Ants on the Melon
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After spending the holiday week with our families, Sandy and I met up in New York for a few days to see friends and celebrate the New Year.

We arrived in the City Friday evening to meet up with some of Sandy’s friends for dinner. We ended up hanging out at really great bubble tea place for a while, and eventually meeting up for a nice dinner later. I can’t remember the names of these places, or find websites for them, but they were both in Chinatown and were really good. Afterwards we headed up to Rockefeller Center to see the famous Christmas tree.

Saturday we took our time and walked around the city, which included my Pilgrimage to the 5th Avenue Apple Store. Later that night we met up with Sandy’s cousin and her husband for dinner at Yakitori Taisho, an amazing little restaurant that was packed full. We got there early, and were able to get a great table in the back. You know the food has to be good when a place that is this tiny has a huge line out the door in the winter. After dinner we walked around and ended up at Veniero’s Pastry for dessert and coffee.

On Sunday we decided to see the American Museum of Natural History, which is where we spent most of the afternoon. This is a really cool museum with lots of different types of exhibits. I spent a lot of time at the physics/space exhibits, but there were also some really interesting displays with animals, primates and such.

Afterwards we headed down to meet up with some of Sandy’s other friends for our New Year’s Eve dinner at Guantanamera, a Cuban restaurant on 8th Avenue. We had a great meal (at least I did) and dessert, before heading out to a friends apartment to hang out until midnight got a little closer. Around 10:30 Sandy and I left for Central Park to find a nice place to watch the fireworks. We ended up at a terrific spot with a perfectly clear view of the sky. When the fireworks started at midnight, they went on for 10 minutes and were some of the most spectacular fireworks I have ever seen. Everyone makes a big deal about Times Square for New Year’s, but I cant imagine a better place to be on New Year’s than in Central Park.

Overall, it was a great trip and reminded me how much I love New York City (especially the smells of the food from the street vendors).

Thursday morning I drove over to Covington, Louisiana to spend Thanksgiving with the Taurman family. In addition to a wonderful meal, they had also planned a fishing trip for us to go on the following day. Friday evening 5 of us piled into Chad’s truck and headed down to Cocodrie, Louisiana.

We had a room reserved at Boudreaux’s Marina, a nice little place operated by Andre Boudreaux and his family. After getting a little sleep Friday night we woke up before 6 am and had a nice breakfast at the marina. As soon as breakfast was gone we piled in the boat to head out into the marsh and start fishing. Normally there are several different fishing guides who can take groups out, but as it turned out, all of Andre’s guides had taken the week off to go hunting, so he took us out himself.

It didn’t take long before Choose was reeling in the first fish, a speckled trout, and pretty soon we were all pulling them in. We caught lots of trout, red fish, and black drum and by the time we went in around 1pm we had caught enough food for everyone to have dinner. We also couldn’t have asked for better weather for the trip (I took this video while we were fishing, its 22 secs, 21 MB).

Andre Boudreaux is the real deal, no question about it (with a last name like “Boudreaux”, how could he not be?). He also gives guided tours for those who want to catch alligators, and his stories about those trips are pretty funny as well.

This trip reminded me of how much I enjoy fishing. Sadly, I haven’t gone much since I moved away from Virginia.

Thanks to the Taurman family for a great time!

This weekend I drove up to the capital city for the 2006 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

After last years festival I had decided that I did not want to spent another weekend under the blazing Sun and try to enjoy music. It was just too hot. But when I saw that both Ween and Willie Nelson would be performing, I went ahead and bought two 3-day passes. As it turns out, I had a pretty good time this year.

Friday I was there alone, and I just walked around from stage to stage. I spent more time getting to and from the festival than I did at the festival, but it was fun anyway (although really, really hot). I managed to see Gnarls Barkley and a few other shows.

On Saturday Sandy was able to come with me and we saw String Cheese Incident, the South Austin Jug Band, Brazilian Girls, and of course, Willie Nelson, as well as several other smaller bands.

Sunday morning we met up with Jason at Kerby Lane Cafe for a late Breakfast. Afterwards we went up to the 360 Bridge and chilled for a while, before picking up Katie and heading to the festival. We caught parts of performances from Ween, Matisyahu, Sun Volt, The Flaming Lips, The Greencards and Ben Harper.

