I swore I wouldn't

After an invigorating year with a number of exciting and challenging projects, it is time to move on. I am taking a position with an established software provider in Vienna, VA. There are a number of very exciting projects that are on the roster, and I am eager to get started.

I recently encountered a cumbersome bug when trying to run a Ruby on Rails application (insoshi-based) on Ubuntu. Sporadically (but typically during events which involved attachment_fu) the server would crash and an error relating to “gc_sweep unknown data type” would show up in the log file. This did not occur in our development environments (Mac OSX) but only in UAT and prod environments (Ubuntu.) After much searching, stumbled upon a bug report that mentioned that this was a problem with ruby 1.8.7 versions prior to patch-level 300. Upgrading to 1.8.7p300 seems to have solved the problem. Will post a follow up if that turns out not to be the case.

More discussion about Gizmodo’s potential problems related to their “good fortune” of stumbling upon an iPhone prototype…

Finders Keepers?

What he never did, however, was notify anyone who worked at the bar, according to its owner, Volcker Staudt. That would have been the simplest way to get the phone back to the Apple employee who lost it, who “called constantly trying to retrieve it” in the days afterward, recalls Volcker. “The guy was pretty hectic about it.”

Nor did the finder report it to the Redwood City Police Department, says Sgt. Dan Mulholland. To be fair, no one from Apple told the police the phone was lost, either. I contacted a company spokeswoman to ask why not but never heard back.

Assuming the jury in a hypothetical criminal or civil suit consisted of locals like Volcker, the claim that the sellers actions constituted a “reasonable effort” to contact the owner wouldnt hold much water. “The most reasonable effort would have been to bring it back to us, because he knows that person would be going back to us first,” says Volcker. “Why not just make it simple and bring it back?”

Buyers Burden

And make no mistake: In this case, it was up to Gawker to establish that the seller legally possessed the property. Paul J. Wallin, a founding partner at the California law firm Wallin & Klaritch, offers an analogy. “If you purchase a Rolex watch at a swap meet for $200, a reasonable person would be put on notice that it might be stolen goods,” he says. The buyer would thus be required to take extra measures to determine that it wasnt.

via Why Apple Could Sue Gawker Over Lost iPhone Story – DailyFinance.