Posts

• Jul 10 2022 - ... Hi there this is as basic an example post as you’re going to see!
• Jan 2 2014 - ... this is going to be my first Lanyon is an unassuming Jekyll theme that places content first by tucking away navigation in a hidden drawer. It’s based on Poole, the Jekyll butler. Built on Poole Poole is the Jekyll Butler, serving as an upstanding and effective foundation for Jekyll themes by @mdo. Poole, and every theme built on it (like Lanyon here) includes the following: Complete Jekyll setup included (layouts, config, 404, RSS feed, posts, and example page) Mobile friendly design and development Easily scalable text and component sizing with rem units in the CSS Support for a wide gamut of HTML elements Related posts (time-based, because Jekyll) below each post Syntax highlighting, courtesy Pygments (the Python-based code snippet highlighter) Lanyon features In addition to the features of Poole, Lanyon adds the following:
• Dec 31 2013 - What's Jekyll? ... Jekyll is a static site generator, an open-source tool for creating simple yet powerful websites of all shapes and sizes. From the project’s readme: Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory […] and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. This is also the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host your project’s page or blog right here from GitHub.
• Apr 3 2013 - Loving SourceTree ... Being a relative newbie to git I really appreciate the Atlassian's new SourceTree app. FreeEasy to startDeep feature set  The last few GUI git clients I've tried attempted to mask the complexity of the git feature-set whereas with SourceTree I feel like I can actually explore that feature set. I've already begun embracing branching way more as a result of the nice visualizations and as a bonus my command line git usage is also improving.
• Feb 16 2013 - iTerm2 vs Terminal.app (iTerm2 FTW!) ... I just switched from the built-in Terminal.app on Mac OS X (which I've always liked) toiTerm2. Here's some of what I like about iTerm2 : borderless windowsbetter scrolling and mouse support (or better defaults?) I can use my scrollwheel in vim by default and clicking on a word moves the cursor which is a nice bonus (behaves like unix) feels faster; I was having issues with Terminal which seemed to be related to using Microsoft's Consolas font coupled with transparency and blur which was causing ever so slight but hugely annoying key lag in vim.
• Feb 15 2013 - I am a technology tourist (or first impressions of Dart) ... So this week I met with someone who was very excited about working with Google Dart, a web programming language aimed at being a better JavaScript running both on the server and ultimately the client where the VM could run in browsers (only chromium for now). When Google first announced Dart in September '11 I thought "cool, too bad it will never work" and basically dismissed the project as doomed since it would presumably face too much pressure from competitors and open standards.
• Feb 14 2013 - How does vim keep sucking me in? ... I "grew up" on vim, which is to say my second professional programming job 15 years ago required me to spend vast quantities of time in a terminal to a Solaris machine on which I used vi exclusively to get work done. In those two years I got relatively proficient at navigation, search and replacing, using registers, and tweaking .vimrc with custom settings and macros. I did NOT get into folding, window management, syntax highlighting, or plugins.
• Oct 27 2011 - From GitHub to BitBucket in 60 seconds ... Three weeks ago I finally decided to pay for GitHub so that I could keep some of my new projects private without giving up the beauty that is their cloud based source control. Last night I decided to try BitBucket's new FREE offering and see whether I could save myself $7/month. Literally fifteen minutes later I was deleting my private repo's on GitHub so that I could downgrade my account back to free.
• May 27 2011 - Timeline tools ... My memory is awful, it really is. I maintain a private personal blog which I use for capturing extremely short pieces of content that I want tagged and timestamped. Works well for those random thoughts that are maybe not suitable for sharing but which I want to capture nonetheless. Anyway, I'm looking for sometime similar to aid my memory at work and have been considering something more along the lines of a timeline of sorts where I can jot down major company moments, hires etc in a format that's easy to explore and I came across the following online timeline makers which all seem to fit the mold of what I need.
• Oct 7 2010 - lowering impedance of TDD with python mock ... So after my post about gaeunit a few weeks ago I’ve since completely thrown out what I was doing there and moved to vanilla python unit tests. I ended up making this move for a few reasons.  1. I was never running my tests. GAEUnit was nice, but slow. Even when running tests in parallel I still had to go through the process of opening the browser, navigating to the right place and letting the tests run.