At the gates of the festival there were people giving away iTunes music cards that said they were worth $30 towards music from bands performing at the festival. At first I thought this meant that I could pick $30 worth of music, but as it turns out they have a preselected playlist of 31 songs from artists at the festival. So now I have 5 extra cards, if anyone would like one.

Well, for those who haven’t heard, tomorrow will be my last day at Rackspace. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that I was flying down for my interview with the CORE team. At that time (mid 2003) the company was around 280 people, and every day was exciting. Rackspace has come a long way since then, and as of two weeks ago there are now over 1,000 employees and there is no slowdown in sight.

Being at Rackspace has had a tremendous impact on my life. I have been exposed to some really amazing individuals, and in the process I have learned a lot about business, software, and people. It is wonderful to be surrounded by such bright people all the time, and I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with them. Rackspace is a very special place, because of the special people there.

Deciding to leave this environment was not an easy thing for me to do, but I have an opportunity to do something I have always wanted, and its the right time in my life to go for it. All along at Rackspace I felt like I was learning and preparing for something later, and I think I will now have a chance to apply what I have learned. “It’s all just practice”, as someone who has been a big influence on me likes to say.

Next week I’ll be packing up all my stuff and moving on to my next hop, Houston.

Just another Ant on the Melon…

After delays from the firemarshall, Defcon finally got started around noon on Friday. We saw several talks, including magstripe hacking, wireless insanity, and even eXtreme Programming, all of which were very interesting.

Eliot joined us for a trip to In-N-Out Burger, where a massive number of beef patties were consumed by the 5 of us. Mmmm good.

At this point I am up $5 on the blackjack tables, woo hoo!

I spent the weekend with some friends in Virginia at Wintergreen Resort.

The event was great because almost all of us had something to celebrate. Rebecca is (finally) graduating from Pharmacy school, it was Pete’s birthday, I finished paying of my college loans, and Scott was celebrating the fact that Rebecca is (finally) graduating. Sarah and Elissa helped to get the party started. Its not very often that this group of friends gets together, since we all live in different parts of the country, but when we do it is a lot of fun. Unfortunately I was never able to meet up with Tate and his entourage while we were all up there (sorry Tate!), but I’ve already told them that next year we have to plan a trip out west.

I’ve been skiing and snowboarding at Wintergreen since the fourth grade, and it always seemed like such a fun place. But after spending several days snowboarding in Colorado my perspective on east coast slopes is a little different now. The snow is so slippery and icy, the slopes are short and crowded, the lift lines are long, the lifts are slow, and the people are dangerously novice at best. People also appear to have attitude problems there as well, but that seems more like a general east coast issue.

But, then again, there are a lot of mountain men up that way and you tend to see some interesting sights, like the guy in the picture to the left. Notice the camoflague hunting overalls doubling as skiing attire, and the awesome “pizza” stance.

It was a very quick trip, but we had a great time.

Recently I spent some time out in Colorado, here’s what happened.

Snowboarding at Beaver Creek

After landing at the Eagle/Vail airport I met up with some mutual friends and caught a shuttle to our place at Beaver Creek Resort. When I arrived at the house I didn’t know any of the other 7 people there, but they were Chris’s friends and everyone was very friendly. We had dinner and played some games until everyone was ready for sleep around 10. Chris arrived later that night.

The next day we hit the slopes. It had been about 3 years since I had last used my snowboard, so it took me an hour or two to get back in the swing of things. Soon I was back on the advanced blues and hitting the black daimonds. I started skiing when I was in the 4th grade, and switched over to snowboarding around the 11th grade in high school, but almost all of my experience is from the mountains on the east coast, especially at Wintergreen Resort. In college Tate and I used to go up there several times a week in the winter, good times. When I lived in New Orleans I flew out to Winter Park, Colorado to hang out with my cousin and snowboard for a few days. I remember thinking then how much more intense the slopes are in the Rockies, and Beaver Creek is no different. (check out the trail maps)

We snowboarded for 4 solid days and after each day everyone was completely exhausted. Usually everyone passed out by 10pm, but one night we took the opportunity to head over to Vail and check out the scene. By the end of the 4 days my calves were a jelly-like substance and there was no way I could think of spending any more time on the slopes. The only thing that kept me going was the excellent food that Katie, Jason and the group prepared each night, although I am quite sensitive to peppers now. We headed out Friday morning, and I caught my flight to Denver to continue the rest of my trip.

