Rhonabwy

profile of Tim O'Reilly

Wired has a profile of Tim O'Reilly that is a worthwhile read. While I used to listen to every word I could get from him, that hasn't been the case lately. And the whole concept of Web 2.0 just annoys the shit out of me as rah-rah hype that isn't really saying anything. Its probably not as bad as all that, but for some reason that particular tag (and the hype-engine associated with it) just irks me to no end.

Still, the profile is an interesting read, and he's got a really thought provoking keynote from a few years back available on IT Conversations that is definitely worth a listen. He'd been saying the same basic story for a year or two, but this was the only recording of it I spotted.

WOW! Serenity (no spoilers)

WOW!

Rotten Tomatoes is giving Serenity an 83% at the moment, up from 79% when we went into the theatre. And what an incredible flick! I took a bunch of folks from work, and they hadn't seen the series, but still loved it! Incredibles all around!

I'm shocked, to be honest, by some of the ending. I mean, ... wow. Ohmygod.

Serenity

Serenity opens tomorrow!

We've got tickets for the 1:50pm showing with a good whole pile of friends! I'm really looking forward to this. In Seattle, it's showing at the Loews theatres. I could have imagined some amazing stuff with the Cinerama, but it looks like it's not going to be this time. Maybe if this movie is a success, then the next one will be there...

I really hope it does all go well - and that Fox realizes how badly they screwed up cancelling that show!

Interview - Neil and Joss

Time Online has an interview with Neil and Joss that's really good. I love some of the commentary in there - read through all four pages - the good stuff is near the end.

a talk with Jason Fried, of 37Signals

I mentioned to Gus and Brent last night about a podcast that was really worth listening to - the founder of 37Signals, Jason Fried, talks about Basecamp and a bit of their philosophy and lessons learned in developing it.

I don't actually agree with everything he said, but I thought his talk was refreshing for it's lack of general wheezing and his no-nonsense way of putting his (sometimes strong) opinions out there. Anyway, I figured a link to the talk would be useful for some.

I've continued to listen to IT Conversations, although I've stopped listening to all the other podcasts that were blooming right around the time iTunes really kicked up it's conceptual volume. Most of them, well - just aren't something I want to spend my time with. And to be fair, there's a lot in IT Conversations that I don't really give a crap about either - but they've got a pretty high ratio of gems in their stuff. Even if I don't agree with the verbiage being spewed, it is worth it to get a sense of what people are talking about.

Four Days - this Friday - Serenity

Four days to Serenity. In Seattle, it's showing at the Loewes Cineplex Meridian. So I guess that's the target for Friday night!

treadmill

Well, I've finally gone and done it. We bought a treadmill today, and I've spent the afternoon hauling, shoving, and rearranging furniture to fit it into the house. That's the thing will small houses - you've got to plan for something like this as though it's a major event.

That would be because it IS a major event.

I shanghai'd a neighbor (he was very gracious about it) into helping me lift that monstrous base into the house, and then we slid it most of the way into position on moving blankets. Karen and I assembled, with the periodic helpful comment from our young neighbor Kate, and just in time for the final bits John was able to help us slide it into position without scraping up the floor. Thank god too, because after all that I'm about bushed.

So that's the basics - now comes the more difficult task. The whole idea behind this was to try and replicate the NEAT Research Lab's "office of the future" - the whole idea being that instead of couch potato'ing in the living room, I can work while doing a stroll on the treadmill. And hey - if that just completely goes to crap, I can always just watch movies on the laptop while I'm speed walking or something. Lord knows I need to get some kind of excercise going.

I actually tried to contact the NEAT Research Lab to ask them about how to set this up, but I never got a response - so I'm going to be settling it all into place on my own wits.

Merlot

Karen and I popped a bottle of Merlot that we had about last night. Can't really remember where we got it. Anyway, it wasn't a terrible expensive bottle of wine, but it was really good. We had a sort of fancy Macaroni & Cheese last night, and it worked beautifully with it.

And since I never remember the names of wines that I like, I thought I'd write it down here so I could go back and look later: Beaulieu Vineyard Coastal Merlot.

