Hey All,

*edit*

So turns out I missed my 1 year anniversary for my blog…..I’ve never been able to keep a blog up and going for more than a month or two so this is definitely an accomplishment for me! The anniversary of the Robert Report was actually on Feb 14th, 2008…..go figure!

For reference, here is a link to the first post: Clicky!

*/edit*

Well again, I haven’t been keeping up with my blog….sorry about that! So this post should be fairly large in length in order to get up to speed on what’s been going on as of late.

Presidents Day Weekend – 2/14/09
I went snowboarding with some buddies of mine: Jared, Tuan and Diego. We went to mountain high…that was fun. The weather was perfect and there actually weren’t that many people! I hope to go again some time really soon especially since Jared got all new gear…I want to try that stuff out! =)

Random Ride – 2/21/09

So I finally managed to get back on my bike and head out for another motorcycle ride. Man was that way overdue! It was amazingly awesome by the way…..the ride started off a little chilly, but once I got up into the mountains and onto the other side (not overcast anymore) the weather was great, took off the jacket and strapped it to my backpack. As I started to get higher the snow from the previous rain started to emerge….that was exciting! I’ve never ridden in the snow, it was quite slippery but definitely fun! Hopefully I can get out on a long ride over Spring Break…..*crosses fingers*

Quarter Ending

So Winter quarter here at UCSB is drawing to a close and all my classes project due dates are approaching fast. I have a midterm later today that I should be studying for….hopefully that goes ok. I have a project due tomorrow that I totally forgot about, hopefully its not too long! I have another group project due next Tuesday, that should be ok….my group members are smart and responsible. Although I need to get a haircut on Friday to make myself somewhat presentable for the presentation I need to give for that….

SCO3

So with the Quarter drawing to a close the deadline for my project, now aptly named SCO3 or Service Center Online version 3, is approaching as well. I’m supposed to have this bad boy done before everyone comes back from spring break so I guess I’ll be doing some coding over the break. I am now experimenting with various AJAX requests and making it more Web 2.0-ey……but that might have to be put on hold for the next release while I polish up the interface and make it more usable/intuitive.

I think that’s it for now, as usual I’ll try to keep this updated more often….but hey I’ve had this thing for almost a year….holy crap I just realized I’ve had this for a year….*edit*

Phiivo? What’s that?

So based on a lot of thinking and a great deal of “mulling” as my friend Matt would say…..I’ve decided to step down as VP of eFireHost.com Limited, Inc. Instead I will be pursuing my own venture….Phiivo What that you might ask? Well as of right now….it’s just a registered domain name….however I have plans to turn it into a site that is dedicated to my web development work, OSS and Commercial. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for some time now…so we’ll see how it plays out! Any suggestions or comments are definately appreciated!

Until next time….Later!

Hey All,

Again….haven’t been keeping up with this lately but oh well no one really follows it! So this weekend is the highly commercialized Valentines Day weekend……I wish good luck to all your poor souls (Re: Guys and their wallets) that have to endure this holiday. Hopefully there is a good ROI at the end of it all….

In other news, Jared and I are finally going to go on the first (of hopefully many) snowboarding trips. I’m really looking forward to that! Unfortunately I fear there will be MASS traffic on the way up to Bear Mountain….

That’s it for now, l8r….

Hey All,

Well as of next week hell begins, I start with a Midterm on wednesday and then the rest just pile on. Have I been studing this weekend? Not really…..but I’ll figure it out somehow someway haha. This weekend has been fun though, watched a few movies. Reformatted the HTPC and installed the new Raptor. I had some issues with the HD playback at full screen but through a flurry of google searching and forum reading I was able to correct the issue and we can now do 1080p streaming flawlessly again!

I also found a treasure trove of pictures that I just added to my gallery. They cover my Gorman trip in November of last year! Good stuff!