Hanging Out in Boulder and Denver

Ken picked me up from the Denver airport around 4pm on Friday and we headed over to his friend Scott’s place to hang out. While we were in Denver with Scott and Jenny we went to dinner at Tommy’s Thai. When we walked in we noticed that everyone was wearing jackets, gloves and stocking caps. It was very cold inside, but the food was worth it. I ordered medium hot Pad Thai and an order of vegetable gyoza, and every bite was excellent. I’m not a huge fan of Asian food, but I could eat at Tommy’s any day. After playing several games of pool and being reprimanded by a middle-aged woman in an “N’Sync” shirt, Ken and I headed up to Boulder where he lives.

The next morning we woke up early and got off to an extremely good start by having breakfast at Lucile’s. Breakfast is my favorite meal and I think its pretty hard to get a top of the line breakfast. There are many great lunch and dinner spots, but few places specialize on breakfast. Lucile’s breakfast was one of the best I have ever had. There were 3 or 4 things on the menu that I really wanted to order, but I finally settled on the New Orleans french toast. It came with eggs, sausage, fresh fruit, and was hands down one of the best breakfast meals I have ever had.

After breakfast Ken showed me around the Pearl Street Mall in downtown Boulder. There were all kinds of interesting shops and stores, and I picked up a few CDs from Bart’s CD Cellar. After a few hours of this we headed up to the foothills and walked around for a while. By this time we were ready for a late lunch so we headed back down to the city and stopped by Foolish Craig’s for a byte to eat. Once again the meal was incredible. I ordered their chicken salad sandwich and a Raspberry Frambozen and all was at peace. We walked around for a while longer then headed back for a break.

My friend James Taurman recently moved to Fort Collins, CO which is about 45 minutes north of Boulder, so I called him up when I got to town to see if he had plans. James drove down to Boulder to meet up with Ken and me at the Red Fish Brewhouse for dinner. We all ordered one of their Pilsners and I thought it was quite tasty. (I originally order their “Badonkadonk Brown,” but was disappointed to hear that they were sold out.) The meal was pretty good, although my previous three meals were a hard act to follow. James’ suggested that we head down to Denver to see Robert Randolph and the Family Band at the Fillmore Auditorium. Danny told me that Robert Randolph put on an excellent show at last year’s ACL Fest, so it sounded like a good plan to me.

Robert Randolph at the Fillmore in Denver

When we arrived at the Fillmore Auditorium there was a large gathering of people around the ticket window, but we were still able to get tickets. I thought the Fillmore was actually a really cool venue, with the blacklight-fueled purple chandeliers and the sunken center area. We were only there for about 5 minutes when a man on the center of the stage started making some incredible electric sounds. It sounded like a guitar, but the man did not appear to be playing a guitar. Then I finally realized that it was Robert Randolph and he was making these sounds on a pedal steel guitar, an instrument almost exclusively used in country music. But here he was playing it in funk/soul/blues music. Insane!

The show lasted about 2.5 hours, with about the last 30 minutes of that being a 4 song encore. These guys can really jam, as several of their songs lasted 10-15 minutes each. They are also great showmen. At one point in the show Robert started pulling people from the crowd and giving them an electric guitar (a PRS, btw) for them to play leads on. Two different white guys jumped up onto the stage, but their skills weren’t quite on the same level as the rest of the bands. Around that time the band also had about 25-30 girls from the audience come on stage and dance with them. But of all the stage tricks they had, the most amazing was when they started swapping instruments. At first Robert went back to play drums, while the drummer came down to play the pedal steel. Then Robert went to bass and the bass player got behind the drums. Then there was more swapping with the keyboard player until they all finally swapped back into place. The crazy thing was that each one of them did a fantastic job on each instrument, they are all extremely talented.