• Sep 21 2010 - Engineering Management (link) ... Great article(s) on some of the management principles in the engineering group at Facebook from Yishan Wong who was at Facebook through some very interesting growth times. I found reading this to be inspirational so posting for posterity… http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management.html
• Sep 15 2010 - I just quit my job.... ... Ha! No I didn’t. But starting on the premise that I had and I had already saved a bunch of cash and decided to finally become my own boss, what would I do first? For me this is hypothetical, but for my good friend who’s about to make the leap out of full time employment to self employment it is very very real. And so I will live vicariously and imagine what I’d do.
• Sep 14 2010 - welcome criticism, be open to review and invest in process ... TLDR: External audit and review is important and can have value not easily measuredBe open to investing in processes even if you think those processes are already optimalWhen someone asks you why you aren’t better at what you do, how do you react? Is your impulse to defend yourself? Do you look for comparables? Do you start to question yourself or your team? Can you begin to break down what exists today and imagine it built up in a new form?
• Aug 24 2010 - blogquotes version b02.1 ... New release of blogquotes is out, with the biggest change being a switch from exclusive reliance on google accounts for login to leveraging a cool service at http://www.janrain.com/ that gives me a simple way of integrating authentication from a bunch of different sources. So you no longer need to be a google user to use blogquotes!   Note that if you were previously using google to login this should just work albeit with a slightly different UI.
• Aug 20 2010 - Unicode woes and Python unit testing in GAE ... One of the really cool aspects of deploying to Google’s cloud offering (GAE) versus the more machine oriented Microsoft Azure and AmazonEC2 approaches are that you really are only dealing with computing resources. You deploy your app not to any particular server, but to the cloud itself. Despite the very real challenges in distributing work across data centers I am still filled with visions of automagical propagation and distribution and unlimited elastic computing.
• Aug 9 2010 - Blogquotes version b01.2 ... Didn’t expect to get more released this weekend or I would have combined these posts, but another quick release of blogquotes, the following are added : - enhancement: quotes table is sortable by either “who” or “quote”  - enhancement: click to edit on any cell in the table for convenient fixes  - bugfix: missing robots.txt In the background I’ve also added analytics to the header so I can get a sense of how much traffic the site is seeing.
• Aug 7 2010 - Blogquotes version b01.1 ... A new version of blogquotes has been published this morning. Not a lot of new features, but at least the wheels are turning again and some annoying bugs have been addressed. - bugfix: adding quotes with some types of punctuation caused page errors - bugfix: unicode characters in quotes caused errors when pulling those quotes out for includes - bugfix: hitting enter on the “who” input field caused a page error, now hitting enter is equivalent to clicking “Add”
• Jun 30 2010 - curiosity killed the addictive gamer in me ... I can see it now. Homeless, slightly demented and jabbering about inane details of imaginary characters. This will be my life in six months from now after suffering through a debilitating addiction.  An addiction to the ridiculous time suck that is world of warcraft (aka world of walking). I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I have now played through the 10 day free trial (damn you free trial!) and have paid to play for another month.
• May 30 2010 - Flying at the right altitude - advice to a slightly younger me ... No posts in five months! Almost exactly the same time I’ve been in a new position at work. Disturbing trends, this completely predates just the last six months…. I’ve moved from being a team lead to being the head of our R&D group. I now have as many teams (7) as I did people to think about, and a whole new world of politics, strategy and planning. With a group of this size HR issues seem to be at least a weekly occurrence and I am now fully and completely on the manager’s schedule.
• Dec 14 2009 - google chrome software updates make everything else feel broken ... I am growing more and more annoyed at the Apple’s and the Adobe’s of the world who are constantly interrupting my work to tell me that there are updates waiting for me to install. Why do I have to manage this? Yes I know that I can go in there and tweak the settings so that I don’t get annoyed… but why should I even have to do that? I would need to do that across every user account on every machine I use on a regular basis!
