Transcending Ordinary

Its seems each year I’ve got something going on around the house After all my traveling, I’ve had some time to get to a few things. In the last two weeks I’ve changed a shower rod/curtain, installed a cabinet in a bathroom, and gave my deck some much needed attention by resurfacing it. The deck turned out great, later that day it rained and seeing the water bead up put a smile on my face:) Last, I’m reaping the benefits of work done two summer ago, here’s a few shots of my perennials.

Upgrade the shower rod to the curved type:

Install new cabinet in bathroom (notice the modification ; ):

Deck Before:

Deck After:

Perennials:

From Hui Hin Thailand to Ocean City Maryland. Pulled some photos off my camera tonight, and found a bunch of golfing pics

Ocean City:

Thailand:

Ok, new mac so time for a clean custom install See my php and ruby writeups on previous Mac talks.

First let me start by saying that these instructions are how I setup a mac from scratch and you might not necessarily follow the same steps, though I think you should. If you are interested in repartitioning your drive, read on, if not, skip to step 1.
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I sat next to a virologist on my flight to Bejing and we began speaking of genetics, then viruses and it set me on an enlightening train of thought. I travel to Thailand to visit my father who is very sick. After viruses, we spoke of cancer and I conveyed my understanding of cancer as a cellular process by which one random cell, though some fluke, has a variation and though the normal process of mitosis, splits to new cells, also with this genetic anomoly. As this process repeats, soon these mutant cells become more then a localized variation of a few cells. Eventually this occurrence matures to cancer.
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Having used Leopard’s built in Ruby on Rails, I heard that the Apple guys also bundled Apache with PHP5. Here’s a quickstart on setting up and using them:
:update, where u see vi, you can replace with pico (a more friendly editor) if you don’t know vi, most commands in pick start with holding the control button.
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Man, where do I start. Well I’ve come to the realization that many others have and that is that Ruby just doesn’t scale as easily as other available languages nor does it have the polished feel of something like Java or C. Sure, it is much faster to develop with, when you’re not debugging that is. For someone that wants a fast, out of the box framework well wired to object oriented database hooks and MVC it is the way to go, though doing really custom things can be fairly obscure. Over the last few days I’ve been using RMagick lots and it’s been quite frustrating to have things hang where I should be getting error messages.

Long story short, I continue Ruby with my work on AIM Photos at AOL, however my personal stuff I’m moving to PHP with an equivalent rails framework. Two likely candidates are trax and symfony.

During my evaluations I read a great quote by another developer switching back to PHP, he said, “PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE *YOU* ARE BETTER.” How true are both of those statements. The basic point is that you learn so much from the past relationship that you come better prepared for the next one.

If Java was more supported by shared hosts, I’d jump back on the Struts boat, though for my personal work, PHP should do fine. Now I need to switch from Netbeans back to Eclipse, and dreamhost back to 1and1, oh joy Similar to a new GF, who brings her own baggage and family, you need to accept and try for a successful integration.

Ok, I know I’ve been back for a while, but I’ve been accumulating things to blog about so, before I talk about todays latest and greatest, let me talk about the LBF that I attended in the second half of my London trip.

First off, it was huge, supposedly the largest book fair in the world. I have a few more coming up so I’ll be the judge, though I doubt this one will be topped.

The company got a decent size booth in the back. At first I thought it was a terrible location though changed my mind when I realized first that rather then other booths directly in front of us, we had a cafe/meeting place area, second, by the time people got to our area they actually listened to what we were saying rather then just grabing a few freebies and moving on to the next row of booths (since there really were no others:).

One morning I arrived before the general public was allowed in and snapped a few pictures, some of the booths were truly impressive.

I returned on thursday morning after spending almost a week in the UK. Although it was a short trip, the work / sightseeing mix was just right. The great company also helped. For those of you who didn’t know, the purpose of the trip was the London Book Fair, which my cousin had a booth to represent a new product his company is working on. Due to the size of the fair, apparently the largest book fair in the world, I will dedicate a separate post to it. This post will focus on the sightseeing. Feel free to check out my travel gallery on the right for all my UK pictures.

We started the weekend on a open top bus tour where we listened to information via earphones and experienced the brisk London weather.
The bus went through the famous Trafalgar Square, which commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Lord Nelson stands on the column in the middle surrounded by four lions.
Here is most of the SLC team, that’s me above, my cousin Nitat on the left, followed by Sam, Eric, Nina, and Ann I must say thanks to Ann, she was the London native and certainly took care of us while we were there including getting me tickets to a premier league game, Chelsea, ranked #2, against Wigan.
We also saw the tower bridge, built in 1894, over the river Thames.
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Companies are entities founded for the purpose of making money for their stakeholders, including employees. They are often complex, beyond the typical revenue generating activities that they are associated with. They employ revenue enabling resources like accountants, lawyers, marketers, cleaning staff, security guards, etc.

For many, these activies are considered fluff, or “overhead.” Sure companies have them, but how effective are they? Are they simply added beurocracy to justify being a bonified “company”? Why should the money I make in my revenue generating work go to anyone else but me? How confident am I that the money is being spent efficiently? For most of us, their activies are unknown and therefore not fully justified in our minds.

This leads to the believe that the person could do x, y, and z better themselves, without the seemingly unnecessary overhead of the other business layers. Often they can generate revenue themselves on their own, though eventually they too will hire all those supplementary resources as their venture grows.
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So I have two rooms in the front of the house that could use more space, besides rearranging the furniture, I turned to working on the closet. A while back I had installed shoe racks and more shelves in my closet so I had some experience with wire shelving already. I knew I was going to install a system in one room, but that meant that i would have extra wire shelving, what was I going to do with that? How about use it for another system, designed by yours truly
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Past experiences and habits really do have an influence on future accomplishments. I’m sure you are thinking, “That’s probably pretty obvious,” and I agree, though lately I’ve been thinking of this and see more and more concrete examples of this in real life.
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This article is for those people who want to share input/output from the keyboard/mouse/monitor(s) among multiple systems.

There are two new tools I recently uncovered which I find quite useful. The first is full remote desktop sharing software. The second is input sharing, specifically using the keyboard/mouse among multiple computers with separate displays.
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Ok, so I started my Rails work with Tiger and painfully used rails to get RoR setup with RMagick.

I did the same thing on Leopard, and it also ended up being a pain. However, after some expiremention I’ve decided to roll with the preinstalled RoR that comes with Leopard rather then installing everything with ports. I’ve also got the RMagic install down to only four steps:)

Assumptions: you are running Leopard, you have already installed xCode, and you have Mac Ports.

- sudo port install tiff -macosx

- sudo port install ImageMagick

- sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/libMagick++.dylib /opt/local/lib/libmagick.dylib

- sudo gem install rmagick

DONE

I’ve taken some heat for my last post, everyone seems to get caught up on me using numbers in my example. It was only to help get my point across as to just how rare it is for two people who are compatible with each other to actually meet at the right time in their lives.

So what’s next, well on the same thread as the earlier post, stages in life, I’ll talk about another realization I had recently in my own life.

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Ok, any developer will tell you, IE6 can be a real hassle to develop for. Now I’ve certainly made my share of concessions, so another IE6 work around is nothing new. Having gotten used to more standards based browsers, I constantly think, why is IE so freaking popular! But alias, it is, so I have to support it.

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