Without question this was the most high-energy concert I have ever seen, and I see a fair amount of music shows. Whenever he wanted to Robert would make the pedal steel screen and the entire room would be just buzzing with energy. This lasted throughout the entire show too, I have no idea how the band members can sustain it without any break other than the 3 minute gap between the show and the encore. In addition to their own original music they covered a few older songs including Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”, Bobby McFaren’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” All in all, it was an excellent show and I would highly recommend checking out this band.

Wrapping it up…

Sunday morning Ken, James and I had a really good breakfast over at the Buff Restaurant in Boulder. Afterwards Ken and I bid farewell to James and then headed towards the Denver airport, where I had the only negative experience of the whole trip.

I arrived at the airport at about 12:45pm (an hour and fifteen minutes ahead of my flight), waited in line at the United Airlines counter for 30 minutes, and when I finally made it to the front I was told that I could not check my luggage and snowboard since the flight was scheduled to leave in less than 45 minutes. It was actually around 42 minutes before the scheduled departure time, and she told me that she didn’t care that I had waited in line for 30 minutes, only to miss the checkin deadline by 3 minutes. I had checked-in online the night before, I only needed my baggage to make the flight. I told her that the baggage could come on a later flight if necessary, but she wasn’t interested in making a deal. She put me on standby for the next flight to San Antonio, which was at 7:30 and told me there was almost certainly no way I would make it, as the flight was already overbooked. Thanks, lady. After talking with several other people for the next hour and a half I finally ended up in front of a man with a brain and the will to get things done. He immediately told me to ignore what everyone else had told me, and that he would put get me a seat on the 7:30 flight, which is exactly what he did. I asked if there was anyway that I could tip him, but he said no and quickly asked to help the next person. Rock on, dude.

I’ll probably avoid United Airlines from now on, just as I have done with Northwest for the past year. Sometimes the lower price just isn’t worth it.

Overall, I had an excellent trip and it was great to see a few old friends and make some new ones. Oh, and Boulder has topped San Francisco in my list of most awesome cities. I didn’t think that would be possible, but The People’s Republic of Boulder is one extremely cool place.

A few weeks ago I discovered that Terry Allen would be performing his “Dugout III: Warboy” for three nights in Los Angeles. I’ve been trying to see Terry Allen for a while, and since he does not perform very often I thought it might be a good idea to check this out. I knew that Chris was out in L.A., and I figured he might want to go as well. A few IM’s later I had tickets to the show and my flights booked.

Chris picked me up from LAX last Friday afternoon, and apparently he can now read minds because as soon as I hopped in his jeep he asked if I was hungry for In-n-Out Burger. I had just spent 3 hours on a plane, mostly thinking about eating at In-n-Out Burger, so yea, perfect. Mmmm so good!

That evening we went to the “rooftop bar” at The Standard hotel. This is an open air bar on the top of a high-rise hotel in downtown L.A. There is a pool up there, and these big red pods shaped like giant Hershey’s kisses with waterbeds in them. It was a pretty cool place to hang out, and there were some sweet views from up there.

Later that night we met up with Chris’s friend, the Dread Pirate, and headed over to Cozy’s to see Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys. These guys were a lot of fun and put on a pretty good show. Also, it was interesting to see the SoCal rock-a-billy crowd, it must be pretty rough being stuck in 1952.

Saturday afternoon we went down to Hollywood Boulevard. While walking down the sidewalk we passed by Richard Pryor’s star, who had died earlier that day. There were people there with cameras taking pictures of the star with flowers on it.

Saturday night was the event I had been waiting for: Terry Allen’s “Dugout III: Warboy.” After a sushi dinner at R23, Chris and I headed over to the REDCAT theater to catch the show. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. I knew that it was some sort of theatrical performance that included Terry’s wife, Jo Harvey Allen, as well as Lloyd Maines and Richard Bowden, but beyond that I wasn’t sure. As it turned out, the show consisted of Jo Harvey telling a story based on Terry’s parent’s lives, while the three musicians performed the soundtrack of original music. This might not sound that interesting, but let me assure you, it was incredible. Not only was the story extremely fascinating, but the music was pure Terry Allen and was excellent.

Afterwards we headed out to Tommy’s Burgers for a late night snack. Before eating at Tommy’s I thought that Chester’s made the world’s messiest chili-cheeseburger, but now I know I was wrong. Tommy’s burgers are served from a stand on the side of the road, and you do not even have the option of ordering a burger without chili — like the bun and the meat patty, its part of the experience. About 15 napkins later I realized that I had been defeated, so I called it quits.

