily procedural coding techniques, I'm feeling pretty behind the curve. I've never felt good about my skills but it's become apparent that I won't get better unless I put in the effort to do something about it. To help with this, I'll be digging into some of the current tools of the trade to put together some neat hobby projects.

Arguably one of the biggest must-have tools to come out in recent years is node.js. It's non-blocking I/O model has been proven to save a lot of network resources and to improve application scalability.

I wanted to start my first project with Bootstrap. Bower is a really easy way to pull in all of the Bootstrap files into my project folder. To get Bower, I needed node.js for its npm package manager.

I'm using Kubuntu for my dev environment but this tutorial could apply to any ubuntu-based distro. The steps below were heavily inspired by this blog post.

1) Get Compiler
To use node.js, we need to be able to compile it from source. A compiler is available from the "build-essential" package. 

Update your packages and then install the "build-essential" package:

sudo apt-get update 

sudo apt-get install build-essential -y

2) Get Git
Installing Git is a simple command:

sudo apt-get install git -y 

3) Get Python and libssl

node.js depends on Python 2 which is available via the packages:
sudo apt-get install python -y

If you want to use TLS/SSL encryption, you will also need libssl:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev -y

4) Get node.js!
At last we can install node.js. Be sure to check the current version on their site before continuing. First we'll use Git to clone the GitHub repository for node.js onto our system. We'll put it in /usr/local/bin to make it globally available for the user.

cd /usr/local/src
sudo git clone git://github.com/joyent/node.git

Now go into the cloned repository and check out the latest version (replace the letters after 'v' with the version numbers):

cd node
sudo git checkout vX.Y.Z 

With the version checked out, we need to configure it to make sure we have the dependencies installed:

sudo ./configure

Everything should report OK. If not, check any dependencies you're missing.
At this point, we have all of the resources we need to compile and install node.js:

sudo make
sudo make install 

Finally, node.js is installed! You can check it in the command-line by doing a quick version check which will return the version number you just installed:

node -v

Identity

David Lamb was a joyful man of many talents. He loved to tell jokes to lighten up a room, sing and strum a guitar to lift heavy spirits, go on a boating adventure to reel in elusive fish and carve wooden mementos that would last for generations. Having earned diplomas in industrial arts and engineering from three universities, he also enjoyed sharing his knowledge. He was always active, never slowing down if he could help it. His love of activities was almost as great as the love he had for his family.

Last Wednesday, the only grandfather I knew as a child slipped away quietly, leaving this legacy behind him.

As I reflect on the time I spent with him, I think about things he shared with me that I didn't think much of at the time. Despite me not being much of an outdoors kid, he was eager to take me out on his pier and cast a line just so I could experience the challenge of getting a catch. Later on, he gave me a tackle box filled with lures and other fishing bits so I could be a fisherman like him. Even though that box ended up on a shelf in my parents' garage, it still holds the kindness he showed me on the day he passed it on to me. I was also not much of a singer but that didn't matter to him. Occasionally when he had his karaoke studio playing some of his favorite country hits, he pulled me in for backup vocals. I bristled at first, but as I sang with him, I let go of my embarrassment and enjoyed the music. 

If there is one thing to take away from these memories, it's that in everything he did, my grandfather always stayed true to himself. He didn't care what other people thought because he knew what he stood for. That's something he left that I'll carry with me for the rest of my days. I've tried to be like others, thinking that things like drawings done by my hand or stories fabricated from my mind would somehow make me feel more fulfilled. The truth is that I was just faking an identity instead of appreciating my true one. I believe my grandfather realized this about himself and that's why he lived with such passion. I will go forward remembering this and looking forward to seeing him again in heaven.

Summer of Direction

This summer has brought quite a few changes: I moved to a wonderful new place with nice people, my company moved to a new building that isn't plagued by loud noises and diesel fumes, I have a new little furry family member that loves to be adorable while causing chaos, and more changes are on the way.

Last month I turned a year older. This prompts me to reflect on where I've been and where I'm going in life. I've been blessed with a wonderful wife, a nice shelter, steady job, good friends and family and more entertainment than I need, to name a few things. There is still one thing missing though - something I haven't come up with a name for until this post. I'll call it creative direction. Don't get me wrong, I would be very hard-pressed to live without any of the things I listed above, but I've always wanted to pursue an artistic hobby. For me the choice of hobby has been one of three; music, writing and art.

I know what you're thinking. Why choose one? The first reason is time. I don't want to spend my evenings shutting myself away because I have too many things to practice (already made that mistake a few times and the results weren't pretty). The second reason is commitment. Anyone who knows my branch of the family line knows that dedication to something is a trait not to be abused. I can't tell you how many times I've flipped from one thing to the next because it might feel better than what I'm currently doing. I've been around that merry-go-round enough times to make me barf. The third reason is my fear of spreading myself so thin that I don't enjoy what I do which would defeat the purpose of having hobbies!

My experience explains what it means when I say I suffer from a lack of creative direction. This summer I've been trying to settle this by taking some time each week to try one of my three desired paths. Obviously, this blog covers the writing part. For music, I set up my electronic keyboard and went over halfway through a piano lesson book for adults. I followed my interest in electronic music by signing up for a free online course in music production. However, after learning the basics of sound physics and realizing that trying to understand and properly use a digital audio workstation would be a second job in itself, I decided that listening to music was just as good as playing it. This brings me to art. This is the creative skill that I envy most in others and I'm fortunate enough to know a couple of artsy folks from whom I've gotten inspiration. I have an assortment of "How-To" books that I've collected over the years when the bug to pick up a pencil struck me. I typically practice by setting up in a corner with a pen, a pad, a pair of headphones and a lesson book. This works until my concentration is broken by something going on in the house, which happens frequently. After a few distractions, I give up from frustration.

This post isn't meant to be disheartening, because there is a light in all of this. One thing this experience has taught me is that a hobby shouldn't be treated like a second job that you don't get paid for. If your boss asked you to stay an extra four to six hours at work each day and oh, by the way, come in on weekends but not get paid for it, would you do it? Heck no! A hobby shouldn't feel like that either. It should be a pursuit you do because it's what you want to do, not because someone told you to. This is how I'll approach hobbies for the rest of the summer. I pray that by the end of it, I'll find the direction I need.