• Dec 5 2009 - build it (so it's easy) and they will come (make the right decision) ... One of the biggest lessons I think I’ve learned over the past few years is that you have to be very careful with what you make easy to do in a software system. When you are working within a preexisting system, it is very hard to work effectively outside the bounds of that system. Whether you are limited by time constraints, peer pressure, political decisions or just pure technical inertia, those early/legacy decisions in a system will have long reaching impacts on the decisions of those who follow.
• Sep 23 2009 - way to go, LRO ... LRO does it again, water on the moon! That’s so cool! NASA is important people, we’re laying the foundation for future generations here. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090923-moon-water-discovery.html And of course finding water is not the same as finding lakes, but imagine the potential for fuel sources and or human sustenance. Water is damn heavy, and not something we can easily take with us. Pretty cool stuff.
• Sep 2 2009 - hanselman tools 2009!! ... Saw this on reddit tonight, hanselman has updates his legendary tools list for 2009. So what was going to be an evening of actual coding is slowing turning into an evening of trying out cool new tools that have made his list.  (I’m writing this blog post in windows Live Writer after seeing it in the list) But what’s an hour or two of my time compared to the time that must go into compiling this list?
• Sep 1 2009 - LRO sends us some underwhelming evidence! ... I remain a huge fan of projects like LRO, and personally still believe that the disbelievers are crackpots but I also have to admit to being a little underwhelmed by the photos listed here on NASA’s site for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html Still, I’m excited “we’re” (go NASA) going back, and if anything this just really highlights for me how damn big our “little” moon is. Easy to forget that the satellite that’s taking those photos is still 50 kilometers!
• Sep 1 2009 - lessons learned from online gambling - predicting scalability ... I work with someone who has spent a few years working for an online poker company who shall remain nameless. This company was responsible for a poker platform that supported both their own branded poker offering as well as being an engine for other companies who would layer on their branding. My colleague played an important role in taking their fairly well built existing system from thousands of users to tens of thousands of users, and in the process exposing a large handful of very deep bugs, some of which were core design issues.
• Sep 1 2009 - sometimes it's helpful to think about what NOT to do ... Came across this list of “anti-patterns” on wikipedia tonight. I’m tempted just to copy and paste the contents here but that would make me feel dirty. Definitely a good list though and something worth reminding ourselves of every once in a while when thinking about the systems we build. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern
• Aug 7 2009 - the rise and fall of myspace (and twitter) ... This is a great post on how myspace rose and fall and how the same thing applies to Twitter (and I’d imagine Facebook as well) Some really good thoughts. Getting popular before you have your mission can forever trap you into that identity vacuum where popularity is everything. http://codybrown.name/2009/08/06/myspace-is-to-facebook-as-twitter-is-to-______/ A good read, and the level of blogging I’d like to work towards (more pictures!).
• Jul 23 2009 - manager schedule vs maker schedule ... Popular comp-sci essayist and lisp hacker extraordinaire Paul Graham recently posted this article on the difference between a manager’s schedule and a maker’s schedule. This is really inline with my own views on this issue and really sums up a big problem we have where I work with meetings being scheduled with the makers and the impact that has. We’ve had tons of discussions around the cost of mental context switching, but even that’s an understatement of the problem… Great work, it’s always helpful hearing echoes of these types of thoughts beyond my own everyday sphere.
• Jul 22 2009 - performance tuning to an insane level ... Ok, so I have to admit that I’ve been one to disregard figures around performance when arguing with co-workers over the merit of managed code vs C/C++. I’ve even used the argument that statically typed languages like Java and C# offer more hints to the compiler that allow for optimizations not possible in unmanaged code. I still have a fairly pragmatic view of the spectrum of cost to deliver (skill set/maintainability) vs performance gains… but regardless of all that….
• May 11 2009 - taking a step back/up/sideways (thebrain) ... Around 2003, 2004 I had a bit of a mild obsession with organizing my life into digital form, creating as many mappings as I could from my everyday existence into some kind of digital form. This of course included ideas and thoughts, writings and paintings, music and movies, friends and bits of information about those friends etc. This amass of data have gone from one disjointed medium to another (.txt files in folders, emails, blog posts, napkins) without ever really achieving any chohesiveness or real improvement in my ability to actually synthesize or act on all that information.
