Life & Times of a Female Software Engineer
Tech
Things to Always Keep in Your Car
Aug 26th
I recently found this article off of one of my favorite websites, LifeHacker, which called readers to list some of the things that they always keep in their car. It was based off of this article from Budgets Are Sexy.com which discusses the 5 things that the writer always carries around with them in their car.
That got me thinking about myself and what I carry around. Until the end of last year or the beginning of this year I had the bad habit of not carrying a emergency roadside kit with me, especially considering the amount of trans-state traveling I do throughout the year, this was a disaster waiting to happen. I now carrying a roadside kit, albeit a very cheap one, which contains a set of jumper cables, a bunch of tools and wrench pieces, and flares. My car is small and the battery isn’t huge so I think the small jumper cables will be enough but I found earlier this year when a friend’s battery died that they were no match for her gigantic SUV (oh, the joys and benefits of having a super-compact car…! 
Have I mentioned enough about how much I love my car?)
I realized that I have been doing some things right. I always carry a sleeping bag with me in the off chance I will have to do some dirty work underneath the car or, heaven forbid, if I need to sleep in the car for some reason. My car seats are reasonably comfortable (for me, some relatives and friends hate them) and if I’ve had to nap in the car I’ve done so successfully. Then again, I take after my father who is capable of nearly sleeping anywhere save for sleeping standing up.
The article did bring up something I haven’t thought about. I should probably keep an extra set of clothes and maybe even shoes, just in case I find my travels taking me someplace that I can’t get home to change or I messy them with bad weather or car trouble. I also don’t have a first aid kit which seems horribly overlooked considering how accident-prone I am.I’ve also been meaning to get a travel sized flashlight but have yet to stumble upon one. It also seems like it would be a good idea to keep some sort of energy or granola bar in the car since I’m hypoglycemic and I’m intolerable in that state.
Here’s a broken down list of things I usually keep in my car:
- Sleeping bag
- Roadside kit & Tire fixing tools
- Portable dog crate
- Reusable grocery bags
- Napkins
- Umbrella
- iPod/iPhone charger/axillary connector kit.
- Backseat cover for dog and dog harness
- Things to donate/return
- GPS
Here’s some things I should think about keeping in the car:
- Extra set of clothes/shoes
- Sweater
- First Aid Kit
- Energy or granola bars
- Flashlight
- Coupons
Postgres 8.4
Aug 20th
Last year, you may remember me fussing with a new installation of Snow Leopard and trying to get Postgres to behave properly.
At my most current job I’m still stuck on Leopard and just began a project maintaining our installation of Redmine that requires PostgreSQL. We’re behind an iron-clad proxy server (which is a pain in itself) due to the nature of the company, but I was working from home that day and had the luxury of just disconnecting from the VPN and was able to use the one-click installer provided by EnterpriseDB which was a relatively painless procedure. I don’t remember it being so pleasant last year. I’m not sure if the one-click installer is new, I probably installed everything by source last time. In the hopes that within the next few months (I can only dream) I’ll get one of the new snazzy MacBook Pros they’re rolling out to the Online team, I can do it “properly” then and can afford to be lazy now.
I was quite impressed at the tools available in the installer that placed themselves in my /Applications directory by default such as pgAdmin III and a cute SQL Shell that automatically launches the psql command line tool. My only gripe with the one-click installer was that by default it installed postgres to the /Library/PostgreSQL/8.4 directory instead of /usr/local so previous postgres configurations in my extensive dotfiles were a little mucked up until I realized what I had done. Nothing a little bit of symlinking couldn’t fix, but it did drive me insane wondering why psql wasn’t in my $PATH.
Gmail Filters Suck
Aug 4th
I hate Gmail’s filters.
I’ve been using Gmail for a number of years now, and the most irritating, hair-pulling experience is whenever I have to make changes to my filters. When I was in college, I used Pine in conjunction with Procmail and I was a happy little ducky for a long time. Then CCIS upgraded to Zimbra, and I thought, “Hey, I want to try that new stuff!” and got my email transitioned to the web client. Well, I couldn’t use my procmail settings anymore and while the filters weren’t as nicely set up and I had to deal with a lot more clicking than I wanted to, it was still fairly straight forward to get my mail directed to where I wanted it to go.
Now that I am graduated and have grown out of my college email address, the logical next step was to something like Gmail because hey, everyone™ uses that now, right?
