The Codebelay Blog

Author: barce

  • I lost 7 pounds in 2 weeks with the 4 Hour Body Slow Carb Diet

    At the end of the LA marathon, I was a healthy 165, but my foot was busted. There’s a stress fracture on my 4th metatarsal on my left foot and I’ve got to keep it flat in a wooden boot until it heals. I can’t even swim, since the water would flex my foot.

    At SxSW, I went to Tim Ferriss’ talk on his new book, The Four Hour Body. I didn’t feel I really needed the book, but when I ballooned to 172 in less than a week, that gave me pause.

    Weight on 3/28: 172
    Weight on 4/08: 165

    I didn’t work out except for doing some squats. On cheat days, which is Saturday for me, you can eat whatever and as much as you want: chocolate croissants, pringles, ABB Carboforce, protein drinks, steaks, ice cream. I love Saturdays.

    Here’s the diet I followed and each meal except for the sardines and carrots made me full. I spent about $50 on groceries and $50 on lunch per week. $100 / week isn’t bad on a mostly protein diet.

    3/28 - Monday
Breakfast: steak, 3 eggs, spinach
Lunch: chipotle bowl - no frills
Dinner: Chicken, Mixed veggies, Black Beans, Yogurt (nono)

3/29 - Tuesday
Breakfast: steak, 3 eggs, spinach, glass of milk (nono)
Lunch: chipotle bowl - sour cream and cheese (nono)
Dinner: swordfish steak, mixed veggies, black beans, yogurt (nono)

3/30 - Wednesday
Breakfast: 3 eggs, spinach, swordfish steak
Lunch: chipotle bowl with salsa and avocado
Dinner: chicken, mixed veggies, black beeans

3/31 - Thursday
Breakfast: 3 eggs, beef steak, spinach
Lunch: tofu, asparagus, veggie chili, brocoli
2nd lunch: carrots, sardines
Dinner: red wine (free), swordfish, mixed veggies

4/1 - Friday
Breakfast: spinach, swordfish
Lunch: chipotle bowl with salsa and avocado
2nd lunch: carrots, sardines
Dinner: red wine, steak, mixed veggies

4/2 - Saturday
Went nuts and ate all day

4/3 - Sunday
Breakfast: 3 eggs, chicken breast
Lunch: steak chipotle bowl - salsa, lettuce & guac
Dinner: lentils, chicken breast

4/4 - Monday
Breakfast: 3 eggs, chicken breast
Lunch: steak chipotle bowl - salsa, lettuce & guac
Dinner: lentils, chicken breast


4/5 - Tuesday
Breakfast: 3 eggs, lentils, chicken
Lunch: steak chipotle bowl - salsa, lettuce & guac
Dinner: salmon, asparagus, beans , redwine

4/6 - Wednesday
Breakfast: lentils, spinach, chicken
Lunch: barbacoa chipotle bowl - salsa, lettuce & guac
Dinner: blackbeans, mixed veggies, steak


4/7 - Thursday
Breakfast: spinach, lentils, steak
Lunch: steak chipotle bowl - salsa, lettuce & guac
Dinner: steak, blackbeans, mixed veggies

4/8 - Friday
Breakfast: steak
Lunch: salmon, asparagus, beans , redwine
Dinner: steak, blackbeans, mixed veggies

    I lost a surprising 4 lbs. the first week, but only lost 3 lbs. the second week. I’m pretty sure the 3 lbs. was due to not having the 2nd lunch as recommended. I also measured my body fat with calipers: 24% – 20% body fat.

    The first week was pretty difficult but the 2nd week it’s been no problem at all. I can also tell when I’m in ketosis because there’s a slight metallic taste to my mouth and my breathe seems sweeter to the nose.

