The cookies pictured here magically appeared in my office today, and they’re as good as they look. She rocks.

• Sleep in on Monday Even with Steve Jobs not running the show, I’m guessing people will be queueing up for the keynote surprisingly early. Sleep in. Take the morning off. Watch the keynote later when it’s available off apple.com.
• Turn off twitter If you’re a Mac or iPhone dev, you’re probably following a handful of people that will be at WWDC. Don’t bother loading twitter, it’s just going to be full of your attending friends telling people what session they’re in, what they’re wearing and about what party they’re going to. It will just increase your jealousy.
• Enjoy your comfy chair The chairs at Moscone West are awful. Wallow in your comfy chair and appreciate it. Side note: before attending my first WWDC (or any conference) I assumed each room had movie theatre style stadium seating. Not sure where I got that picture, but I was sorely disappointed.
• Bake your own cookies I’m a sucker for treats, especially the kind that magically show up in the afternoon. The magic treats are probably one of my favorite parts of WWDC (yes, I know that’s sad). Bake your own cookies or brownies one morning. Try really hard to forget they exist and ask someone in your house to put a plate out randomly one day. Cookies! [1] Bonus points if you can convince someone else to do the baking.
• Just walk right in and use your bathroom Taking a bio-break at WWDC is tricky. Between sessions there’s always a line for the men’s room. Enjoy the fact that you can just waltz right into your bathroom and use it without waiting (and hopefully minus the sticky floors too).
• Throw your own party The nights at WWDC are packed with social events. Take your significant other (or whoever) out to a fancy dinner or just get out and do something. You likely won’t meet any new people, especially Mac/iPhone devs, but it’s very likely you’re like me and don’t get out often enough.
• Get stuff done WWDC is a lot of fun and you certainly can get a lot out of it, but you really have to consider it a vacation. As much as I tried each year, I got nothing done [2]. So stop crying about not being able to be there this year and go check things off your todo list!
• Call ADC Finally, if you’re really bummed out about not being there, use a tech support incident. Call ‘em up and just chat about something (just make up an issue). Talking to someone at Apple could help you feel like you’re there. Of course, I’m not really sure anyone’s manning the phones during WWDC since they’re all at the Moscone center having a blast! [3]

[1] – A lot of the WWDC survival guides actually suggest avoiding the junk food and some suggest avoiding the Moscone food altogether. If you’re stronger willed than I, do that. My first year at WWDC I went nuts on the free Odwalla drinks and had a tummy ache for a couple days. Pace yourself.

[2] – Of course if you show up well prepared with questions and bugs to sit down with an Apple employee you could save yourself a lot of time in that one week.

[3] Don’t do this.

Why did I do all this? The main reason was because the one dedicated server was real cheap and scared me. It was a single disk setup with zero redundancy and only nightly backups of critical data that I had to setup manually. I had gotten away with running in that setup for about a year and it was really only a matter of time before that machine failed me. If that hard drive or any part of the machine failed I’d have to rebuild the server from scratch and manually restore the critical data.

After moving to EC2 I have a custom image that I boot with all my configuration setup and an elastic block storage volume with all the database and other changing data stored on it. The volume is easy to take snapshots of and I feel pretty good about the whole setup.

The only gotcha I hit was when I tried to run two SSL virtual hosts off the same IP. Turns out you can’t do that. The recommended solution is to use separate IP addresses to differentiate the hosts. However, EC2 currently only allows you to bind one public IP per instance. I went with the solution to keep one vhost on the standard https port, 443, and the other on a non-standard port. Not pretty, but it’s working for now.

Some light details about the setup:

• Apache virtual hosts are serving the 8 domains
• mod_rails is taking care of the 4 domains that are rails applications. So far I’m very pleased with mod_rails – add a new vhost and bam, it just works. No monkeying with mongrel_cluster yaml files.
• Sending of mail is being taken care of by authsmtp.com. This is new for me but so far I’m happy. I always hate setting up sending or anything related to email on a server. Was happy to outsource this.
• DNS is now being hosted by https://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/. Not a pretty app, but it does the job at a decent price and it’s something I’ll rarely have to tweak.

