netinlet - Home

MileMeter has Launched

2008-10-11T12:52:00Z

After a year of work, my company MileMeter has launched. We sell auto insurance by the mile with no vehicle tracking devices involved.

A big hats off to Chris Gay for working so hard for so many years so that we can could get to this point. Insurance rules had to be changed and it was difficult for many people to see the benefit selling insurance this way.

We are also one of very few, if not the only insurance company powered entirely by Ruby It certainly gave us an advantage as we were able to get a robust, well tested application out the door so quickly.

ruby-mysql-osx

2008-09-03T00:35:00Z

I keep having to look this up…..


sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Pradipta's Rolodex

2008-07-18T18:24:00Z

I woke up this morning to a 40+ thread of emails which originated by a recruiter sending 416 people job posting, all via TO:

It quickly turned into a somewhat fun conversation with lots of people and jokes. Rather quickly a google group named Pradipta’s Rolodex was created. Also followed was a Wikipedia entry (quickly deleted by Wikipedia admins), a FaceBook group, at least one domain registration as well as posts to Digg, Reddit and others.

Oh, the friday fun…..

Update…..

Now with new shiny buttons…...

Rspec Test render(:nothing => true)

2008-03-31T21:15:00Z

I was trying to test one of my controllers was successfully hitting the render(:nothing => true) block. I could not find anything specifically in the API which handled this senario, so I ended up using have_text with a space as an argument.


@response.should have_text(" ")

Vote for Milemeter at AWS Startup Challenge

2007-12-01T20:19:00Z

Go vote for Milemeter at AWS Startup Challenge and keep me gainfully employed!

We are proud to be 1 of 7 Finalist for the Amazon.com AWS Startup Challenge and will give our presentation next week at Amazon.com HQ. Milemeter is an innovative insurance start-up that will offer “auto insurance buy the mile”.

Please Vote for Milemeter!

Update: Congratulations to Ooyala for winning the AWS Startup Challenge.

Quote of the Day

2007-11-30T16:27:00Z

This one is from my 4 year old. While walking through the womens department with my wife, they come across the bras. There was one particularly large white bra hanging on the end of a rack. Tommy stopped and studied it for a minute then proclaimed “Look mommy, that’s where the penguins live”.

Testing private and protected methods with ruby

2007-04-18T17:48:00Z

When I have to test my protected and private methods in ruby, I make the methods public for the scope of the test.


  MyClass.send(:public, *MyClass.protected_instance_methods)  
  MyClass.send(:public, *MyClass.private_instance_methods)

Just place this code in your testing class substituting your class name. Include the namespace if applicable.

Transfer email from one google account to another

2007-04-03T13:22:00Z

I recently signed up the netinlet.com email for Google apps for you domain

I had all my mail funneling to a gmail account to begin with, so I need to get all that email from the first google account to the new google apps account.

You can do with with POP, but you have to put in a different pop server name. Use pop.googlemail.com instead of pop.gmail.com. pop.gmail.com will not allow you to access via pop. Go figure.

Everything else stays the same, just make sure to use ssl on port 995.

The process takes a while. Mine has been running for about a half an hour and has only pulled over 300 emails so far. I have mine setup to pull over all email, so everything (INBOX, SENT, & ARCHIVED) gets stuck into the inbox on the google apps account.

Google Apps - html verify takes a long time

2007-03-28T01:35:00Z

I recently signed up the netinlet.com domain and a friends work domain for the Google Apps

You have to verify ownership of the domain to get the ball rolling. They allow you to either upload a unique html page to the domain or add a cname entry which points to google.com. I chose the former because it was simple and easy to do.

Google tells you up to 48 hours before the account is active. Well, 48 hours came and went. Then a whole week came and went and I heard nothing. Searches for why this was taking so long did not turn up much.

I finally stumbled upon some http log entries which show google was trying to verify. The entries looked like this:

216.239.36.136 - - [27/Mar/2007:22:58:25 +0000] "GET /googlehostedservice.html HTTP/1.0" 412 258 "-" "Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.0.1"

Look, a clue! Notice the 412 error code.

After some more hunting, it turns out that the verification process is triggering Apache mod_security. Luckily, the fix is simple.

If you don’t already have one, create a .htaccess file in you webserver root directory. In this file put

SecFilterEngine Off

My host is textdrive and I found a textdrive specific fix here but this fix should apply to almost everybody who is getting 412 error codes in their log files.

