Random Thoughts by Paul

It's been a busy week and a half since my last post and a bit of a roller coaster as well. We had the home inspection last week and there weren't any huge surprises save for one related to the floor joists. The inspector noted that the joists had been notched and may not pass codes and that it could be a problem. I was somewhat skeptical of his concern but not willing to dismiss them without verification given the ramifications of having to replace the entire floor support structure.

We have an accepted offer on the investment property we put a bid on, now it's ours if we want it. The excitement in the household has been pretty overwhelming. Had our first meeting with the fellow investors yesterday and started mapping out the plan for the first couple of weeks after closing. Lots of planning, material research (flooring, tile, etc.), calculating (cost and budgeting) going on this weekend. The work begins next week.

First time in a long time I've written a post on my site but I am going to attempt to write about a big development in my life... Real Estate Investment. Now that Bianca and I have paid off all of our debt except the house we are trying to put some of our extra income each month into various investments. Some really low risk like savings, some in 401k and we have been interested in doing something much riskier, dipping our toes into real estate.

This first house is a pretty low risk for several reasons:

For most applications authentication is a necessary evil and my current project is no exception. I always dread having to write the authentication logic in applications. Some frameworks have OK authentication plugins available but I always finding myself writing some piece of it before it's over with. I was really hoping to avoid that with rails and thanks to devise I have. It has everything I was looking for and more.

This is one place where rails really shines, the number of tutorials, screen casts, and other educational resources are second to none. I've been very impressed with both the quantity and quality of the free information available.

A large number of resources are cataloged here.

I've decided to try a new philosophy with this project, simplify my life, outsource the unimportant stuff. Instead of setting up a source repository on a server and configuring a hosting environment for my project I'm letting others do that work so I can concentrate on getting code written.

I spend a lot of my time these days writing back end services to process mountains of data across a large number of servers almost entirely written in Perl. I try to pride myself on using the right tool for the job and that means straying away from Perl from time to time. Over the past couple of years I've written (excluding Perl):
- Windows services in C#
- Front end touch screen apps in action script (never again, ever, never)
- C code for freeswitch
- A web front end in PHP that I later scrapped when I confirmed that I still dislike PHP

From time to time I find myself needing to treat one class of devices differently than another class of devices as dhcp clients. This becomes very common when dealing with sip phones, different phones need different/conflicting configuration parameters. The typical way to deal with this is to have an entry per device to specify how it will behave. That behavior doesn't scale very well unless you have an automated system to modify the dhcpd configuration on the fly. It turns out that dhcpd has quite a few advanced features that few people ever stumble upon.

This is a pretty quick post but I wanted to throw it out here as it might help somebody. When you start getting into several tables and a large rule base it can get to be a bit difficult to figure out what rule blocked a packet that shouldn't have gotten through.

Instead of:
IN=eth1 OUT=tun0 SRC=10.2.1.2 DST=10.3.1.6 LEN=84 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=63 ID=16679 PROTO=ICMP TYPE=0 CODE=0 ID=29120 SEQ=4

Everyone always has a hard time figuring out what to buy for me and I don't make it very easy. I don't want for much and my typical answer when asked what I want is "I don't need anything." Sorry about that, to make up for my difficulty I've spent some time and put together a couple of wish lists of things I would love to have. I realize some items on the list are pretty expensive I promise I haven't lost my mind! It's a wish list and I wish I had those things, I am very aware that no-one would ever buy them for me.

Geeky stuff:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/brain/gimme.cgi?wid=81cdc8087