There had been a couple of reds that we received as gifts from the Rogue Valley in Oregon, and those were outstanding. I wish I'd written them down. And yeah, I tend to favor reds over whites.

perl books

Karen's continuing with classes soon, and this next set includes some CGI programming to go along with all the web design pieces she's been picking up. The javascript classes were really pretty weak (my opinion), but there wasn't much else for her to switch into to get a good class on it.

So now she's heading into deeper interactions, and frankly I'll be really curious to see what they're teaching in this area. My copy of Learning Perl is so old that I fear it won't be much use, although I still have (albiet slightly dogeared) reasonably up to date copies of Programming Perl and the Perl Cookbook. Yep - all three (plus one other, non-OReilly book) were in her required book list.

'Course it figures - I'm living in Python these days, and watching a number of folks slink up all close and stuff to Ruby, and Seattle Central is teaching perl. Ah well. At least I know it and can help her with the homework if she wants.

Tortuga

From the western carribean (at Xcaret in Mexico): Tortuga

A little family time

Today was a little family time - playing XBox. Dan and Shawna (Karen's sublings) back in Missouri got together with me today via Xbox live and we had a great time shooting each other up. Dan's clearly the best of us, but I held a reasonable amount of "kills" by the end of our session. Two hours goes by really, really fast.

I'll once again reiterate that it sucks that XBox didn't enable Cooperative play across XBox live. That's the shiz to me. And it's not something that a whole lot of games (read - damn near any) are focused on. Multiplayer, yeah. Coop - no.

I really should give Halo cred for at least making a Coop mode when you're all together on an Xbox. Dan and I regularly burn a number of holiday hours killing covenant with that particular setup.

I do have to say that I'm actually a bit disappointed with Bungie and Halo2. Halo was really continuing the direction of a deep storyline, and that seems to be getting laid a little to the wayside with Halo2, focusing instead more on the multiplayer and killing potential of the whole game. Maybe I'm off the mark, and it's just the marketing crap getting to me. Hard to tell

Wil's a bit looney

I really enjoy reading Wil Shipley's blog, even if he's bat-sht looney sometimes in his theories. His latest is about unit testing, and while he makes a lot of amusing comments about how it's unfun and boring, he completely blows it with his theory that "YOUR PROGRAM IS NOT GOING TO BE USED BY OTHER PROGRAMS". I mean, really - that's the whole concept behind unit testing.

I completely agree with Wil's general assertion that you should test your code with real user data. That it's the only way to really see trouble in the whole integrated system, and to make sure it works.

But let's be honest here - manually testing is fraught with danger. You forget something, you get tired, you don't remember why something was important later in refactoring...

I've used unit testing in development through four different languages (C#, Java, Objective-C, and python) and 3 different platforms (you get to guess these). The setup is reasonably consistent, it's quick to automate, and frankly it's saved my ass more than once. If you develop with unit testing in mind from the beginning, it can really save you from making those stupid mistakes where you expect an error value to return an empty string instead of a null or some such. There's lots more there - Gus has a great example, and I'm pleased to see a number of folks commenting back to Wil that he's lost it on this one.

I think ultimately it's clear that Wil is used to working on small teams. I don't think the benefit of unit testing is explicit to not-small teams, but you do really see the effects when it's done right. Like wolf mentioned - you can do it wrong and painfully, but to completely disregard it is stupid.

Course, if Wil just wanted to drive some hits to his site, it was a great post for that!

XCoder meeting

We had a really nice turnout for tonight's XCoder meeting, where Gus showed off a series of five short hacks for twiddling with NSWindow. A little syntax highlighting, making clickable links, global floating windows, and the notorious "tweed window" discovered by Quentin at Rogue Amoeba.

Rita

Holy cow - here we go again!

From a category 2 to a category 5 hurricane in under 24 hours.

All you lunatics with SUVs... HAH! YOU'RE SCREWED! Shoulda bought a useful or pretty car instead. $5/gallon is coming our way.

Nope, I ain't dead

Ain't dead - just got back from a 7 day cruise to the western carribean. Damn, I'm such a wimp - 94 F and 80% humidity is like to kill me. Only I was finally getting somewhat acclimated to it by the end.

Damn that water is gorgeous.

more later - and some pics too!

Intriguing...

Geekstuff -

Saw an article on OReillyNet about OpenNMS that I think will bear looking at further. OpenNMS is a network management center app - meant to replace software that hideous piece of crap called OpenView (not that I have an opinion there). I've been using Nagios for this sort of thing for the past several years, but this looks intriging enough that it might bear fruit to check it out further.