The trip was quick but it was a lot of fun. Thanks again to Chris for letting me crash there and showing me around the city.

Last night my buddy Johnny Strunk and I were reminiscing about the old crazy days of instant messaging, and I started thinking about my early experiences with computers and the Internet.

Growing up in Blackstone, VA, I spent most of my teenage years focused on go-carts, guitars, basketball and squirrel hunting (yes, its true). My dad had computers around the house for years and our home was one of the first in the county to be on CompuServe. However, it was all text based and I had never really taken much of an interest.

Strunk was just the opposite. He was all into computers and was the man around our high school¹ for fixing anything that used electricity. At that time, most of the computers at Kenston were still old Apple IIe’s, with a few Macintosh’s mixed in whenever the school could scrape together some extra cash. Strunk hated messing with those old Apple’s, and by the time we graduated he was happy that the school had been given an old Dell running Windows 3.1.

Around this time “AOL” was becoming a household name (at least in our neck of the woods) and Strunk had a subscription. It was at his house in the spring of 1997 that I first saw a website, and it was a memorable one: www.heavensgate.com. Those crazy black-nike-wearing, spaceship-riding aliens had just committed suicide and their website was all over the news. Of all the websites on the Internet, this is what my friend chose to introduce me to the World Wide Web.

When I arrived on the Hampden-Sydney campus as a freshman in the fall of 1997 I was far from computer saavy. It was the first year that HSC had recommended that students bring their own computers, so when it came time for me to head off to school my dad hooked me up with a sweet Pentium 166MHz with 16MB of RAM and a 3GB hard drive running Windows 95, of course. I had no idea what to do with the machine, so at first it was mainly used as a glorified CD player. Asking Strunk for help was not an option, as he was two hours away working on his computer science degree at his new home, The College of William and Mary.

After a couple weeks of school I got an email from Strunk, telling me to go to www.mirabilis.com and download something called ICQ. I did this and installed the software, and after a few emails from Strunk, I had my UIN² and was online. Of course, initially I had no idea what this meant or how it was significant. I hated typing emails, and this seemed to be a way to get in touch with people without composing an email, so I was all for it. Soon he showed me how to send files through ICQ, and he sent something to me that he said was music. I clicked on it, and nothing happened, so he told me to go to www.nullsoft.com and download something called Winamp. After I downloaded and installed the software, Strunk told me to drag the music file on top of the Winamp window. I can remember the excitement as I listened to that first mp3 (”Far Behind” by Candlebox) and realized that my friends and I could send music to each other, for free!

So this whole trip down memory lane started last night when Strunk reminded me about one really annoying (and fun) feature of the early ICQ clients, some of you may also remember this. I can’t recall exactly what it was named, but there was a feature that allowed you to playback a foghorn sound on a recipients machine. Anyone who had this happen to them can probably still remember the sound. The first few times this happened to me I was completely confused and thought my computer had contracted some sort of extremely obnoxious virus. I soon discovered that I also had this ability, and neither friends nor family were spared, but I thought it was hilarious.

This reminded me of another annoying little Windows app that we had a lot of fun with: WinNuke. WinNuke was a small app that could be given an IP address, and it would DOS it. It took advantage of the WinNuke OOB vulnerability and would completely crash the victim’s computer. Combined with ICQ (which would reveal a person’s IP address), we used WinNuke to “bluescreen” all of our friends on campus. I can remember “nuking” one friend’s computer when he was apparently nearly finished with a paper. I guess this was before word processors had auto-save because he claimed to have lost all his work, but I always doubted he had actually written anything. For some reason, these things never stopped being funny.

It wasn’t long after this that Strunk set up my first Linux desktop for me and I started down a more serious path with computers. But, that’s a story for another day.

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1. For those that do not know, I attended grades 4-12 at Kenston Forest School, a small, rural private school in my home town of Blackstone, VA. This was not an elite “rich kids” boarding school. Think “Happy Days” meets “Green Acres“. The school was poor and always needed money. Fundraisers included selling Coach’s Brunswick Stew, selling fruit, selling Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and selling tickets to the “Texas Festival,” an all-you-can-eat BBQ/ribs/stew event. Notice a trend?