Every time I have to make a change to one of my filters I have to take a deep breath and try my damnedest not to kill my screen in the process.
- You can’t logically order them. Every time you make a change, that filter goes to the top of the list. I have to do a text search to figure out which of my filters I need to edit.
- You can’t do an OR on two different types of fields. For instance, I’d like it to search for something in the subject or if the email is from a certain address. Impossible to do!
- You can’t do precedence. What is great about Procmail and even the mail filters in Zimbra, you can order filters to your heart’s content so you can check if it fits one filter and then nothing else is acted upon it. Gmail doesn’t have an indication to do this.
- Impossible to edit complicated filters. This is my filter to label things as “Shopping” so that they get shuffled off into a separate folder with a “Shopping” label instead of cluttering up my inbox.
Matches: from:(*@masterbeat.com |*@stores.gap.com | *@koss.messages1.com | *@e.victoriassecret.com | *@athletag.delivery.net | *@shop.sephora.com | *@piperlimeg.delivery.net | penews@perfumeemporium.com | *@giltgroupe.com | *@ideeli.com| thegoodguideteam@goodguide.com | BarnesandNobleEmail@email.bn.com | creativememories@nwlmail.com | *@trans-em.jetblue.com | email@photo.cvs.com | promo@e.newegg.com | *@es.shoebuy.com | *@es.bagsbuy.com | *@stewleonards.com | *@zipzoomfly.com | *@gapinc.delivery.net | *drugstore.com | cbnews7@cox.net | *gap.delivery.net | petperks@petsmart-mail.com | News@insideapple.apple.com | *@pragmaticbookshelf.com | *@e.staples.com | *@bedbathandbeyond.com | email@extracare.cvs.com) Do this: Apply label "Shopping"
That is impossible to edit in a couple hundred pixels input form field.
I’m sure there are other things about the filters that piss me off but those are the top four. In my opinion, Gmail really needs to step it up quite a bit and I’m disappointed there really hasn’t been any major changes since Gmail Beta. Gmail has the opportunity to have some really awesome filtering capability that integrates well with the label and folder system but it is just too frustration right now to be really useful!
Upgraded to WordPress 3.0
I upgraded all my blogs to WordPress 3.0 today. Gotta say it was pretty painless since DreamHost has those One-click installs, and you know how lazy software engineers get…
Git Handyism: Reflog
Apr 15th
This just saved my butt.
Say you want to delete a branch:
% git branch -D s-588-test-list-of-urls
BUT THEN YOUR REALIZE YOU DELETED THE WRONG ONE. And you had commits that were local and were not pushed to the main repository, this piece of information is very helpful.
Do a:
% git reflog
And you’ll get something like:
fbfdcea HEAD@{0}: checkout: moving from master to s-588-test-list-of-urls
fbfdcea HEAD@{1}: checkout: moving from b-702-slideshow-play-button-jquery to ma
c87935e HEAD@{2}: checkout: moving from s-588-test-list-of-urls to b-702-slidesh
eaeb971 HEAD@{3}: commit: Writing some looping code to pull urls from sitemap.xm
fe2d942 HEAD@{4}: commit: adding backgroundrb
fbfdcea HEAD@{5}: checkout: moving from master to s-588-test-list-of-urls
fbfdcea HEAD@{6}: checkout: moving from b-702-slideshow-play-button-jquery to ma
c87935e HEAD@{7}: commit: Change how the text buttons are colored
1d233b8 HEAD@{8}: checkout: moving from master to b-702-slideshow-play-button-jq
fbfdcea HEAD@{9}: checkout: moving from b-702-slideshow-play-button-jquery to ma
1d233b8 HEAD@{10}: commit: Slideshows work again with jQuery
f101f15 HEAD@{11}: checkout: moving from 0.8.0 to b-702-slideshow-play-button-jq
87a1769 HEAD@{12}: checkout: moving from b-702-slideshow-play-button-jquery to 0
f101f15 HEAD@{13}: commit: Playing with javascripts and styles
Pick out which revision you last remember you did on your branch and then do this (with a new branch):
% git checkout -b s-588-test-list-of-urls-redo HEAD@{3}
And then checkout the correct repository again:
% git checkout s-588-test-list-of-urls
And do a merge!
% git merge s-588-test-list-of-urls-redo
And breathe a sigh of relief because you saved yourself a panic attack.