  • 4 Tech Tools for Marathon Training

    I finished the LA Marathon on Sunday in 6 hours and 30 minutes. Walking the whole thing straight would’ve been faster, and I was on track for a 5 hour and 45 minute marathon, but my foot blew out in the last 4 miles. There were lots of things that almost derailed this marathon, but I’m glad I did it. All the hard work paid off this time.

    Hopefully, it’s nothing more than a muscle injury and not a fracture. I’ll find out soon.

    There are 4 tools that really helped me out. I’ve tried a dozen tools but these 4 turned out to be the best of the lot.

    Runkeeper was by far the best for daily use. I’ve tried different apps and even got a GPS enabled watch, but Runkeeper proved itself to be quite a bargain at around $10 USD .

    Next up is the free Marathon Coach app by Running Method. It’s free but shouldn’t be used as a stand alone since it’s GPS features are quite buggy. However, the synergy you get when used with Runkeeper is excellent.

    Tim Ferriss’ book, The Four Hour Body, really helped me out a bit. I experimented one week by reducing the amount mileage by 75% of my midweek run and replaced it with sprint work. This sprint work was provided by AccelerateSF at Kezar Stadium. These guys are great and train you for $5 / session by experienced marathoners and track runners. The result was a fast (for me) weekend run where I ran 10 miles in 2 hours and 5 minutes vs. a previous 2 hours and 10 minutes. What’s more is that this speed gain pretty much remained with me throughout training.

    Rapid carbohydrate loading after a short bout of near maximal-intensity exercise is the last piece of technology that helped me. I didn’t hit the wall at all during the LA Marathon by following this program.

    There were a few mistakes I made during training:

    • Be sure to keep your nutrition levels up. I had a zinc deficiency that led to an infection. I did not eat enough protein or consume enough calcium in the beginning. The requirements for these double during training.
    • I think the reason I got injured was because I didn’t have the year of running that is required as a base prior to any marathon training.

    Marathon training is quite the commitment but I’m glad I did it!

    (I also raised money for the American Heart Association as part of my marathon participation.)

  • Jim Barcelona, Ruby Rockstar

    The term “rockstar” is much maligned in tech circles when applied to job descriptions.

    Another sentiment told with utter sarcasm:

    Any job description which contains the word, “rockstar,” must also disclose the salary offer.

    -Steve

    @jangosteve
    And to round things out:
    There’s nothing more ridiculous than job ads requesting a Ruby rock star. — Giles Bowkett
    Since the term is so maligned, I’ve decided to take it. Like a day trader attracted to something at it’s lowest buy point, I’m attracted to the term, “Rockstar.”
    My guitar skills aren’t that great. If anybody should be worthy of the term of Ruby rockstar it should be Zed Shaw for meeting the terms figuratively and literally. He plays guitar in an awesome way in the streets and he’s a great coder.
    I wrote an email to the SF Ruby Meetup List in jest that was written in the alter ego of a Ruby rockstar. I was poking fun of a combination of stereotypes dealing with coders with egos and rockstars with egos.
    The businessman in me thinks it’s such a shame that folks don’t own up to the moniker. Since others won’t; I will. I’m Jim Barcelona, Ruby rockstar.

  • Upgrading To Rails 3

    Here’s how I upgraded Sitebeagle.net to Rails 3.

    1. Go into your site’s Rails directory and install rails_upgrade:

    script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/rails_upgrade.git

    Run the following commands and follow the instructions:

    rake rails:upgrade:check
    rake rails:upgrade:backup
    rake rails:upgrade:routes
    rake rails:upgrade:gems
    rake rails:upgrade:configuration

    2. Make sure that your version of Ruby 1.9+ has iconv working.

    Mine didn’t, so I went through this process:

    rvm package install readline
    rvm package install iconv
    rvm remove 1.9.2
    rvm install –trace 1.9.2 -C –with-iconv-dir=$HOME/.rvm/usr

    to test:
    irb
    require ‘iconv’ # should return true

    3. Upgrade to Rails 3: gem install rails

    4. Start migrating to Rails 3: I branched my site using git and went into my Rails root directory and typed:

    rails `pwd`

    Use your best judgment on what can and cannot be over-written. Here’s my list:

    * let rails overwrite?
    * overwrite rake file
    * overwrite application_controller.rb? yes but copy
    * application_helper.rb ? yes
    * routes.rb ? yes but copy
    * environment.rb ?
    * make new initializer for contants
    * config.gem? copy and put into a Gemfile
    * application.js ? only if confident in js
    * scripts? overwrite all

    5. See if stuff works:

    rails server

    Twitter-auth broke for me, so I had to update it to work on Rails 3 using this guide:

    https://github.com/benders/twitter-auth/compare/master…rails_3

    How’s your upgrade to Rails 3 go? Let me know in the comments below.

    Update (14 January 2011):

    Chris Laco wrote up this great guide to upgrading Rails 3 on Dreamhost. It solves path problem issues with gems.

  • 4 Cool Things That Happened at Super Happy Dev House LA

    On Saturday, November 6th, a little less than a score of coders gathered to geek out at Collecta.

    Here are 4 cool things that happened:

    1. The Gowalla guys stopped by. I learned this from @dthompson.
    2. Somebody made a really addicting game based off of Wikipedia called The WikiGame, and shared it with us.
    3. Node.js is really cool and @twonds has a cool project called Noylitics but he’s focused on Erlang now. I had a fun time hacking on it.
    4. Pizza with the bagel crust was great. It was from Abbot’s Pizza.

    I’m hoping there are more events like this in the future. Were you there? What did you like about Super Happy Dev House LA? Any suggestions fora future event?

  • Why is Foursquare Down? 3 Educated Guesses

    Why is Foursquare down?

    Update (5 October 2010 at 5:36 pm PDT) : The folks at Foursquare tell us why in a post-mortem. There are autosharding issues with MongoDB. Yup, my guesses were wrong, unless you consider MongoDB a kind of cache. 😉

    I used to work for a few sites that required high scalability expertise. Now that we’re over 5 hours into the outage I’ll share some of my thoughts.

    But before I do, I’d just like to say, I really hope that it’s nothing bad and I really like the Foursquare peeps. I’m not putting out this article to harsh on anybody, but just to share some knowledge I have. Outages happen to everybody!

    Also, I do not feel that this meltdown is in any way indicative of Amazon’s EC2. I have a site that shares the same IP space and facility as Foursquare and we have had no outages today.

    • The worst case scenario is a full scale Magnolia meltdown. This is where because of a backup process that was off, they cannot restore ever from backup. Odds: unlikely.
    • Someone turned off caching. I’m not sure how cache dependent the architecture is at Foursquare. If someone turned off the cache and the cache is just plain gone, then the caches have to be re-built. Rebuilding caches, depending on the time and complexity of each query can take up to 100x more time that it takes to retrieve the cache. If there’s some cached item that takes 100 seconds per user, the site will be down for a long time. They can only put a user back on foursquare at a rate of 100 per second if that’s the case, unless they can concurrently run the re-building of the cache.
    • There’s an issue with a hacker who has broken through security and is wreaking havoc on Foursquare. It’s happened to the best sites, e.g. Google in the 90s, and it’s pretty tough to recover from. Sometimes you let the criminals in and do their worst while keeping the site up. Sometimes you have 0 tolerance.

      • I wish Foursquare the best of luck. I am more than happy to lend a hand to their issues, if they need another pair of eyes.

  • Dumping Monaco for 9×15 Font

    I’ve been using Monaco as my default font for coding for about 10 years now. I used to be a hardcore Courier fan back in college only because our printers only printed out in Courier. I wanted my emails and printouts to match.

    I ran into an article on the 9×15 font being more readable and clean, and decided to use it. Here’s the comparison below with Monaco first,

    and then 9×15:

  • 3 Things The Social Network Taught Me About Startups

    Spoiler Alert: You’ve been warned.