• May 8 2009 - Simple Extensibility in .NET ... I’ve used this approach a few times when I essentially need a really simple plugin / provider model within my applications so I thought I’d jot down the relevant details here for posterity using an old project for adding post commit hooks to subversion. Consider this a somewhat simplistic approach, not suitable for production code without a bit more plumbing. If you are going all out and need true add-in’s for your .
• May 6 2009 - Transcendent Man! ... I read the singularity is near last year and really enjoyed it, despite a few misgivings for Kurzweil’s ego and some dubious use of statistics. One of the things I found myself really intrigued by was Kurweil himself and this movie looks like a fun look at the man and his ideas. Do I believe him? Part of me wants to, definitely. The ultimate end-game of the singularity is fascinating and wondrous, but I actually found some of the more intermediate steps in his projections to be more fascinating.
• Apr 30 2009 - From test spy to Verify() with Moq ... Moq is now my favorite unit testing framework for .NET, and a great poster child for the power of the lambda expression support added to C#. If you are not doing unit tests or Test Driven Development you should, and if you already are and have not checked out Moq, you should. My tests previous to Moq were using NMock, a very handy tool that looks like a lot of other mock frameworks.
• Mar 25 2009 - silverlight 3 - after the high ... I failed to convince my manager at work that sending me and a few members of my team to MIX was a worthwhile expense in this economy. So instead I spent a couple days this sprint with http://live.visitmix.com/ on one screen and visual studio in the other. I have to say, Microsoft did an amazing job with MIX in terms of getting me excited and having me “tuned in”. If you are at all interested in web development on the Microsoft stack and  haven’t checked out the keynote I’d recommend it.
• Feb 18 2009 - decision making : flip a coin then check your gut ... I once heard an interesting anecdote about how to make a difficult decision between two paths. When you find yourself spinning, alternating between one choice and then the other, it can be helpful to simply assign each choice “heads” or “tails” and flip a coin. When you reveal what side the coin landed on pay attention to your emotional reaction… are you relieved or are you disappointed?  Try it sometime, it really can work.
• Feb 12 2009 - Flex data services limitations (FlexBuilder generated wsdl code sucks) ... The post saved me a ton of time. It’s a bit embarrassing for Adobe in my mind to ship something this buggy. I was seriously running into these issues within an hour of trying to connect Flex to our .NET Soap based services. “MyMethod can’t return an object of with the type name MyMethodResult.”You’re fracking kidding me right?  Wow. (and there are more along these lines) http://lukesh.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/very-important-limitations-of-flex-data-services/ After fighting with the above and other bugs I was rewriting a lot of the generated code from FlexBuilder and it was just pointless.
• Jan 31 2009 - QWERTY Myth and the entrenchment of Flash ... This is a great article about the myth of how the best technology doesn’t necessarily win. Granted, sometimes the best technology does not win, but there is a persistent and pervasive sense that the populous often chooses the “VHS” over the far superior alternative. The article addresses the VHS vs Beta debate directly as well as the victory over Dvorak by QWERTY. To encourage you to read the original I won’t reveal the clever arguments made.
• Jan 28 2009 - Silverlight controls ... Silverlight 2 may not have the control set that Flex developers are used to seeing out of the box but there are a significant number of control vendors who are stepping up to the plate to fill the void. It seems as though Microsoft’s strategy has been to get the Silverlight 2 runtime out as quickly as possible (and as lean as possible) always knowing that this type of extension to the framework would exist.
• Dec 31 2008 - 1 TB drive won't format using Disk Utility ... I just bought a 1TB external HD, the “Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus” this weekend on sale at London Drugs. A bit of an impulse purchase but I’ve been digiizing all of our dvd’s lately into iTunes and had completely run out of space… The drive has a bunch of automated backup features I’ll never use, so I skipped all the software and went to use the drive directly from Mac OS X.
