Unfortunately after pulling off the plastic, I was immediately disappointed. The first thing that stood out was that the edges were rusty. Not all the way around, but definitely noticeable in several spots. Now rust isn’t uncommon, but brand new board that was pre-ordered and shipped as soon as it was built I’m a little surprised for it to have rust already.

I continued to inspect the board, and found a nice sized gap in the edge near the tail.

I’ve seen gaps like these before, but they are always filled with plastic base material. Having a gap like this open leaves it free to catch on anything you ride over, and possibly cause more damage!

So on my brand new board, the first thing I’m going to do is rub off the rust with a gummy stone and try my best to fill the gap with ptex!

All said, I am still excited to ride this board on the first available powder day. However for a $700 board, I am disappointed. If you are considering purchasing this board, be prepared for a long back order wait and possibly some questionable craftsmanship. I would recommend waiting for this board to start appearing in stores, where they can be inspected in person before purchase.

I’ve got a new job at Pivotal Labs, and will be doing any technical blogging over there.

This blog I will try to do more outdoorsy blogging, as well as reviews. Stay tuned!

After the NES came the 286, then the Playstation 1. At some point between Commander Keen and Ridge Racer, I decided I wanted to design my own games. I didn’t to much programming though. Around the age of 10 I started writing .bat scripts… which never did anything useful. I hacked (mostly unsuccessfully) on ZZT.

When I was 13 I created an awesome Star Trek fan site on GeoCities giving me my first taste of HTML. Taking that to what I thought was the next step, I learned VRML… which turned out to be a step towards nowhere.

No, I didn’t do any real programming until college. Here I learned C, Java, ML, Prolog, Lisp, and Icon. Along with learning what real programming was, I learned that programming games is hard. I came to the realization sometime around my senior year that being a game developer would be awesome, but probably wasn’t in the cards for me. A dream job that I might have someday.

Towards the end of my college career, I started doing web development as a research assistant using JSPs and Servlets. This turned into somewhat of an expertise for me, and ended up landing me my first job out of college.

Still using Java at the time, I was introduced to Ruby and Rails by an outside consultant. This consultant was brought in to explore the possibility of using Rails on a new project. But like so many other companies at the time, using Rails (which at the time was new and unproven in the eyes of enterprise businesses) was too high of a risk. They went with the tried and true Java approach.

I didn’t take the Java approach. I left the company shortly after and joined a startup where I got paid to do Rails full time. I had drank the Rails kool aid. I was mainly hooked on how quickly you could implement ideas. I could come up with an idea in the morning, and have a working web app by the afternoon. I could gather requirements and show off working code the same day. I loved it.

At some point, I looked back and realized that game development wasn’t for me. Rapid development of games doesn’t exist the same way it does in web development. I’ve been a happy web developer ever since.

First I generate a rails app:

lappy:tmp bsmith$ rails foo

Then I add restful authentication, using the command listed in the install documentation:

lappy:tmp bsmith$ cd foo/
lappy:foo bsmith$ cd vendor/plugins/
lappy:plugins bsmith$ git clone git://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication.git restful_authentication
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/bsmith/tmp/foo/vendor/plugins/restful_authentication/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 1741, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (590/590), done.
remote: Total 1741 (delta 1010), reused 1641 (delta 957)
Receiving objects: 100% (1741/1741), 733.93 KiB | 831 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1010/1010), done.

Then I add everything to git:

lappy:plugins bsmith$ cd ../..
lappy:foo bsmith$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/bsmith/tmp/foo/.git/
lappy:foo bsmith$ git add .
lappy:foo bsmith$ git commit -m ‘init’
[master (root-commit) f63c7ea] init
43 files changed, 8462 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 README
create mode 100644 Rakefile
…[followed by lots more output]

Then I pushed it to github:

lappy:foo bsmith$ git remote add github git@github.com:benjaminleesmith/submodule_test.git
lappy:foo bsmith$ git push github master
Counting objects: 64, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (56/56), done.
Writing objects: 100% (64/64), 79.32 KiB, done.
Total 64 (delta 10), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:benjaminleesmith/submodule_test.git
* [new branch] master -> master

Next, I take a look at the vendor directory that got committed go github:

From screen shots

I assume that the little folder icon with an arrow means that the restful authentication code is being hosted elsewhere… as a submodule maybe? The folder is not clickable, so I can’t see what’s inside… if there’s anything!

