Today I found myself needing to move data between two heroku apps. If you have the pgbackups addon installed, it turns out this is really easy:

1

heroku pgbackups:restore DATABASE `heroku pgbackups:url --app myapp` --app myapp-staging

Heroku covers the process more in depth in their documentation

Heroku rocks!

This morning I came across an article on hacker news titled Rails Is Not For Beginners. The article is actually about Sinatra, but the link-bait title is dead wrong. Rails is perfect for beginners and here is why …

A friend of mine with zero programming experience recently asked me to help him learn web development. We setup rails together, and I pointed him to some online tutorials. When he called me the next evening, he could barely contain his excitement:

“Rails is awesome! I can edit, add, delete! This is a real web app and I made it!”

In Rails, with only a few commands you can have a fully functioning CRUD app built on scaffolding. No experienced Rails developer I know uses scaffolding. So why is it still in the source code? Because Rails is for beginners.

The best way to teach anyone web development is to inspire them to learn on their own. My friend is a long way from being a productive web developer, but because of Rails he is excited to learn more.

If you are a beginner and looking for a place to start, I recommend railstutorial.org. It is a fantastic resource, and best of all the online version is free.

I’m moving the blog from dreamhost+wordpress to heroku+octopress (which is built on jekyll). Anything before this point in the blog has been imported and might be a little off. You have been warned!

Last Friday, I did a radio interview on 1670 AM for my startup - GeoHuddle.  The full audio is available here:

[wpaudio url=”http://www.southpolesteve.com/wp- content/uploads/GH_interview.mp3” text=”InBusiness with Jody and Joan - Interview with Steve Faulkner”]

Just click the little play button to listen

As some of you might know, I am working on a new startup company these days called GeoHuddle. We are developing a new style of community geothermal energy system. Check out our website at www.geohuddle.com

More importantly, we need your help!  GeoHuddle is making a bid in the newly announced $200 million dollar GE Ecomagination Challenge.  Please take a few moments and go vote for our startup!

Total Distance: 92.58 miles Max Speed: 14.7 mph Average Speed: 4.75 mph

Click on the picture for a bigger version

Can’t help but post about this again. GPS tracking for sailing is pretty awesome! Today I sailed 25 total miles and had a max speed of almost 10 mph. Thats pretty quick for a sailboat. Also, I did a bunch of practice landings while under sail. You can see on the map below how I kept circling around and landing at the pier and a pin in the mooring field. At the end of the season I think I’ll do a big summary that gives all kinds of interesting statistics about my sailing this summer.

View Sailing Summer 2010 in a larger map

I ran into this video today and just had to pass it along. Sweet video time lapse of the volcano in Iceland. Make me want to go to Iceland so bad, and also to buy a super nice video camera.

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Used the GPS to track my sailing today for the first time.  Of course I only remembered to turn it on for the trip back.  But its a start!

View Sailing Summer 2010 in a larger map

Some of you adventurous types may have clicked the little “about” link at the very top of the page. If you did, you quickly realized there wasn’t much there. But… change is here!  Now when you click that link you will be redirected to Steve’s new personal landing page: http://flavors.me/southpolesteve

I made it using this awesome site called Flavors.Me.  It is a dead simple way to create an “About Me” page.  It also automatically integrates  accounts from a ton of social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, etc).  Highly recommended.

Happy Mother’s Day!