Wifi on the busses

Ever since EVDO finally came to Seattle, I figured the Metro transit guys would eventually link up the busses to a central core. And today, the announcement rolled out that not only are they linking up, but they're also providing Wifi access. Here I figured it would be awesome for the logistical benefits alone! That and I figured that those cameras in the buses would start streaming real-time back to a central location.

My biggest hope is that it will enable some improvements in logistics for the busses to be more efficient. The wifi is a bonus, but I'm usually only on the trolleys for 30 minutes each way to and from work - so the benefit of wifi isn't all that crazy-needed to me. Then again, maybe I'll get into Skype or Gizmo, and it'll be all the world. Hard to say.

PSP

"Sucker", says Gus.

Yep, I broke down and after incoherently crazing the damn thing, I bought a PSP today. I have admired the look and function of these things since they came out - almost 6 months ago. I've seen other's playing with them, and the video aspect seemed pretty darn cool. I don't care much about the whole UMD video thing - but I'd like to put some of my own videos and such onto it. PSPWare seems to be the code of choice, although I'll need to learn a bit more about transcoding to whatever format this thing requires. PSPWare looks like it does all sorts of fancy formats - I just need to get enough memory storage to make it work.

Right out of the gate I went ahead and updated to the PSP 2.0 code. That gets the little browser thing, and a bunch of miscellaneous updates. It also means that home-brew code isn't immediately available - but I'm OK with that.

Since Apple didn't announce a tablet or cool video thingy of their own today, well - it just seemed like the time to go ahead and get one. Although I've got to admit - the iPod Nano is really freakin' cool. I'll have to play with Gus' when he gets one.

Seattle

Seattle, as viewed from the Bremerton ferry, coming around the south end of Bainbridge Island.

Sailing and rain

I really wanted to go sailing today, but it looks like it could easily rain. I'm planning on taking off a few days before too long, so right now I really, really don't want to do anything that could get me a cold...

So we're going to hop a ferry to Bremerton and enjoy being out on the water that way. Catch a bus to the ferry terminal, catch a ferry over, and then catch one back. Not exactly sailing on Lake Union, but I'll take it!

lacerated fingers

My fingers aren't holding up so well today. Both hands have lacerated fingers from my dear friend (and fiend) Pooka. The little fellow's claws are going to be getting trimmed after this, but at the moment I'm waiting, as I'm rather annoyed and am likely to trim a lot more harshly than the little bugger deserves.

On the flip side, the house is clean, the day is beautiful, and I'm finally calming down from being mightily pissed off earlier today. Low torque tolerance I think - probably a really good thing that its on to a three day weekend.

I pulled the bike out of the basement and attempted to put air in the tires. I think I've a flat in the back tire, and the front brakes are all out of whack - so I guess its time to have someone who knows what the hell they're doing take a look and make it work right.

The bike thing is stemming from a desire to not drive anywhere right now, which is causing all sorts of weird conflicting emotions. I feel trapped without a vehicle, but at the same time I don't want to drive anywhere. I'm thinking the bike might be a good solution. I drove to the grocery store this morning, but only because I didn't think I could reasonably carry all the groceries back. Maybe I can get some little cart thing to tow behind for errands like that. Or maybe I just oughta say screw it and drive where ever the hell I please.

Its the rare mid-day post

Lunch time on Friday, and it has been a tremendous week. Tremendously busy, difficult, and successful - so in the end also tremendously positive.

DocuSign rolled out a major new feature set for our customers this past wednesday, and it is running great. We have had wonderfully positive feedback, and it is the completion of the first major upgrade of the product that I have been involved with from conception to completion. We have some videos of the product in action on our corporate web site - sort of screen casting what DocuSign is about.

So with that done, it is relaxing time - and I'm looking forward to the three day weekend. Lots of sleep (I missed a fair bit this week), maybe an in-promptu block party the neighbors are cooking up, and chillin' is on the docket.

snippets

Snippets is a pretty neat site - sort of a variation on OReilly's "Code Zoo" idea, except left a lot more freeform because you can put up anything there and tag it as you see fit.

Where Zoo is a library reference (at least that's how it looks at a blush), Snippets is like a living, unmoderated Python Cookbook - except for any language.