So my next step is to pull the project, say for a deployment on another system:

lappy:tmp bsmith$ mkdir bar
lappy:tmp bsmith$ cd bar/
lappy:bar bsmith$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/bsmith/tmp/bar/.git/
lappy:bar bsmith$ git pull git://github.com/benjaminleesmith/submodule_test.git
remote: Counting objects: 64, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (56/56), done.
remote: Total 64 (delta 10), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (64/64), done.
From git://github.com/benjaminleesmith/submodule_test
* branch HEAD -> FETCH_HEAD

Then… I go searching for restful auth in this latest pull…

lappy:bar bsmith$ cd vendor/plugins/
lappy:plugins bsmith$ ls
restful_authentication
lappy:plugins bsmith$ cd restful_authentication/
lappy:restful_authentication bsmith$ ls
lappy:restful_authentication bsmith$

Yikes! The directory is there, but the contents are missing! I don’t know if this is a problem with the way I added restful auth to my local git repo, or if this is an issue with github. I noticed this when a production deployment was failing saying “uninitialized constant User::Authentication (NameError)” as if restful auth was no where to be found.

It seems less than intuitive to say the least. If anyone knows what’s going on here, leave me a comment please! Otherwise, my fix was to clone restful auth, then remove its git directory. This allowed me to push to github exactly what my local copy contained.

http://benjaminsmithphotography.com/

Photography has been a hobby of mine for awhile, and I have thousands of pictures on Flickr. I’m the first to admit that most of them are utter crap. As I’ve gotten better, the ratio of crap pictures to good ones has gotten better. Still, even out of my good pictures, there’s only a few that I’d like to show to the world as my best work.

So, I decided to build a little Rails app that would show off my best photos from Flickr. I created a Set on Flickr and added my best pictures to it. Then using the Flickr API, my Rails app displays the photos in a nice, clean, professional looking layout (although I think there’s some bugs in IE). I also decided to pull posts from my blog relating to photography, giving the site some nice content as well.

I’m thinking about cleaning up the code and open sourcing it. Maybe even added support for other photo bucket sites and out blogging engines. For now, it makes for a sweet way to show off my photos.

The Clymb is a new deal site that sells outdoor gear, and I got a beta invite! Beta invite, plus cheap gear sounds right up my alley. The site which goes live on Wednesday follows a model similar to woot.com. One deal per week at very discounted rates. They also have a concept of GreenShipping, which is an interesting idea.

The Clymb has plenty of competition. I already monitor steepandcheap, OutDoorDaily, REI’s Deal of the Day, Whiskey Milita, and SpadOut. So we will see how they fair.

If you’re interested in checking out the site and signing up for a beta account you should DEFINITELY use this link: http://theclymb.com/invite-from/BenjaminSmith because if you use that link, and you end up buying something, then I get $10 credit towards my next purchase! And since I don’t have an actual job at the moment, I will need as much free credit as I can muster for new gear!

So now I’m here, on a Monday morning, writing about OpenRain with a heavy heart. OpenRain was one of the most fun places I’ve had the privilege to work. The light hearted atmosphere made it easy to joke and laugh at anytime. The projects were ever changing. I think I worked on five different projects my time there, each one presented its own set of challenges and gave me a refreshing start after coming off the previous project. The schedule was flexible, allowing me to pursue rock climbing and other crazy passions I have in my life that sometimes take more than a normal weekend. And the technology was always changing, I always felt pushed to use the latest and greatest stuff and to stay a little ahead of the game… or innovate and come up with something new.

OpenRain might be my favorite job I’ve ever held. The AI Lab at the UofA is the only place that competes with it. Both of them had many similar qualities… lots of smart people to work with, changing projects, innovating.

So what happens next? I really wish I knew. I think today I’ll go visit Erin at her kindergarten class, drop by the unemployment office, update my resume, and start trying to find another job. After today, I have no clue what the future holds. Keep your fingers crossed for good things!

ANYWAYS… during the first few hours of being excited about Google Wave, I decided to write a “Gadget” which would embed a Flickr user’s latest images into a Wave. It was super easy to write. Gadgets are basically JavaScript and HTML wrapped in some XML. So whipping up a Rails app that fetched Flickr images via the Flickr API and rendered some HTML to display them was cake. I deployed the Rails app/Gadget to heroku… check it out here: http://flickr-wave.heroku.com/

There seems to be some bugs, for some reason after embedding the Gadget and reloading the wave SOMETIMES it won’t load the Gadget. I don’t know why… and I probably won’t worry about fixing it unless I start getting excited about Google Wave again. Ohh well, check out the source here: http://github.com/benjaminleesmith/Flickr-Wave

What happened to that nice blue sky?…

Sorry Eddie, your face looks like it was consumed by a black hole…

So what do you do? Well… usually I adjust my exposure so you can see the climber, maybe slightly under exposed. Then I’ll do my best to crop as much of the over exposed sections out later. Like so…

It’s not horrible, but it’s not great either. A better solution is to expose the photo for the background, then add a flash into the mix to light up the climber. I’ve just started doing this with limited success so far:

It’s not wonderful yet, but it’s getting there.