Last blog post for 2006

Happy New Year, everybody! It’s five and a half hours to the big hour here at Chez PJ, so I am taking this time to update you all about what’s going on.

Last weekend, I finally got Trac and Subversion installed like I wanted: read-only anonymous checkouts through http://svn.pjtrix.com/projectname, and read/write access for certain users only through svn+ssh://svn.pjtrix.com/var/svn/projectname.

As is almost always the case with things Unixy, the problems all had to do with setting the right permissions on the repository folder, and making sure that all related processes create new files with the right permissions set. The fix was a litany of addgroups, modusers, chowns, and chmods. Then I had to make substitute shell scripts for all the subversion commands, which simply set umask 002 before running the actual command.

After the Trac and Subversion headaches came Christmas, so I took a three-day break, visiting family, starting to read one of a few dozen fiction books from my “to read” pile, and generally chilling out. Then from Thursday through Saturday, I only worked on proposals for articles for “the secret online geekly articles site.” I hope to get at least one article proposal accepted in the next weeks.

I also found a potential employer, a place in Amhurst, MA called Assembla.com. They are a remote development consulting company, looking for Ruby on Rails developers that can work remotely. Their main product is something like a mashup between a wiki, a social network site, and a project management repository. They also do custom remote development for customers.

The interesting thing about Assembla.com, is that the hiring process consists of a type of paid audition: instead of sitting through interviews, getting your references and work history checked out, and usual job-getting stuff, they assign you a task out of their real workload, and pay you for a week or two while you get it done. If you accomplish the task to their satisfaction, you’re offered a permanent contract. If not, well, you can keep trying. I’m going to be applying this coming week.

I need to get my time organized, that’s certainly step one of the New Year. I want to work on iCal to GCal Sync and do more pjtrix goodness. I also will need to work on whatever tech article gets the a-OK. And I also need to concentrate on passing a paid trial for Assembla.com. Easy peasy. (Hint: that was sarcasm, folks. But I’ll try nonetheless.)

What I will probably end up doing, is divide my days into five-hour periods, not including sleeping, eating, my mandatory 20-minutes-away-from-the-computers-every-two-hours, and hygiene time. I’ll work on only one thing each period, then rotate among tasks every five hours. It will be like working three part-time at-home jobs! I’ll be like a homemaker mom.

Alright, that about does it with the updates. If I think of anything else, it will be my first post for 2007! See you then!

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