I was working away happily this week on my Ansible scripts, testing them with Vagrant VMs when all of a sudden Vagrant wouldn’t create new VMs for me. I discovered the problem was that the 256GB SSD on my laptop was filled with photos and videos. I regularly take photos, with both a camera phone and a DSLR but, ever since my daughter was born, my wife and I (mostly my wife cough cough) have been taking an enormous amount of pictures. It wasn’t until my hard drive space was at 90% that I realized that I have a data growth problem on my hands which is going to cost me an increasing amount of time and money to manage correctly. ...

Here I was learning the ins and outs of Ansible so that I can provision my Vagrant installation with a modicum of scripting, when lo and behold it decides to abruptly fail on me. Searching around the Interwebs using the error I received didn’t help much, except to tie bits and pieces together. So I’m writing this in case (a) I ever forget the issue again, or (b) someone else gets tripped up on this. It isn’t in Ansible’s docs, so I’m guessing they are a Linux-only shop. ...

I was reading the MyBatis docs as a refresher and in the Dynamic SQL section I noticed that they are still struggling with the WHERE clause if all elements are conditional. Take this example from the docs: It says that if none of the conditions are met, you will end up with an invalid SQL statement of SELECT * FROM BLOG WHERE or in another case SELECT * FROM BLOG WHERE AND title like #{title}. Both of these are a common problem when trying to build a dynamic SQL statement. ...

When people have looked at my code, specifically my test code, one of the most common things they ask is why I test my getters and setters. They see this as a weird thing to do, but I tend to be a very paranoid defensive programmer, so I like to ensure that my getters and setters aren’t actually modifying anything. “That is paranoid, Scott” you proclaim, and try to enlighten me on all the code that doesn’t modify accessor methods. But I’ve been burned by this assumption often, and a simple and stupid unit test ensures that the code is adhering to my assumptions. It’s quick and painless. ...

Font Awesome is truly a work of art. Those guys should be charging for this product, but I am grateful that they are not. Today was the day that I finally got fed up using the font-awesome-rails gem. On Rails 3 it was excellent and it was just a bundle install away, but with Rails 4 it just stopped working. Others have had issues with it and their response was that it was a sass-rails problem, and not theirs. Every time I used their gem with a Rails 4 project I would manually patch their gem to make it a proper SCSS file font-awesome.css.scss instead of using the old style font-awesome.css.erb that they use. However, whenever they release a new version of their gem mine stopped working until I patched it again. ...

I came across a fantastic article on Hacker News called Crushing the Imposter Syndrome and I think everyone should read it. I have an addendum to make to it as it relates to my life and what I have seen in the IT industry over the past 16 years. Please go and read the article now, then come back and read this. Back? OK, let’s start. I see imposter syndrome happening in IT quite a lot, but limited to a select group of people who really try to do a good job (e.g. solving a large problem). This is in contrast to the people in IT that are in it purely for the money and power or to sell something and then forget about that customer in the attempt to get a new customer. It possibly happens as much in other industries, but I don’t know since I have only existed in IT (or the IT department of other industries). One big cause of imposter syndrome is the pressure put on IT applicants when searching for a job. ...

I was reading a brilliant article titled “Post-Scarcity Economics” by Tom Streithorst and it resonated with me about our failing economy in Canada that I needed to write an article on it. Although the article is set against the US economy, much of what happens there also happens in Canada, albeit to a less extent 1. Please read the entire article (warning: it is lengthy) first, and I will be pulling sentences out and applying my experiences in Canada to them. ...

In yesterday’s post I explained some weird activity in my RAID backup server. Well, it turns out that it was just calm before the storm. Thankfully, that storm was nothing more than a little rain. The backup server started working again, without issue, after I pushed the drives back into place. When I awoke today I noticed that the disk status light beside drive 1 was off. I tried reseating it but the light would not go back on. I figured that maybe something happened to the circuitry in the unit and the LED is no longer receiving power. ...

It turns out that the heating and cooling of the unit over the past 5 years caused the HDDs to slip out of their connectors. All I needed to do was nudge 3 out of 4 of them back into place (I didn’t need to reseat them, just push them back in) and the unit started working again. Crazy. This incident now has me thinking about backups for my backups. ...

Knock-on Effect: A secondary, often unintended effect. While I don’t typically write it down, I have often provided my thoughts about Vancouver’s real estate market when I speak to others in person. Vancouver has had a run-up in real estate for 9 years now, one of the largest and longest real estate bubbles ever. Oh, did I say “bubble”? Many people won’t admit that it is a bubble, and yet there is little else to explain housing prices that have doubled – nay, tripled – in nearly 10 years. This false wealth by rising real estate values has caused a lot of snobbery and abusive spending, causing inflation in many ways. ...