2. Although I have not regularly logged on to ICQ in almost 4 years, I still remember my UIN as if it were my social security number.

All I wanted was sleep.

It was Labor Day and I had been out late the night before playing “nickel and dime” poker with friends. I probably made it to bed around 4am, and the only thing I had planned for my day off was sleep, and maybe catching up on the book I was reading, The Tipping Point. But my slumber would come to an end around 10:30am, and it would be another 3 weeks before I finally would get a decent night’s sleep.

When my phone rang that morning I quickly awoke and jumped out of bed, as I always do. The caller ID on my phone said “Brett’s Cell,” so I figured he was calling to tell me about a cookout or pool party at The Big E Ranch for the holiday, after all, Brett is known for his parties.

I had only been awake for a matter of seconds so I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something like “I need a sysadmin, can you help me?” He proceeded to tell me about the Windsor Park Mall shelter that Rackspace had set up and how a better way to track people was desperately needed. “Sure, I’ll be right there.”

When I arrived at The Ranch Brett told me the rest of the story. I already knew that Rackspace CEO Graham Weston had offered up the old Montgomery Wards building at the Windsor Park Mall for use as an evacuee shelter for victims of hurricane Katrina, and that Racker’s had been working all weekend to get it in condition. Graham bought the building a few years earlier with plans that it would become the next Rackspace headquarters. For various reasons, we relocated elsewhere so by this time the Windsor building had been vacant for around 5 years. The real problem was that evacuees had already begun arriving at the shelter, but to everyone’s amazement, neither the Red Cross nor FEMA had any computerized system in place to record information about who was entering or leaving the shelter. I found this hard to understand, mostly because where I work everything is computerized and automated.

Brett told me that he and Dirk had started working on a web-based application to handle this problem and showed me what they had so far. There was a basic page for registering members of a family and checking them in, but not much more. Dirk was no longer working on the code, and Brett does very little programming, so there was a lot of work that needed to be done. To top it off, they had chosen to use the Ruby on Rails framework, with which I had no experience. I spent the rest of that day learning the language and framework, banging my head against the wall, and wondering how to do things in Ruby. With the growing list of tasks that were piling up, it became clear that we needed to recruit teammates. I paged Brandon and called Will, who were both busy for the holiday but would be available the next day. Brett called Lister, who was ready to help immediately. The team was growing and the deadline was shrinking; the race was on.

I left the Ranch around 1am that Monday night, and returned around 9am the next morning. Will came over to help that day, but had to leave around 6pm. Shortly thereafter Brandon arrived and began redesigning the heart of the application: the family page. We worked until around 2am and then headed home to crash for a few hours. The next morning we reconfigured our work area at the Ranch so that we were all sitting at a tall table, facing each other. This worked much better, and for the next week the Ranch was not only Brett’s home, but also all of ours. Wednesday we worked from 10am until 6:30am on Thursday, only breaking for a vendor sponsored sushi dinner and a midnight caffeine run to Starbucks at the Quarry. I had no idea what time it was until Brandon said, “Crap, now we are going to have to deal with morning traffic.” It finally hit me how much fun I was having: I had completely lost track of time, I was exhausted, I was hungry and most importantly, I did not want to stop. Do I really need to sleep? Sigh.

When you are having this much fun, time completely disappears. We each had special skills to contribute, and everyone’s abilities complemented the others. We were all doing what we do best and we were focused on a single, clear goal. In other words, although each of us was playing a different instrument, we were all in the same key, and the result was harmony. Our “Disaster Orchestra” roster:

• Brett – our point man, interface designer, blogger and badgemaster. Unlike me, he does not need sleep.
• Will – DBA extraordinaire, software master, reporting engine. He can ruin your life with a single database view, so don’t tempt him. (Also, he speaks in weird tongues over Google Talk)
• Brandon – blazingly fast coder, ajax lover, image-rotater. Try finding a problem he can’t solve.
• Lister – go-to man for anything and everything, wireless ninja, sushi-destroyer. This man is everywhere at the same time.
• Cory – sysadmin, ruby-newbie turned rails lover, food services. Just don’t ask me to install RT ever again

The extended family included Sharon, Tom, Ed, Marcus, Edwin, Debra, Suzy and a cast of about 200 other Rackers.

