A friend has convinced me to build an E-Commerce site with him (he is a good sales person, which was part of the deal!).  Technically this is really not that hard seeing how I have done this before, however the cool thing is that I get to design the system from the ground up.  Which means I get to ‘do it right’ from the get go by making the site secure, scalable and easy to administer.  Two new tools I am using for this project are Puppet and Ruby on Rails.  Combined with KVM for the many servers, I am really enjoying this.  Especially when the person I am working with understands that I will do this as inexpensive as possible and when I mention the need for a VM server, instead of pushing back… conferences calls some one who can help get resources.  Still, it is really fun to be able to get some pretty redundant systems for very little money.  I mean, how beefy does a firewall have to be… all I ask for is a 1U case with hot swap disks, dual power supplies and a LOM

The VM server is a bit more difficult as you have to really look at the processors to ensure KVM is supported.  AMD is pretty straight forward. I wish Intel was the same.  Though with how inexpensive 1TB SATA drives and Linux having software RAID 6, my goal is to keep this server under a grand.  Like I said, I am having fun with this.

On the political side, Portland’s local government is going off the deep end with Hayden Island.  On one side of the island they want to take away land with the CRC.  Then Adams’ ‘Hand Picked Yes People’ spent 17 months and $500,000 doing… well no one knows?  Then it is becoming politically to popular to speak up for sexually exploited teens, which Dan Saltzman started making noise about during his re-election.  My question is where was he and the rest… oh, a year ago?

Speaking about asleep a the wheel.  Portland city council did what we know they would do with lawsuits against the city that they know they can not win… settle.  One would thing that the former and current police commissioners would make it to the council session to vote and give guidance about why it took 4 years and $1.6 million.

One good thing, all of this tech that I am doing is gearing up for some really cool stuff for the local elections in 2012!

Categories: Linux, Portland politics, Puppet, Ruby, city council, geek
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I had an interview that had me nervous, in a good way, when I woke up yesterday.  I try really hard to have my resume reflect all that I have done.  Most of the time I know that I am one of the most technically adept people in a given room.  Though I am pretty humble and not cockey about it.  Yesterday I had an interview with a group of people that contribute to a really cool Sys Admin tool called Puppet written in Ruby.  Some times I can kick my self for missing projects like this.  Anyhow, this group is on top of their game and really know their stuff.  The job is one that I can totally do and grow with.

After the interview I was off to the old hood to visit RevPhill.  It was great catching up with him and he gave me a piece of great advice to answer friends questions about my past year… make a Zine and carry copies with you.  This is brilliant.

Then it was off to get some post interview thank you cards… but I just could not send some lame piece of paper that essentially is a reminder of my name… I would not want to be treated like that.  So for the same price of cards I found a cool tattoo book and sent that instead.  Which was had a cool serendipitous outcome as at the Main postoffice I ran into a campaign volunteer who was kind enough last year to drive me home after I had about 5 too many beers.  I love how Portland is small like that.

So today my goal is to clean the kitchen (which needs it bad), then fill the green yard debris bin and get the trash to the curb… my rewards shale be outline my Zine, write a tiny rails App and install play with puppet on some VM’s… I guess I could update wordpress as well.  I am also digging this Sci-Fi book that I got for $1.00 from Powells called Salt.

UPDATE: Amazing how much time CLEAR tech support takes trying to get a static IP.

Categories: Puppet, Ruby, SciFi
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