Braintree — an online payments processor — aims to have a developer-friendly API for integration and touts excellent customer service as one of their strengths.
I have been on the phone with these guys several times this week as I integrate our subscriptions at GreenWizard more tightly with Braintree for better reporting. Every interaction with the support staff at Braintree has been quick, pleasant and helpful, and each episode left me happy to have chosen Braintree as our payment gateway.
BT guys, if you’re reading this, feel free to use this as a happy customer testimonial. Keep up the good work. Your sandbox is also a pleasure to work with (unlike a major gateway who’s name rhymes with paypal).
Here’s a quick one-liner you can use in Bash to get the latest subversion revision number from your present working directory:
sed -n '4p' .svn/entries
Use backticks to assign it to a local variable you can use when making a build (say, a zip archive of a website or other type of artifact you might want to create):
version=`sed -n '4p' .svn/entries`
“I just want to get started.” How commonly uttered is this phrase in the life of a new project?
My wife is tiling our bathroom and she’s carefully laying out tiles, measuring, preparing to make cuts that accommodate the cabinets, and various other tasks that are required before anyone can lay a single tile on grout and have it stay there forever. She lamented to me, “I just want to get started.”
“You’ve started!” I replied. “You’re doing this project. This is what it takes.”
“Yeah, I know, but I just want to get to it already.”
It’s the same thing with any software project. Coders are always saying they just want to get started. Writing code is fun. Figuring out what code to write or how to write it … not so much fun.
Visual progress on a bathroom with newly laid tiles is fun. Planning, measuring, cutting, and laying it out before grouting … not so much fun.
It’s all part of the project. In fact, it’s the essential part. Fred Brooks, Steve McConnell, and other software luminaries have already demonstrated that actual construction (coders writing code) represents a minority of time for a well-run software project. Requirements, design, and testing the fidelity of the implementation is the bulk of software development costs.
But we all just want to get started.
This How-To article shows how you can make your own seedling starter pots from newspaper! Very cool idea. My plastic trays are getting crumpled from continuous reuse and buying new peet pots is expensive. I’m going to try using newspaper as described in the article. Cheap new pots in perptuity!
http://whipup.net/2007/05/21/raising-seedlings-using-recycled-newspaper/
Spring is officially here and the growing season has begun! I have high hopes for these pole bean sprouts.
Some are deficit hawks and truly believe we should have a sane, balanced budget. Others claim to be deficit hawks but upon closer inspection, you realize their feathers are different. They aren’t hawks at all. They are deficit peacocks who love to strut and preen but do very little to address the real problems facing America today.
Go read this article to learn how to identify deficit peacocks and why our solving our Federal budget gaps is a much, much harder problem to solve than the peacocks like to admit.
Full link: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/01/deficit_peacock.html
Colorado Springs is dying. Dramatic budget gaps and an electorate unwilling (and politicians unable) to consider tax increases force the city to cut crucial services across the board. There are fewer cops, fewer firefighters, no recreation centers, all museums are closing, no public pools, no one to mow the lawns in the park, and no trash cans in the park at all because there will be no one to empty them. Visitors are encouraged to take their trash with them.
Voters in Colorado Springs decried “big government spending” and emphatically voted against raising taxes to fill budget gaps. Why? Because voters did not “trust city government to wisely spend a general tax increase and don’t believe the current cuts are the only way to balance a budget.”
The result is a general deadening of the city.
The very citizens who voted against tax increases complained that “cuts to bus services, drug enforcement and treatment and job development are attacks on basic needs for the working class.”
Today, as always, we want all the services big government provides but we are unwilling to pay for any of it.
Ronald Reagan raised taxes. His deficits were unsustainable. The Tea Partiers will one day see the light. Until then, we’ll get “small government” and complain about the death of public services.
The Economist has an interesting article talking about the true cost of goods and services we take for granted when the environmental impact is measured and accounted for. This is also Lester Brown’s argument, which I wrote about recently. Mr. Brown calls it a Global Ponzi scheme.
In The Economist’s article, the author writes about the destruction of mangrove swamps in Thailand to make shrimp farms. Profits per hectare were nearly $10,000 and accounted for by the private sector, but the public cost of the farms include generous government subsidies, increased pollution, and the loss of the mangroves’ natural role in the ecosystem which includes protection against violent storms and a source of food and medicine for local people. What looks good in an accounting ledger for the private sector masks the public cost spread over society as large that appears in no ledger at all.
My wife taught agroforestry in Cameroon for the Peace Corps. Her job was to teach her village how forests protect their farms by preventing the wind from blowing away all their topsoil. Preventing erosion is noted in The Economist article’s second sentence:
In 360BC Plato remarked on the helpful role that forests play in preserving fertile soil; in their absence, he noted, the land was turned into desert, like the bones of a wasted body.
Some things never change, though the lessons often need to be continually relearned.
South Carolina weather is good for an extended growing season. Here is my broccoli after Christmas.
Lester Brown has an interesting take on the unsustainable economy we live and work within.
http://www.grist.org/article/our-global-ponzi-economy/
He argues, for example, that “expensive” $3/gallon gas does not reflect the true cost of the fuel in our cars. Mr. Brown believes the cost of gas isn’t just pumping, refining, and shipping gasoline. It also includes the military cost of protecting oil in a politically unstable region, the costs incurred by climate change, subsidies to energy producers, and the health care costs of we the people breathing polluted air.
We’re overfishing our oceans, overgrazing our pastures, overpumping aquifers, and overpolluting the atmosphere to levels where the earth cannot regenerate. We are borrowing from the future in ways that an unsustainable in the long term.
This is the very same point made by Thomas Friedman in “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.” The planet is able to sustain a single American-sized consumption-based economy, which is profligate, wasteful, and dirty. The problem is that India and China have each created 1 America-sized economy in terms of consumption and pollution and have several more incubating. All our environment problems are going to get much worse.
A green revolution is just that: a revolution. It can’t happen piecemeal. We need to shift from a consumption-based economy to one that develops sustainable trends. This is the first time our industrial economy has faced this challenge and it flies in the face of 200 years of history.
If healthcare is hard to fix, I can’t wait to watch this fight develop in Congress and parliaments around the world.