Matt Gornick's Blog

I recently had been getting the error "A signed resource has been added, modified, or deleted." everytime I wanted to install an application from source on my iPhone.  I ran into this blog (http://blog.tapmode.com/post/127796473/how-to-move-code-signing-certificates-to-a-different) that recommended:

1. Xcode > Build > 'Clean' and then 'Clean All Targets'
2. Xcode > Build > 'Build and Go'

After that everything worked out and the app properly installed on my iPhone.

2 things I hate:
1. Standing in lines that exceed 3 minutes
2. Wasting time

Yesterday, I was asked to see an opening day movie (Harry Potter) with a group of friends.  I was indifferent to seeing the movie and would normally not have gone if it wasn’t for friends going.  As you may guess, the lines at the Harry Potter movies are long and filled with tons of dedicated fans.  I have nothing against people dressing up as wizards, movie characters, etc., but its not my cup of tea so if I can prevent myself from spending several hours waiting in line I’ll do it.

(9 p.m. + opening night of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) I needed to fill up my tank of gas.  Show starts at 12:01 a.m. My friends will be getting to the theater around 11:15 p.m. to get tickets for the showing (while waiting almost an hour in a line filled with thousands of people).  I was not entirely sure that they would be able to get tickets at this point as this is a highly anticipated movie with tons of fans: the movie can easily sell out if you aren’t in line earlier enough.  At this point, I recalled that I used Fandango in the past when I was in New York City to see the recent Batman movie.  I loaded the Fandango app on my iPhone, purchased a ticket for the movie, and received the email confirmation.
(9:30 p.m.) I swing by the theater and to my surprise the line for the Harry Potter movie had already started and was outside the theater!  I walked in the regular entrance, grabbed my midnight showing ticket at the Fandango counter and drove back to my apartment.
(11:45 p.m.) I call my friend to find out that they are in line for tickets and they’ll get in to see the show tonight.  They mention that I need to hurry up if I want to get tickets.  I left my apartment.
(11:57 p.m.) I arrived at the theater, casually walked in past a few thousand people inline to get tickets, and comfortably got my seat.  At this point, my friends are still in line trying to get tickets, worrying that the show my start without them, and potentially missing the movie.
(12:01 a.m.) Typical movie start
(12:15 a.m.) Moved to where my friends were sitting, watched movie, enjoyed time with friends, etc.

The reason I bring up this story is that so much uncertainty surrounded this event.
1. If I get there at this time, will the show be sold out?
2. If it isn’t sold out, will I miss part of the movie because the line is too long/slow?
3. How early should I get there to get a good seat?

I had made the decision that I will stay at my apartment as long as I could to optimize my utility (getting things done, knocking out email, relaxing, etc.).  I’ll go ahead and buy the Fandango tickets not knowing if my friends will get tickets (if the show sold out) and simply wait until either:
a). My friends get in the ticket line about an hour early and do in fact get tickets.  I will drive over to join them.
b). My friends didn’t get tickets because the line was too long and now I don’t have to waste my time in line but loose the cost of the Fandango tickets.

These decisions are seemingly reminiscent of financial stock options at expiration.  After retrieving the tickets, I had socially hedged my night for either outcome: I am guaranteed to come out ahead or at least protect myself from downside risk (of not knowing what to do or to do nothing).  I try to keep up with the standard life hacking and productivity news, but I feel that combining the right tactics and planning with a mixture of life hacking can be highly effective.

I’m going to experiment with other strategies as they present themselves as I don’t think this is an isolated event.  If you have any other social hedging or life hacking ideas, let me know.

I finally resolved an error I’ve been having with CruiseControl.rb with our Ruby on Rails project in Subversion (SVN).  Currently we use RoR with Cucumber for our BDD and CruiseControl.rb as the CI environment.  Below are the steps I’ve taken and the final resolution to fix the problem:

1. Setup Ubuntu Server 9.04 (grab all the necessary gems, subversion, db, etc.)
2. After downloading the source from http://cruisecontrolrb.thoughtworks.com/
3. cd ~/cruisecontrol-1.4.0
4. ./cruise add ProjectName –repository ‘https://projectpath.com/trunk‘ -s subversion –username cruisecontrol –password secretpassword
At this point, the code properly checked out of subversion and I didn’t receive any errors.
5. cd ~/.cruise/projects/ProjectName/
6. edit cruise _config.rb and uncomment project.rake_task = ‘features’
This will build using the ‘cucumber features’ tests
7. cd ~/cruisecontrol-1.4.0 and run ./cruise start
At this point the CruiseControl.rb server is supposed to startup, svn update your projects, and run a build if necessary.  I notice that I received errors:
svn –non-interactive log –limit 1 –revision HEAD:1 –verbose –xml
Host not found

I went into the ~/.cruise/projects/ProjectName/work/ directory and ran a svn update and it would intermittently work and other times return “host not found”.
8. Since this appeared to be a DNS issue I modified the DNS entries via:
sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf
modified and added a line for 4.2.2.2 (Verizon’s public DNS server).
9. I reran step 7 and magically my CruiseControl.rb build ran successfully