Another Lucius Seneca quote:
No one persuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things
What are the things that you are preoccupied with? How many things do you have on the todo list in your head? How many of them have you gotten done lately? If you're like me then you have a big list floating around your head where things drop on and off of the mental checklist and you never really get to most of the things on there. Write it down! Use a text document on your computer, send yourself an email, start a google document, or even good ol' pen and paper. Just get it out of your head so you can focus on things one at a time without worrying that you're going to forget something.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Yesterday my boss forwarded a resume to myself and several of the people on my team. The candidate has a ton of experience doing projects similar to what we're doing and would likely be a good fit. Reading through the previous positions on his resume and then his education I realized that he's been working as a programmer as long as I've been alive (I'm 27). I find the thought that I might still be sending out resumes in 20 years is horribly depressing.
I started reading through On The Shortness Of Life an essay by Lucius Seneca last week here and there while waiting for things to build/install and when eating my lunch. Tim Ferris had a blog post about it and that got me interested. Anyhow, It has me thinking a lot about my time and the fact that it's a limited commodity, the fact that I'm giving up much of the lives of my children for work, and priorities. Here are a few excerpts that I've found particularly insightful:
So it is - the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it . . . life is amply long for him who orders it properly.
"The part of life we really live is small." For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.
Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live!
your vices will swallow up any amount of time. The space you have ... escapes from you quickly; for you do not seize it ... but allow it to slip away as if it were something superfluous and that could be replaced.
I started reading through On The Shortness Of Life an essay by Lucius Seneca last week here and there while waiting for things to build/install and when eating my lunch. Tim Ferris had a blog post about it and that got me interested. Anyhow, It has me thinking a lot about my time and the fact that it's a limited commodity, the fact that I'm giving up much of the lives of my children for work, and priorities. Here are a few excerpts that I've found particularly insightful:
So it is - the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it . . . life is amply long for him who orders it properly.
"The part of life we really live is small." For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.
Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live!
your vices will swallow up any amount of time. The space you have ... escapes from you quickly; for you do not seize it ... but allow it to slip away as if it were something superfluous and that could be replaced.
Been a while
It's been a while since I wrote anything and for that I apologize. A couple months ago I tool a job for a company called Advaiya in Bellvue WA. The commute is a little painful but that stability is rather nice. We'd gotten to the point where I needed to either get other clients or get a real job. Health insurance was killing us and we were pretty tight on funds in general. In hindsight I should have taken care of health insurance and switching out to an HSA but never did.
So, I'm back in the office again. I'm not sure what the future of this blog is and I never posted much or developed any significant level of readership to the best of my knowledge (if you're reading this now don't think that statement means I don't care about you :) ). I might keep writing in it as starting a real job again makes me remember how much I dislike the 9 to 5 thing. The sort of rhythm you get into where you have to fill up 8 hours before you can go home is strange. Can't I get the same amount or even more done faster? If I do the same/more work faster/smarter should I be done and head home? These are things that I'm pondering.
If you have any ideas for the future of this blog please comment.
So, I'm back in the office again. I'm not sure what the future of this blog is and I never posted much or developed any significant level of readership to the best of my knowledge (if you're reading this now don't think that statement means I don't care about you :) ). I might keep writing in it as starting a real job again makes me remember how much I dislike the 9 to 5 thing. The sort of rhythm you get into where you have to fill up 8 hours before you can go home is strange. Can't I get the same amount or even more done faster? If I do the same/more work faster/smarter should I be done and head home? These are things that I'm pondering.
If you have any ideas for the future of this blog please comment.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
IIS7 and url escaping
First off, sorry I'm such a slacker. Posting to this blog hasn't been one of my top priorities. I have a lot of draft posts that I've started or dropped a few thoughts into and never returned to. I'll work on getting through those. Enough of that.
I've been working on a community that's hosted on Community Server off and on for a while now. Recently my primary client upgraded the test environment server over to a new box with a new version of the OS, SQL Server, and IIS. This has caused some problems with some problems here and there but most of those were taken care of easily. One weird one was that the tagging system in Community Server wasn't working quite right anymore. Single token tags such as "foo" would work as expected however multi token tags "foo bar" were no longer working and I was getting a page not found error. After a lot of digging around I discovered the issue:
IIS6 treats "+" and "%20" in a url the same however IIS7 does not. Community Server uses "+" to indicate spaces in their tag urls. So for a single token tag you have something like:
[url]/tags/foo/default.aspx
and for a multiple you have:
[url]/tags/foo+bar/default.aspx
At the suggestion of a developer I know I tried replacing the "+" w/ "%20" and low and behold it worked fine. The solution to this issue is to allow double url escaping by adding the following to your web config inside of the System.WebServer element:
<security>
<requestFiltering allowDoubleEscaping="true" />
</security>
Blog Post on Breaking Changes on IIS7:
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/381/aspnet-20-breaking-changes-on-iis-70/
Community Server documentation on this issue here:
http://docswiki.communityserver.com/wikis/cs20085docs/configuring-iis7-for-community-server.aspx
I've been working on a community that's hosted on Community Server off and on for a while now. Recently my primary client upgraded the test environment server over to a new box with a new version of the OS, SQL Server, and IIS. This has caused some problems with some problems here and there but most of those were taken care of easily. One weird one was that the tagging system in Community Server wasn't working quite right anymore. Single token tags such as "foo" would work as expected however multi token tags "foo bar" were no longer working and I was getting a page not found error. After a lot of digging around I discovered the issue:
IIS6 treats "+" and "%20" in a url the same however IIS7 does not. Community Server uses "+" to indicate spaces in their tag urls. So for a single token tag you have something like:
[url]/tags/foo/default.aspx
and for a multiple you have:
[url]/tags/foo+bar/default.aspx
At the suggestion of a developer I know I tried replacing the "+" w/ "%20" and low and behold it worked fine. The solution to this issue is to allow double url escaping by adding the following to your web config inside of the System.WebServer element:
<requestFiltering allowDoubleEscaping="true" />
</security>
Blog Post on Breaking Changes on IIS7:
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/381/aspnet-20-breaking-changes-on-iis-70/
Community Server documentation on this issue here:
http://docswiki.communityserver.com/wikis/cs20085docs/configuring-iis7-for-community-server.aspx
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