<geek-out begins>

Onto the geek-out story.  Our project focuses on certain content and includes phone numbers.  We found a problem in the phone numbers database table where there were tons (figuratively, not literally a multiple of 2000lbs) of duplicate phone numbers, all of them "2147483647".   There were over 20,000 phone numbers in the table and over 2/3rds of them were all this mysterious phone number.  Who was this mysterious, popular person?  We had no idea – our problem was that all the numbers we were putting into the database were all unique, but somehow most of them were being transformed.  Perplexed, we approached the problem like any other high-functioning partnership – we started blaming each other.     

We pored over every line of our Ruby on Rails code that handled the phone numbers, and set breakpoints at every stage of our data processing, but to no avail – the numbers seemed perfect right up til they were stored in the db, but were transformed once we pulled them back out.  After an hour of frustration, we randomly googled for "2147483647" and discovered it was a Mersenne Prime, which is a prime number that is one less than a power of 2.  Aha!  The problem was that we were stripping all the formatting from our phone number strings and storing the resulting 10-digit value in the database in an INT type column.  It just so happens that the 10-digit number 2,147,483,647 is 2^31 – 1 or 0×7FFFFFFF, the maximum signed integer value for any INT column.  So, every phone number whose digits were less than that value stored fine, and all phone numbers above it were stored as this max integer value, and the fix was simply to change the type to a STRING type instead.  As you’d expect, we were kicking ourselves (and each other) after discovering this.  Who knew such a little type declaration could cause such a headache?  I thought I’d gotten away from these problems forever when I switched out of a developer role at MS!  My ex-coworkers reading this are probably shaking their heads in shame.

</geek-out ends>

-JL

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While browsing Lifehacker I found this AllBusiness blog post about a topic near and dear to our hearts: how to work from home. One of the biggest adjustments I had to make after leaving Microsoft 3 months ago was adapting to the drastic change in my work environment. Making your home a place of productivity in addition to one of rest and relaxation requires a lot of changes, both around the house and in your own actions and perspectives. For most people (that means me) trying to be more productive at home is a never ending battle, but with the right motivation and dedication you can definitely make it work. Here’s a list of the more successful things that have helped me. I’ll save the list of unsuccessful things for a future post.

• Establish a dedicated office. Keep the stuff in the area strictly work-related; no bills, leisure books, tv, etc. to distract you from what you should be doing when you’re there. Making your entire home the “office” does not work.
• Make lists. You should know what you must accomplish that day, and additionally things you’d like to get done if there’s time. Finishing the must list means you can call it a day – this helps you avoid burnout, as starting a business is a marathon, not a sprint. Work on the like list if you’re feeling particularly energetic.
• Stay accountable. Relying on others is really effective here. If you’re lucky enough to have business partners, set up regular status checks, and make sure to share not only what you have done but what you will by the next checkpoint. If you’re flying solo, you can still leverage the pressure of being accountable to others by setting up situations where others expect something from you, like scheduling lunch or coffee where you’ll give a demo of your latest stuff to a friend. Having paying customers helps a lot in this regard too.
• Take the right breaks. Taking a break between tasks helps you unwind from and process the previous work and refocus your energies fully on the next task. There have been too many times where I’ve “finished” one task only to find myself disengaged on the next one because my mind was still thinking about what I was just working on.
• Stop taking the wrong breaks. My personal Achilles’ heel. Your home, by nature, is your most comfortable and distracting place on the planet. Add to that a high-speed internet connection with email, IM, and sites like Youtube and Myspace, along with zero parental supervision, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. One thing that’s worked for me is turning the wrong breaks into the right breaks; by promising myself time to browse/chat after each task, I’m better able to keep my focus on where it should be. If that’s not enough, you can try using two browsers like the AllBusiness article mentions, or better yet, two computers, with one dedicated to work. If all else fails, disconnect your internet. Seriously.
• Get out of the house. Coming from an office environment where I was used to seeing lots of people every day, it was disheartening to suddenly find myself home alone all day. Now I try to find a reason to get out of the house each day. This can be as simple as going to the gym or running, but I’ve found that just being around people helps. What also works well, if your work lets you, is working at a cafe or library every once in a while. The change of pace is refreshing, and oftentimes helps you focus better on your work.
• Be regular. And I’m not talking about Metamucil here. In our first working session, Justin and I worked ourselves to exhaustion. We were so passionate about getting stuff done that we would work til we passed out, shifting our schedules later and later in the day. After two weeks of that we finally learned that it’s not the way you train for a marathon. Since we’re all creatures of habit, it helps productivity to have regular work hours and to stick to them. There’ll definitely be the days when work demands much more from you, but even in those cases it’s important to have a normal “pace” of work that you can return to.

These are the top things that have worked for me (or that I’m working on) to help me actually “work” from home. What kinds of things have worked well for you?

-JL

]]> http://www.twobitoperation.com/blog/how-to-actually-work-when-youre-working-from-home/feed/ 5 http://www.twobitoperation.com/blog/the-ruby-on-rails-bible-version-2/ http://www.twobitoperation.com/blog/the-ruby-on-rails-bible-version-2/#comments Sun, 07 May 2006 03:30:25 +0000 john http://www.twobitoperation.com/blog/2006/05/07/the-ruby-on-rails-bible-version-2/ Just a heads-up that a new version of Agile Web Development With Rails has been released as a beta. If you have even the slightest interest in playing with Rails, you should get this book because it’s got all the info you’ll need to get off to a great start. We’ve had copies of the first version since we started coding and they’re now extremely worn out from all the abuse (or love, depending on your perspective). The new version covers all the great features added to Rails in the latest 1.1 release, including:

• RJS – ridiculously simple updating of multiple page elements from a single AJAX request
• migrations – a simple way to allow incremental updating of your database without disturbing the rest of your app
• Capistrano – a fantastic utility for one-click deployment of your changes to your production server(s)
• RESTful interfaces

We definitely plan to check out this latest version; you should too.

-JL

]]> http://www.twobitoperation.com/blog/the-ruby-on-rails-bible-version-2/feed/ 1 http://www.twobitoperation.com/blog/the-cats-halfway-out-of-the-bag/ http://www.twobitoperation.com/blog/the-cats-halfway-out-of-the-bag/#comments Thu, 04 May 2006 07:32:29 +0000 john http://twobitoperation.com/blog/2006/05/04/the-cats-halfway-out-of-the-bag/ And her name is Ruby. Ruby on Rails, to be exact. After “working” now for a few months in near total secrecy, it’s time we shared some of the technical details of how we spend most of our time. We’re still not ready to share what exactly we are doing, but we want to be able to discuss how we are doing it. And a large part of the how is Ruby on Rails.

What is Ruby on Rails? Ruby is an interpreted, object-oriented programming language, and Rails refers to the web development framework that DHH and others at 37 Signals extracted from their Basecamp product. Ruby is a simple-to-learn, yet powerfully expressive and flexible language that can lead to really elegant (or really ugly) code. Combine this with Rails, which provides a very supportive MVC architecture, and you have a fantastic starting point for building any sort of web application in a short amount of time.

Since Justin and I had only minimal experience in building websites, we wanted to go with a technology that was easy to learn and be productive with, and had a large community of users from which we could get a lot of support. Ruby on Rails fit that bill, and we couldn’t be more happy with our choice. Along with many helpful websites, the following two books got us up and running quickly; I’d highly recommend them to anyone interested in Ruby on Rails:

• Agile Web Development With Rails
• Programming Ruby

So consider this fair warning; from now on we’ll be geeking out occasionally with Ruby on Rails-specific issues and solutions that we encounter. Of course, the best way to follow along is to try it yourself.