Back to our story. It is now Thursday morning and we are ready to unleash our software to the shelters. To hold them over, another Racker had written a small CGI application in Perl with MySQL to capture some basic information on the evacuees who were checking into the shelter. We wanted to import this data, so I wrote a script that logged in to his server, dumped the data, imported it on my laptop, generated a Postgres SQL file, uploaded it to our server and imported it into the database, all in one quick run. Around 2pm on Thursday Sept 8, we ran the conversion scripts, enabled our software, shutdown the old CGI script, and starting teaching the volunteers how to use the new application. 1..2..3..deploy!

It had been a few days since the evacuees had begun arriving in San Antonio, and apparently we were not the only people who were developing software to help organize all the information. We had seen volunteers in the shelters using various other applications to search for missing persons, and other systems for tracking the evacuees at the shelters, but none seemed to be as simple to use as ours. This might not seem like a big deal, but when volunteers are coming and going every hour or so, it is imperative that they be able to sit down at a workstation and immediately begin working without waiting for training, or having to read documentation. Other systems we saw required specific operating systems and browsers (Windows/Internet Explorer/ActiveX), but apparently the people who designed them had no idea what type of machines would be available at these shelters. Most workstations were loaned to the shelters by local businesses or individuals, and we even had a few ancient Pentium 166 machines running Windows 95/98. By requiring the latest in Microsoft technology, these other applications were locking out many people who were using these systems. On the other hand, our system was built to work with any system capable of browsing the web.

We were also faster to respond to the users than anyone else. We often worked right from the shelter so when a volunteer suggested a feature or had a problem, we were immediately able to make the changes and update the application. Sometimes we would watch people using the application to see how we could improve the interface, or speed up repetitive processes. It was a hyper-agile development environment, which Rails made possible. The users knew whom to contact if they had a problem, and most of the time we were within 15 feet. Also, people associated the application with us personally, which was really cool because we were proud of our work, and our users were appreciative; how often does that actually happen?

Over the next few days we made many changes and added more functionality to the application. Brandon and Will both had obligations during the first weekend that the app was live, so when they returned we were able to dive back into things and resume development. We began refactoring, cleaning up the code and performing general maintenance for the next few days, that is, until our next assignment knocked on the door the following Thursday.

We were working from the Ranch when Sharon called to tell us that she had promised that we would have an ID badge system in place by Monday morning. Badges? None of us had any idea what was involved in printing ID badge cards, but then again, just a few days earlier none of us knew how to build software to manage shelters filled with evacuees from a natural disaster. Apparently she had been given 10 minutes to decide if we could do it or not, and after seeing what we had done the previous week, she had no reason to believe we couldn’t do this either. Only this time we were quite out of our element, that element being software. So, first things first, a full featured (not-so-cheap) ID card printer was ordered and shipped via next-day air. Then we started trying to figure out how we were going to actually capture pictures of everyone. Our first idea was to use a webcam and have each person step in front of it just long enough to take a picture and then move on. So, we hooked a webcam up to a linux machine and Brandon put together a system to snap pictures and upload them to our webservers. This looked like it was going to work until we realized that the image quality was pretty bad. After much deliberation we decided to look for another solution. Considering that we were running short on time, our only option appeared to be digital cameras. We hopped in Sharon’s truck and drove to CompUSA to buy a couple digital cameras and SD cards (I don’t think any of us will ever forget that painful trip).

We came up with a system where two people would work the cameras and pass off the SD cards to people sitting in front of the application. In addition, we would be able to verify information about the evacuees in the system as the pictures were uploaded. This helped greatly in cleaning up the data, as our initial import required default values for fields that were not being collected with the previous script.