• Dec 21 2008 - FlexBuilder 3 First Impressions ... Where we’re coming from So at the beginning of the year I was tasked with evaluating a number of technologies for RIA development for the next evolution of my company’s product. Up to this point we had been relying extensively on ASP.NET forms with a traditional post-back model that was responsible for a lot of wasted time and bandwidth. We’ve leveraged a lot of Ajax in the past few years, starting with simple fixes like trees and list based controls that use load on demand and going all the way up to full fledged single page applications that consumed purely services.
• Dec 17 2008 - FlexBuilder 3 Controls ... Controls included with FlexBuilder 3 out of the box below… check out some third party components here . Notes will be updated as I actually get a chance to put some of these to use. FlexBuilder 3 Controls Control Name Notes AdvancedDataGrid  Professional version only + multi column sorting + grouping + tree view + printing support – Still no paging support out of the boxAlertControl  not sure how this gets grouped with these other controls as it is not an explicit control but a static method “show()” which can be used from where ever.
• Dec 15 2008 - visual c++ lesson 0.0.0.0.1 precompiled headers ... I come from a background of managed memory and interpreted languages. I’m a big proponent of pragmatic approaches to problems and as little re-inventing of the wheel as humanly possible. I don’t think the world needs another text editor, and I personally don’t feel the need to write my own version of the stack I rely on for application development. (.NET Framework and IIS) This however gives me less credibility with all those “real” programmers out there.
• Dec 12 2008 - ajax for mac lovers ... Another Ajax Framework :  (or rather, an Application Framework) http://cappuccino.org/ http://cappuccino.org/learn/  Demo app built using it: http://280slides.com/  And a teaser for all those interface builder lovers out there : http://ajaxian.com/archives/nib2cib-use-interface-builder-to-design-your-ajax-apps I came across this in reader this morning and was totally  blown away by how well the 280 slides application  worked. It's really impressive... on non IE browsers. I sent the link to a co-worker to check out and he basically dismissed it as too slow and unresponsive, "
• Nov 28 2008 - C++ linking ... This is a post for myself, to basically bookmark the excellent work of someone else. My post is contributing practically nothing (maybe adding some context/weight for his article) but here it is anyway. ;-) http://blog.copton.net/articles/linker/index.html Despite not being an active user of C++ I really enjoyed this post. I actually feel a little smarter and better informed for having read it. Despite the mess in the C++  tool chain being described, this kind of reading actually makes me feel more inclined to dig into this stuff not less.
• Nov 11 2008 - Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter ... A good friend of mine Sarah believes that the moon landings were a hoax. Despite being a huge science geek , a fan of NASA and a member of the planetary society she subscribes to the idea that man has not in fact walked on the moon, and the entire thing was a lie perpetrated in an effort to win the political war with the USSR. Or something along those lines. Somehow this deeply disturbs me.
• Nov 9 2008 - What you are reading is consuming energy ... Consumption is one of those things that is on my mind a lot. Both economically as I aim to live debt free and with as little "stuff" as really needed as well as in other forms of energy. Buy local, buy less packaging, drive less, eat less! It goes on and on. One of the really interesting things with looking at google appengine is their metering and logging of your application.
• Nov 8 2008 - software fundamentals are exciting? ... I came across a nice list of fundamental axioms of development on reddit this morning that made me a little pumped. Pumped because I’m in the middle of a big transition at work that in a lot of respects has me starting over with a new team and a new mandate. I’ll be focusing on solutions, custom work and a view towards short term revenue vs long term research and development for products.
• Sep 6 2008 - frequent beachballs in mac os x caused by bad fonts ... I’ve been testing the latest nightly builds of firefox 3.1 over the past few days and while generally impressed with the performance improvements in javascript was quite disapointed that it was causing my iMac to go into frequent hangs where I would see the spinning beachball of death for many seconds before I could continue working again. It became bad enough that I finally had to ditch my firefox testing efforts.
• Sep 3 2008 - From Chrome with Love ... A million bloggers all posting on the same topic, why shouldn’t I join in. The Google chrome team has got to be enjoying themselves right now. I read the comic yesterday and really enjoyed it. Seeing a company I can’t help but admire sit down and rethink the browser in so thorough of a manner is inspiring. Even just the QA involved is pretty damn impressive. I’ve been using the chrome browser for a day now and have to same I’m pretty happy with it.
