Josh Barratt's Blog

I’m a big fan of Trello and still regularly use it.

One of my favorite things about testing is that you build these little environments that exercise your code in certain scenarios.

My wife and I are entertaining a still heavily “what-if” idea: migrating away from Southern California into the greener (and, it turns out, greyer) lands of the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve been really enjoying screencasting my presentations, and have come up with a nice workflow using the (commercial) Mac app ScreenFlow.

I’m frequently surprised by how many people don’t know about the awesome GMail keyboard shortcuts that are built in to the web application.

The problem Creating new designs (in whatever domain) is always a bit of a tightrope walk – especially as an organization grows.

The Personal Kanban blog ran a great pair of articles on “Lean Meetings” (part 1, part 2.)

At SCALE 9x I presented a talk in the DevOps track called Getting more Signal from your Noise..

At the September Los Angeles Perl Mongers meetup, Tommy Stanton presented on an in-progress bit of code he’s working on, App::Git::HomeSync.

In March and December of 2009 I described how to do the Inbox Zero method with Mac Mail, often known as Mail.app.

I woke up this morning to a discussion on twitter between two of my favorite internet people, Andrew Shafer and R.I.

Update: (03/2013) I’m not doing much Perl at the moment, but if I was, I’d probably be checking out Carton instead.

I’ve migrated my site from WordPress to Jekyll.

I had a few snags moving to Jekyll that I thought worth sharing.

One of the things I love most about DTrace is your ability to do things like this.

Just came across this useful trick to let anyone browse/download directories you want to share in seconds.

As part of a project I’m working on for fun (shhhh) I’ve been trying to solve an interesting problem – what is the most compact way I can uniquely refer to something in a URI?

My Downloads folder consistently gets large and cluttered.

In general, running your /tmp (or /var/tmp) without the execute bit set is a good idea.

There are 3 ways to Time Machine over the network (that I know of) Use a Time Capsule Run Snow Leopard Server, which allows you to set remote drives as Time Machine volumes Mount the iSCSI share via an "initiator", and use it like it was a normal hard dri…

This eventually required a support ticket to figure out, so I’m documenting it here in case it’s useful to others.

Update: I have updated to a new method since writing this – I now use a free native Archiving plugin.

My brother and I were playing around with Arduinos as part of my epic road trip this summer.

Using WP Widget Cache, I improved my site load time by about 600% by just starting to cache the widgets.

There are a few people I work with who are very passionate about coffee, which is something I enjoy very much as well, and have been known to geek out on.

These days as we move increasingly to ’the clouds’, it’s becoming common to get a server where you’ve got local root.

Update: This software is no longer maintained (and is a lot less important now that there is oEmbed support, to be honest.)

Update: I have refined this technique and uploaded a more full-stack example to GitHub.

I’m raising money for the Wounded Warrior Project and Athletes For A Cure (Prostate Cancer Research) by participating in something called Fight Gone Bad.

Update: This is way out of date.

I’ve been working on a lot of fun things both personally and for my company.

Last night we had a delicious and amazing dinner, celebrating Amber’s 27th birthday, at Providence.

I noticed this blog was slow from time to time, and decided to do a bit of investigation.

I’m managing Linux HA (heartbeat2) from Puppet and I had a problem.

Maybe it’s a par-braise?

I was almost asleep when I got a text message that jolted me awake.

My colleague, Mr.

So the puppet guys provide some notes and files on running puppet with vim.

So because I am insane and completely unable to master one thing before becoming fascinated with something new, I’m learning Haskell.

I haven’t talked about it much on this site, other than on my twitter feed, but I’m really enjoying a fitness program I’ve been doing called CrossFit.

Update: I have updated this method twice since writing this article, but am leaving it around as it’s a good example of Quicksilver triggers and simple Mail.app Applescript.

I recently started to really need more disk around the house.

This was not a straightforward process.

I am the owner of a generally very awesome product – a Litter Robot automated cat litter box.

I found this today and I already love it.

I have seen a lot of 100 something-or-other challenges online recently – I’m currently, as I mentioned, doing the 100 burpee challenge from Crossfit Santa Cruz.

I’m updating my Son-to-be’s blog (carterbarratt.com) with updates so our friends and family can keep up.

Some of the people at Culver City Crossfit started doing a “100 Burpee Challenge” they found on Crossfit Santa Cruz’s site.

So, I have resurrected the blog!

With no information other than the programs, here are the ones I find myself actually using.