As the volunteers were working their way through everyone in the shelter, we were trying to figure out how to get the necessary information from our system into the AlphaCard software that came with the printer. Because we were using load balanced web servers, we needed to store the image data in the database so that it would be accessible instantly on both web servers (no rsyncing, etc). As an image was uploaded we rotated it, resized it, and base64 encoded it to avoid storing blobs in the database. As it turns out, this worked perfectly for sending the data to AlphaCard. Our resident querymaster, Will, wrote a funky stored procedure (yay PL/PGSQL! not really), and threw together a PostgreSQL view so that we could access all the information about an evacuee in one straightforward query. Meanwhile, Brett had put together a mock-up template ID card with help from the Rackspace marketing department and connected the printer to a machine at shelter. We allowed access to the database from the shelter, pointed AlphaCard to the correct database view, and before you could say “Gimme Shelter” we were in the ID card printing business. Well, not really a business, but we were doing it, and by Tuesday evening we had around 800 ID cards printed. Top that, DMV.

Soon we were hearing stories about how the ID cards were providing the residents with a way to begin rebuilding their lives. Many people had literally lost everything in the flood, including drivers licenses and other important documents. With the ID cards that we provided, residents were able to open checking and savings accounts at banks. It did not take long for the other shelters in town to hear about what we had done. By this time Hurricane Rita was nearing landfall and evacuees had started arriving from the gulf coast. Most of the shelters still did not have net connectivity at this point, much less a usuable shelter management system with ID card printing capabilities. With an incoming rush of evacuees from the new hurricane, they wisely requested our help.

We were asked to deploy our software at the other shelters and begin preparing to print ID cards for around 2,600 evacuees. No problem! Your order will be ready in 6 days.

Previously, the ID cards were taking about 1 minute each to print (double sided, color). If we were able to print 1 card per minute non-stop (without changing ribbons, reloading cards, cleaning the printer, etc), it would take 43 hours to print all 2,600. This wouldn’t be a problem if the process could be automated to the point that a human was not required. Unfortunately, this was not possible. Each picture had to be adjusted and cropped, and the card loader on the printer could only hold 100 cards. Brett changed the printer configuration so that the reverse side of the ID card was black only, and this one small changed cut the print time from 1 minute down to around 35 seconds – almost half. Still, we spent several full days baby-sitting the printer.

After the last batch of cards was printed, things began to slow down for us as we entered maintenance mode. Occasionally we would receive a request for changes to the software, but for the most part the excitement was over.

The project turned out to be a lot of fun, mostly because it was an opportunity to work on an interesting and important problem, with smart, capable people, in an extremely fast-paced environment. I would work for Ramen and Mountain Dew to be able to do this every day.

A couple nice side effects were that we helped people who really needed help, and also that we learned a new development platform in the process (Rails).

Our efforts also received a little attention from the media. Brett usually posted any news stories on the San Antonio Safelist Blog, but the following articles specifically mention our software:

• Texas Hosting Company Opens Doors To Katrina Victims – Var Business
• FEMA Computers Hampered During Katrina – physorg.com
• Report Warned of FEMA I.T. Problems in Wake of 2004 Hurricanes. – Top Tech News
• As evacuees leave S.A. shelters, they become hard to track (Brett is quoted) – MySA.com
• Home is sweet, even if it’s a Ward store – Denver Post
• Katrina evacuee connections get digital assistance while at shelters (Brett is quoted) – MySA.com

Not only did we have fun and accomplish something, but we also got a little recognition.

The Unifying Rails Dynamo

There have been many nice things said about Ruby on Rails, but there have also been a lot of nice things said about just about every other language and framework as well. It is often difficult to filter out what is actually great from what someone else just thinks is great, but in this case, it was hard to ignore what we were seeing happen right in front of us. In our situation each of the four main developers were previously using a different primary language:

• Brett – PHP
• Brandon – Perl
• Will – Java
• Cory – Python

Brett and Brandon each had some exposure to Rails, although they were both still new to it. Will and I had never coded in Ruby before, much less Rails. To be honest, the first couple days were frustrating, but I realized later that most of the tribulation came not from learning Ruby or Rails, but rather from unlearning what I already knew. Brett recorded his observations of this process on the San Antonio Safelist Blog, and it was picked up by the official Ruby on Rails Weblog. There were a few other critical tools that we built our software upon, and Brett also did a nice job of covering them on the blog.

Also of note, the Agile Web Programming with Rails book by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hannson is exceptional. We had a couple copies and they went with us everywhere.

So, how do you get web developers using PHP, Perl, Java and Python to agree on a common development platform? Well, from our experience the answer appears to be “Ruby on Rails.”