• Aug 9 2008 - Regression Ratios ... Regression is a nasty issue. Ongoing regression from bug fixes can be a pretty clear indicator that there are some serious problems with your code base, your process, your team or all of the above. As an example case consider the effect of moving from 1 in 5 of all bug fixes causing an unrelated issue to crop up to 1 in 10. Given an imaginary scenario where 1000 bugs are found (a medium size project) and a team is closing 20 of those bugs a day then in an extremely simple model we have just added two weeks to our timeline simply from regression issues.
• Jul 21 2008 - Documenting architecture ... One of my side projects at work right now is documenting the architecture of a product that has already been built but will be going through a re-architecting with a focus on a more robust schema and applying some of the learning we’ve gone through in discovering exactly how our product is being used and ways in which our users want to extend the platform. SaaS and SOA are two good buzz words we’ll be throwing around a lot, although to be honest we’ve been in the SaaS model for years now, just not following all of the best practises.
• Jul 20 2008 - Networks, Assignment 1 ... I just finished my first assignment in a beginning networking course I’m taking and I am so far pretty impressed with how interesting this stuff is. I have a working knowledge of networking that includes decent understanding of the application layer, high level knowledge of the transport layer and basically just awareness of the link layer. It’s pretty rare that in my position as a developer that I need to answer questions about the link layer.
• Jul 19 2008 - blogquotes prototype is working ... I’m supposed to be studying for a challenge exam I’m writing this week in “Advanced” Operating Systems. Instead I spend a good chunk of the day today working on blogquotes in between watching/playing with my daughter. I can justify this time spent because I did all of this work exclusively from a bash shell using vi to refresh myself on some of the content for the course. In this session I was able to use wget,grep,awk,vi,a shell script and some file permissions.
• Jul 17 2008 - code samples in blogger are a pain ... I can’t say I enjoy writing in the blogger post interface, in fact it’s pretty frustrating. For a while there I was using google docs to write posts(which I loved), then I would just publish to my blog. That actually worked great until the actual publishing process which doesn’t allow you to control the title very effectively and totally messed up my rss feed even if I did fix the title.
• Jul 17 2008 - Microsoft's add-in framework and the need for diligence ... We’ve recently put Microsoft’s managed add-in framework (part of .NET 3.5) into very effective use building a plug-in system for a large asp.net application at work. Essentially the framework in place allows other developers (and our own team for out of stream releases) to develop new functionality for our platform that runs the entire life-cycle for a given widget. In our case for this particular widget we’re talking about plugins being responsible for up to 4 asp.
• Jun 26 2008 - Bill C61 notes ... So I have a great personal distrust and disgust in the way copyright law has continually degraded and been abused by large corporations over the past 30 or 40 years . (Thanks Mickey!) I cringe at the idea of the RIAA sueing people to protect their broken business model and laugh my ass off when bands like Metallica (2) and Kiss make total asses of themselves while those artists that are still relevant embrace new ways of engaging their fans.
• Jun 26 2008 - Enough rope to hang yourself (C# Extension Methods) ... So I ran into an interesting “gotchya” with C# extension methods tonight. And of course it happens at the 11th hour on a project that is being demoed at 9:00am tomorrow morning. Of course. Extension MethodsExtension methods are a really cool new feature of C# that were introduced in version 3.0 of the language. Essentially they are static methods that act like instance methods, allowing you to extend objects you don’t own.
• Jun 21 2008 - here here - use var sparingly ... When I first read Jeff Atwood’s latest post on his love of C#’s new “var” keyword I was deeply bothered that my co-workers would find the article and latch on to the argument as a justification for laziness. While I do understand his point of view I was bothered by the idea of var statements littered throughout the code base making things more difficult to read for the next developer.