Thanks to Jonathan for helping with the move and recommending the DNS host. It was nice to know someone who also did a similar migration in case things blew up (he recently moved Round Haus to EC2).

In summary I’m really happy with the new setup. We’ll see how long I stay happy.

note: I was fairly light on the details of the move (post was already long enough). If anyones interested, feel free to email me or comment here.

Enough of my crying. It only took a short amount of googling to find how to do this with Leopard’s terminal:

http://blog.macromates.com/2006/word-movement-in-terminal/ also has a tip for mapping control-left to beginning of line and control-right to end of line. Making the terminal act more editor like.

Glad that’s over with.

gwd()
{
  $*
  growlnotify "${1} is done" -m '...'
}


Drop that in your .bashrc or .bash_profile and you can now do things like:

gwd sleep 1
gwd some time consuming command

Assumptions: * You have growl and the command line growlnotify installed * You use bash

Update: The friend I was talking with didn’t have growlnotify installed. His google search for ‘growlnotify install’ turned up this, much more complete solution: http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/archives/2007/08/tip_use_growlno.html.

A couple weeks ago I downloaded Potion Store for fun and started playing with the admin interface in a development environment. It was way better than anything I had and I wanted it. The only downside was that I would have to sign up for PayPal pro and would lose $30 each month. I justified that as motivation to do more frequent updates and release new apps. Hope it helps.

It took me 7 days of very part time work to finish deploying the store. The biggest pain was adding support for state taxes. I’m a resident of Idaho and am required to collect sales tax from anyone buying rooSwitch that also lives in Idaho. PayPal’s express checkout is not setup to handle this very well. If you’re interested in the details, I started a thread at pdncommunity. I still can’t figure out why more people aren’t talking about this issue. It makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong. (Feel free to educate me in the comments if you know what I’m doing wrong )

Apart from that little sales tax glitch, I’m happy with the results.

Happy 2008!

1. Turn off auto-refresh. I tell NNW when I’m ready for news.
2. Every morning I set aside 20 minutes, open NNW and fetch all.
3. During those 20 minutes I look at all the new entries and answer a question: Do I want to read or think about this more?
   1. Yes? I open the article in a new tab in NNW, in the background.
   2. No? I move on.
4. After each entry has been processed I move on with my day.
5. Throughout the day I come back and read through the tabs casually. When I’m done reading a tab, I close it.
6. Next morning I rinse and repeat.

NNW Zero: I think it’s important for me to always close all my tabs before the end of the day. I used to leave some open thinking they were important and I’d like to deal with them more later. I never do. If it’s really important, I write it down in my todo list.

Use Folders: A while back I grouped my feeds into folders. Some examples are: cocoa devs, apple, photos, life, design, … When I click on a folder to process the contents, the amount of attention I give to the contents varies from folder to folder. I’ve figured out which folders are more important to me and know which can be given less attention. I feel like this helps me process the incoming items even faster.

Feel free to leave your own tips in the comments (or links to your tips).

Thanks guys

Last year I ran a sale on rooSwitch for the week of WWDC. I even had business cards that advertised the sale. I still have plenty of those cards. Instead of making new cards, I decided to run the sale again. Benefit from my laziness: http://roobasoft.com/rooSwitch?WWDC=1.

I love that I can use bookmark keywords to tell Camino (and OmniWeb and Safari (with an InputManager)) that ‘bugz’ is a shortcut to go to the bug database. So I just type ‘bugz’ in the URL field and it figures it out. It was annoying to have to go and recreate these shortcuts when I switched browsers. It was also annoying that Safari couldn’t do this without an InputManager. Then I realized this was a perfect candidate for TextExpander! Now I have TextExpander handle all my keywords. Since TextExpander runs in almost all apps, I prefix all the keywords with a ‘w’. ‘bugz’ is now ‘wbugz’. Works a treat and has really enabled me to create a ton more keywords and not worry about switching browsers.