Shanti’s Dispatches

Well, we finally completed the new Ferret Search Engine indexing system for Mailroom.

We’re now using Ferret to index anywhere between 150,000 and 200,000 Mailroom messages, growing by thousands more daily.

There were a few hiccups along the way. Very few, caused by Ferret itself. Some, by yours truly. Since I’ve only been coding in Ruby/Rails for a few months, luckily I still have that as an excuse. A few more months of doing this full-time and I’ll have nothing to fall back on when I get stuck on a silly problem!

Benefits of Pair/Team Programming

But more and more, I’m realizing how handy pair/team programming can be. Often-times, showstoppers tend to be solved by a simple solution — having another set of eyes looking at the problem.

I.e. the other day there was a majorly annoying JavaScript bug in some new (not deployed yet) Mailroom development code, which brought our new dev efforts to a halt briefly. (if it doesn’t work in IE6, you better bet we won’t be releasing it anytime soon!)

Charles & Co. use Safari as their default browser, which fortunately has an optional plugin called Safari Enhancer.

So while IE6 was reporting that the problem was simply a “undefined Ojbect” or something similarly useless, Safari Enhancer with its JavaScript console pointed me to the exact line of the problem.

Turns out, it was an extraneous comma in a function list, which Firefox was not complaining about, but ended up borking IE6 and Safari in nearly the same way.

Maybe I’m not wasting my money by being a renter.

Actually, my excuse has always been that I’ve been planning to move to the Bay Area in a few years.

After that, travel the world (finally), I hope!

But, I do kick myself when friends tell me stories about making $50k, $75k and $100k here and there from various real estate investments over the past few years. (the PHX market had been HOT. more lukewarm these days.)

Topfunky wrote an awesome plugin that allows you to dump and slurp (or, import) YAML data between databases.

This is handy if you have things like a production server & staging server and need to transfer a few records (or whole tables in this case) across the wire.