• Jun 14 2008 - Dynamic vs Static... no wait make that DBC! ... I need to blog this basically to toss it in my archive. There have been some interesting posts on the religious debate of static vs dynamic languages. I don’t know why I always get drawn into these lines of thought, but I do. (in fact I just added a “versus” label) I say drawn in because my underlying philosophy in all of these things is to choose the right tool for the job and leave it at that.
• Jun 13 2008 - Gadgets in Blogger ... So I’ve actually started my blogquotes project which was intended as a widget style provider for random quotes (from a personal library) to appear somewhere on my site. I’m using the new Google app engine for this project and so far I have to say it’s pretty damn easy. From barely knowing python to having a django templated, gql driven tiny quote engine. Granted it’s the “hello world” of web apps, but still considering I have an application running on Google, with built-in authentication and datastore ….
• Jun 10 2008 - Google's changing the rules again (appspot) ... I am super excited about Google’s recent foray into cloud computing, the app engine. They are not first, I realize Amazon has been doing some pretty cool things with the S3 services and their computing services but the ability to simply and easily have an application that can leverage BigTable and GQL, google account authentication, image manipulation, memcache and having that all live within the seemingly infinite scalability of the google platform is extremely exciting for me.
• Jun 10 2008 - Moving to the interior ... The promise of the electronic office has been so damn close for so damn long now. I know there are thousands and thousands of people out there who now work primarily from home, but I remain on the outside looking in. (or inside looking out?) Visions of a city like Nelson or maybe Prince Rupert dance in my head, with me in my large solitary office overlooking the lake, hardwood everywhere, the distant sound of my daughter playing outside.
• Jun 7 2008 - Do I really need to embrace C++? ... My internal debate rages on… I have some C++ courses in the pipeline so I will definitely learn more than the basic understanding/grasp I have now… Still though. Currently I associate C++ proponents with old-school attitudes on the need for absolute control and a fear of newer levels of abstraction that are allowing increasing complex and large projects. Garbage collection, the .NET framework etc, are all grouped together into a category of tools that only “weak” programmers need.
• Jun 6 2008 - Power Consumption ... I’m a graphing junkie, I have to admit it. So I was pretty pleased to discover that my power company (BC Hydro ) provides some interesting consumption graphs for month to month kilowatts per hour usage. I’m pretty sure my meter is only read every two months so some of the resolution is lost in this, but still it’s helpful. One of the more striking trends I’ve seen in the data has been the birth of my daughter.
• May 31 2008 - Vampires in Space ... I read a very fun book on my holiday in Manitoba this last few weeks. It’s written by a biologist who has turned to fiction with an eye to producing some good hard core science based fiction. I would compare his work to William Gibson and Arthur C. Clarke. The book is called “BlindSight” by Peter Watts, and I’ve added it to my LibraryThing, there is a link to my full review below.
• May 13 2008 - Javascript session hacking ... I had to blog this, and yeah I'm going to be the billionth person to do so, but that's ok because no one reads my blog and it's basically just my personal public archive. (ppa?)  This guy http://www.thomasfrank.se/sessionvars.html has managed to find a very clever place to store data within the browser without resorting to cookies, flash or anything beyond basic cross browser javascript. Apparently "window.name" which lost it's usefulness when the spammers started making popups obsolete can contain arbitrarily long strings that persist as long as that window is open (equivalent to a session cookie)
• May 11 2008 - Saturday night science link (DNA Visualization) ... Fantastic molecular visualization of how dna, rna and ribosomes work… where was this kind of stuff when I was going to school?
• May 11 2008 - ASP.NET Ajax Pendulum ... I’m currently working on moving a web application from using some ad-hoc javascript and iframes to a full fledged ASP.NET Ajax implementation based around Telerik’s RadControls and a suite of our own controls. This is the third application we’ve given the ajax treatment to and each time we’ve taken a slightly different approach. Approach 1 … “Javascript + Web Services” Full view manager/page controller implementation on the client side to handle events thrown by all the components on the pageHomegrown “ServiceManager” to handle brokering calls to the server Centralized error handling
• May 7 2008 - poetic words = exciters of nearby symbols ... In GEB Hofstadter mentions the complexity in building an isomorphism between two poems written in two languages. “In ordinary language, the task of translation is more straightforward, since to each word or phrase in the original language, there can usually be found a corresponding word or phrase in the new language. By contrast, in a poem of this type, [Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll] many “words” do not carry ordinary meaning, but act purely as exciters of nearby symbols.