The Dead Mac and the Improved Google Reader

2006-10-02T00:34:00Z

Well, my iMac G5 died Friday morning. The power shut off while checking email and it just looses power when trying to boot again. After talking to Apple support Friday night… prognosis: bad power supply. This is the second time the Mac died in less than a year. Last time it was right before Christmas. That time, the transistors on the mother board went bad and I had to replace the mother board. Luckily, after the first incident (just days before the 1yr warranty went out) I purchased the extended warranty.

One good thing did come out of this, finding the new and improved Google Reader A while back, I had imported all my NetNewsWire subscriptions into it. I never used it much because the interface was too primitive. So, wanting my rss feeds Friday night, I gave it a try again.

Whoa! Apparently they just updated the UI that day. The interface is very usable. Once they fix a couple of kinks, like occasionaly not iterating to the next unread message, I may be able to replace NetNewsWire. I’m especially happy because I can use it at work on my linux box too. The Google Reader developers made me a very happy camper.

Reinstall Solaris 10 on a T2000

2006-07-28T14:25:00Z

My biggest gripe with the T2000 so far is actually with Solaris package management. pkgadd sucks because it does not handle dependencies and will not automagically download stuff from Sun. I really which they had something like the FreeBSD ports collection or apt-get or yum or something which automatically downloaded and install dependencies.

The T2000 ships (the one I received atleast) with Solaris 10 1/06 release. I want to play with ZFS which was included in the 6/06 release. Plus, I hope installing some of the other packages will be easier if I install the developer packages with some amount of libraries.

So not being able to find out how to upgrade the system from 1/06 to 6/06, I downloaded the 6/06 release and am doing a reinstall.

Since the T2000 does not ship with a video card, you have to install from the console. Not having used Solaris very much , it took a little while to figure out how to get the box to boot from the cdrom.

The trick is to get to the ok> prompt. You can do this by logging in as root on the console and issuing the following command:

shutdown -y -g0 -i0 now

This leaves the server running but in init mode 0.

Now, you can boot from the cdrom and start the installer with the following command.

ok boot cdrom - nowin

This will start the installer in the console mode, rather than in X.

4-Sale - 1999 Suzuki Intruder

2006-07-27T02:10:00Z

Well, I’ve decided to sell my motorcycle. I will not stop riding though. I like it too much!

The Suzuki Intruder was a great first bike. It runs great and is pretty much indestructible.

The main reason I am selling it because it is uncomfortable on longer rides (1 hour commute to and from work). I’m 6’2 and there is not a whole lot of legroom on the bike for someone this tall. I find myself pushing back against the pegs into the hump of the seat alot. This leads to alot of lower back aches.

Look no further if you desire a fun, reliable motorcycle.

the T2000 has arrived

2006-07-26T17:13:00Z

The T2000 has arrived!

I can’t wait to see what this thing will do with ruby and postgresql. This one has 6 cores and 8 gig of ram.

I will more than likely have to send it back at the end of the 60 day trial, but i’m very excited to get to use it as a test server in the meantime.

It’s time to put on my admin hat!

ipod shoe? isn't this going a little too far

2006-05-23T16:55:00Z

From Reuters:

Nike Inc said on Tuesday that it had teamed up with Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod to launch a wireless system that integrates Nike shoes with the popular digital music device

Maybe being 33 makes me too old to understand this, but WTF are you going to do with music in your shoe?

I have a strange vision of the 80’s when you saw people carring around a large boombox. Now, they can bop around with a shoe on their ear.

Link

synergy - the kvm switch replacement

2006-05-03T18:38:00Z

At work, I regularly use two computers, my primary development box (linux) and my other development box for the windows specific piece of the program I am working on.

I have one keyboard and mouse two monitors. I tried using a KVM switch, but that sucked because every time I would switch from linux to windows and back, the scroll wheel on my mouse quit working on the linux box.

I also tried using VNC for a while, but found the screen drawing was too slow.

On one of my rss feeds this morning, I ran across Synergy. This is one sweet program!

You designate one of your computers the primary computer and start a synergy server on that computer. On the other computer, you start a synergy client. Now, all you have to do to move the keyboard and mouse from one computer to the other is push the mouse to one side of the screen from either computer. So when I am on the linux box and want to use the windows box, I just push the mouse to the right of the screen and I am then using the windows computer. To get control back to the linux box, I just push the mouse to the left side of the screen, and voila! I’m working on the linux box again.

This setup only works if you have two monitors and one keyboard/mouse. And… it works very, very well.

TIP: I start synergy daemon on the linux(master) box with crontab. On the windows box, there is a gui option to start looking for the master when the computer is turned on.


@reboot /usr/bin/synergys --daemon --config /path/to/synergy.conf