    If “The Social Network” has a subliminal message, it’s this:

    Swinging for the fences means forgetting about everything they taught you in business school, and if you went to business school, you are fucked. However, with the right guidance from Acclime Singapore, you might just find your footing in the chaos.

    1.Lunch Meetings and Face to Face is for losers.

    If you are going to New York to talk to ad men, you are just cosplaying “Mad Men.” In fact, any social interaction that isn’t mediated and accelerated through something like Flowtown, or Salesforce, or LinkedIn is just that, cosplay. If you are doing business over lunch, then you might as well be dressing up for Renn Faire.

    The lesson of this is one of the pivotal scenes in “The Social Network.” Not to give away too much, but in the movie, Fincher and Sorkin take great pains to show what happens to someone who doesn’t get it, even if he’s a co-founder. This person who didn’t get it has a business degree from Harvard, and went to New York to make deals for selling ads on Facebook.

    2. Coders can do it faster and better than biz dev or people who cannot code.

    Coders code much faster than any “traditional” business arrangement. If you have an idea, and cannot code it, you can never be relevant if you are swinging for the fences. Case in point: The Vinkelvoss twins did have the “idea” for a social network, but so did everybody and their grandma at the time, but execution is very different. Most business folks focus on the idea and the revenue model. The example with Facemash.com in the movie showed that this idea is flawed. Why? Making waves in society with technology will always be faster than a revenue model.

    3. Our capacity for having the wisdom to understand the technology we create outstrips the rate at which we create technology.

    If this is the case, then the point that the character of Sean Parker pushes throughout the movie, that putting ads on a site is like ending a real cool party at 11 pm, is something all startups swinging for the fences have to take to heart.

    EDUARDO: Settle an argument for us, would you? I say it’s time to start making money from TheFacebook but Mark doesn’t want advertising. Who’s right?
    SEAN: Neither of you. TheFacebook is cool, that’s what it’s got going for it… You don’t want to ruin it with ads because ads aren’t cool. It’s like you’re throwing the coolest party on campus and someone’s telling you it’s gotta be over at eleven. You don’t even know what the thing is yet.

    Great point, Sean. I mean look at what ImDB.com has become because of that ad revenue pop-up model of business. ImDB is so ugly and not cool.

  • Microsoft moves Blogs to WordPress

    At the TechCrunch Disrupt event today, Twitter user, @bigs, broke the news that Microsoft announced that it would be moving over 30 million users of their Live blogging service to WordPress.

    As a WordPress expert that has had to work on WordPress in a Windows environment there is one big gotcha: character encoding.

    Here are what common characters look like when they are moved from a Windows environment to WordPress:

    a return: ^M
    single-quotes: ?~@~Y
    asterisk: ?~@?
    double-quotes: ?~@~\ or ?~@~]

    If the WordPress migration process is robust, then it will translate these characters correctly into UTF-8 or something friendly like that.

    Live users will definitely welcome the link schema and permalinks on WordPress. Instead of

    http://cid-d4909e7f27e254e9.profile.live.com/

    a user will get

    http://barce.wordpress.com/ .

    Also WordPress users can now link their accounts to MSN Messenger so that they can update their MSN friends or co-workers.

    Are you a Windows Live Blogging user? How’d your upgrade process go?

  • Lots of Phones to Test At AppDevAndMarketing.com

    We test so many phones at App Dev + Marketing because we are exploring the issues involved with tackling cross phone performance issues.

    MyChamberApp is an app we created that works on

    • Android
    • iPhone
    • Blackberry, and
    • Mobile Web.

    It leads to a lot of late nights and heartache but when you hear from a customer like the Vicksburg Chamber in Mississippi saying how pleased they are it makes it all worth it.

    Right now I’m wrestling with Android issues which hopefully me and my team will fix tonight for our partners, Target Marketing aka Chamber Maps.