• May 5 2008 - I've forgotten how much I enjoy Unix ... I just finished reading “The Dream Machine” and getting a very cool look at some early history of computing including the birth of Multics and it’s spin off and almost more interesting the birth of tools like email and ftp as a way to actually do something with the ARPANET that was being built. A great read for anyone interested in how we collectively have arrived at where we are today in computing.
• Apr 30 2008 - Patches on a centralized VCS in a small team ... My team is always looking for ways to improve on quality and one of the proposed ideas this year was to follow a model similar to large open source projects where basically every checkin is first proposed as a diff/patch and then vetted into the code base AFTER review. Our current setup is a single large subversion repository where our team (~14 developers) all checkout the entire mainline branch we're working on and make commits to mainline as desired.
• Apr 12 2008 - Terrible ad campaign (seal hunt) ... So when I started this blog I wanted to make a point of not posting one angry rant after another. Essentially trying to follow the sage advice of bloggers like Scott Hansleman who says amongst other advice to: “stick to a topic”, “avoid politics”, “don’t blog bile” … Well I’ll break all those rules now by pointing out my extreme distaste for a series of ads being run by the international fund for animal welfare (IFAW).
• Mar 30 2008 - On the need for re-architecting ... I have been grappling with the concept of a rewrite of a relatively successful software product that I’ve been involved with since start-up mode. In truth I was googling for compelling stories about why NOT to disappear for a year to do a complete re-engineering of your product (ala Netscape). Mostly because I’m concerned about the size of the effort and the resources we have to pull it off. Instead came across this article, espousing the need to fire all your developers!
• Mar 30 2008 - University Bureaucracy ... Depending on how I choose to count I am now dealing with my fifth or sixth post-secondary institution in my odyssey to finish my computer science degree. One thing that all of the schools I’ve dealt with have had in common is a slow and inflexible bureaucracy. Of course as a younger man I blamed a lot of my own failings on what I perceived then to be a completely fucked up system (University of Manitoba) that was screwing me over.
• Mar 29 2008 - Maggie! ... This is one of my favorite pictures of my daughter Maggie. She’s not usually this sweet ;-) but at least a few times a day we get a few moments when she’s active, smiley and interactive. I took this picture last weekend, so she’s about nine weeks old here. A lot of Maggie pictures tend to really distort her, and while often cute they don’t all equally capture that part of her that really defines her personality (in my eyes).
• Mar 28 2008 - clever youtube covers ... In the spirit of using the blog as a personal online searchable storage medium here is a playlist of some covers on youtube that I totally get a kick out of… most of these are songs I came across in the past year and am now just logging so I don’t forget them. Youtube is absolutely full of crap song covers by amateur artists in their basements. I think that’s cool and all, I can imagine myself posting something like that when I was first learning guitar but it’s not something I want to watch (does anyone?
• Mar 28 2008 - robots are your friends ... OMG, I so love this freaky dog robot thing… we need more like this! Truly exciting the kinds of things that are going on, I can’t wait to have a robot servant. Watch these all the way through, in the following order. The second one is f’n hilarious after you watch the first. The original Quadruped Robot Dog Thing /o:p the spoof Spoof of Quadruped /o:p and just for fun
• Mar 27 2008 - I have some reading to do! ... http://listverse.com/literature/top-15-science-fiction-book-series I came across this list of the best 15 science fiction series ever written. The reason I love seeing this is 1) it contains a bunch of science fiction series I’ve already read and thought very highly of and 2) contains some series I’ve never even heard of, which of course is exciting since it means I have some reading to do. For all I know the guy who wrote the list is totally unqualified and preying on people’s ego by throwing familiar items on a list with a bunch of obscure ones, but I’m gonna go with it.
• Mar 27 2008 - eighth first post ... Testing blogger hooked up to my own domain…. we’ll see….