On another note, I found a new fun looking pastebin alternative called snipt I’ll be playing with that over the course of the next few days. It looks all flashy with the web 2.0-ness built in, but we’ll see how it fares in terms of functionality!

Thanks interwebz!

L8rz, Robert

Thanks to everyone that made this a great weekend! It was the first holidae weekend of the year/quarter and it was spent sleeping, being highly unproductive and hosting plenty of movie nights. On Friday we had Nicole over for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, that was a good movie. On Saturday I went to study with a girl I met in class, she’s cute, quiet, and with my luck, most likely taken….oh well I got some work done which is good. Later that night we had Susan, partially Esther/Andy, over for Seven Pounds, that was a great movie. I loved putting together all the parts from that film. Not to mention engineer = win for something, I won’t spoil it 😉 Lastly, on Sunday night we had Jason, Kristin, Kristin’s friend (who’s name evades me right now) over for Pineapple Express and Slumdog Millionaire. That was another great movie (slumdog that is) Quite in depth and very suspenseful throughout. Hopefully we host more movie nights at our place as they are quite fun and I love getting together with other friends.

Laterz….

Hey All,

Well this post is going to be all about the response to this post. It’s kinda late actually, I’ve had this solution for a few weeks already but I wanted to test it out.

So I realize that I was sorely over thinking the whole development bug/issue tracker dilemma. I stopped and cleared my mind and started to tackle the issue from another angle. Why did I need/want a fancy web 2.0 front end? Why did I need to host my repositories in 3 separate places? Why was I making it so hard for myself?

Well turns out the solution I ended up going with was posted in my previous rant. I finally decided to go with RedMine and what a great decision that was! However there were a few issues that needed to be handled before moving to RedMine:

• I need a mongrel/rails environment
• I don’t want to spend gobs of money

The first, well both issues were actually handled at the same time. (Kill two birds with one stone theory?) While I did indeed enjoy my brief time at MediaTemple I definitely could not justify ANOTHER $20/mo on top of the already $20/mo for a mongrel/ruby environment. I’m a college student, sorry MediaTemple.

My answer to this was actually right under my nose. My previous host, JaguarPC, was a superb host. I had been with them for almost a year before trying MediaTemple and moving. (I was with MediaTemple for two months before moving back!) My only real gripes with JaguarPC at the time (when I moved away) were:

• No custom DNS without opening a ticket (unless I had a reseller account)
• The server I was on was slow and unreliable.

I wasn’t able to get them to open up a WHM panel for my shared account, but as often as I change DNS I decided it wasn’t a deal breaker. As for the reliability? I opted for one of the semi-dedicated plans, sure it only saves me $10/mo over MediaTemple but from what I’ve heard/read JaguarPCs semi-dedicated plans are rock solid. They even offer a fail-over plan for the semi-dedicated servers, but I decided I didn’t need that.

So for the past almost month now I’ve been happily hosted by JaguarPC again! I miss their support and fun forums. When I was getting setup and moving all my stuff over the support team really bent over backwards for me. I told them that I wanted to install RedMine and they enabled the RoRs support for my account and helped debug any issues that I was having on setup (outside of their scope of support mind you!)

It also turns out that JaguarPC offers SVN repositories from within shell accounts. So I can connect to my repo’s via ssh+svn, this is good but I’m not completely satisfied. At one point or another I’m going to want to have public repo’s that people can just checkout anonymously, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

Now that I’m up and running with my new RedMine install I do have a few gripes, well one really (will I ever be happy? Nah…) I want more granular control over user/account permissions for the application as a whole. I wanted the ability for the SVN viewing option of a project to be locked to certain users but the rest of the project open to all. One option that some members on the IRC chat offered was to create two projects, one locked down with Repo access and the other open and free. I haven’t implemented that idea yet but it is definitely on my todo list.

Oh yeah…..here is the link to my RedMine install:

http://dev.crshman.info

That’s it for now!

Laterz….Roberrr