The Learning Journey

Steve Howard from MLE Systems has started talking to me about Sales techniques and, man, do I love it!

Although, Sales is a modern “survival” skill, it’s hardly taught in schools for non-business majors (what a shame). Being a techie, you become more involved into tech details and, like it or not, social skills (including sales) quickly withdraw from your soft-skill stack.

Selling products, services, or even yourself (hard skill set) is often overlooked by techies, but I see it a major component in any success (Apple, eBay, Microsoft, 37 Signals, … you name it). I’ve long wanted to start learning more about it and Steve is offering me a great opportunity.

Thanks Steve.

This is serious.

The United Nations’ World Food Program has been hit so hard by skyrocketing grain prices that it may be forced to cut off some food aid to the world’s poorest countries, while the United States is planning to turn record quantities of corn into automotive fuel.

Cereal grain import prices for the world’s poorest countries are expected to rise 35% for the second consecutive year in 2008, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Droughts and floods have reduced grain stocks, and demand is rising in part because better living standards in developing countries are bringing a change in diet — Indians and Chinese are eating more meat, so more grain is needed for livestock feed. And ethanol is making a bad situation worse. The U.S. is the world’s top corn exporter, and about a quarter of last year’s crop went to ethanol. Food prices, meanwhile, have increased so much that the World Food Program says it will have to raise $500 million more just to carry out its scheduled operations.

via LA Times, via reddit

Update: The NY Times is publishing about the same issue.

Pat Eyler from On Ruby has notified me that I won his Holiday Blogging Contest. My entry for generating a Rails site map was apparently the best Rails how-to in those posted. It won me 3 books from Apress.
This is my first online win EVER, and being it a Rails-oriented win, makes it even sweeter.

Thanks Pat. Thanks Apress.

If you’re using mongrel and want to deploy Rails to a subdirectory instead of a sub/domain (example.com/my_app instead of my_app.example.com or my_app.com), then you can use --prefix=/my_app in your mongrel startup command.

Then using Apache as a proxy, ProxyPass /my_app http://localhost:3000/my_app

Oh the Horror! Web Applications are just Web Forms.

Can’t believe that some might think that.

By chance, irb and ruby-console tab completion discovery. Made my day!
irb
irb(main)> t = Time.new
=> ...
irb(main)> t.m #[tab]
t.mday t.method t.methods t.min t.mon t.month


Rails Console
>> Feed.fi #[tab]
Feed.find
Feed.find_all
Feed.find_all_with_deprecation
Feed.find_all_without_deprecation
…

Win XP, ruby 1.8.5 and rails 1.2.2. Google away if not on your machine.