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Friday, January 4th, 2008I’m again experimenting with adding my Twitter stream to Futurist Now. People detested the old post style integration so this time I’m trying a live feed view in the sidebar. Leave a comment if you love it or hate it.
I can configure the number of tweets to display - how many do readers find useful? If I just put a single one it shows real-time context without visually overpowering the main content column. On the other hand more gives a better context of what I’m doing, but adds a huge block of text to the sidebar.
Refactoring is fun
Friday, December 28th, 2007During the last couple of days I’ve been toying with Traskpro development tasks while I’ve been home ill. Until today I didn’t actually implement any new functionality, but rather spent my time re-factoring ‘old’ code from the 0.1 and 0.2 versions. Re-factoring is a low strain on my brain and a great task for idly doing while drifting in and out of sickly sleep - once I got the new architectures and designs on paper implementation of the new pattern happened on a feature by feature basis.
Most notably I took a lot of hacky if loops to select SQL queries and moved them into a net-new function which builds the queries based in inputs so the code is both easier to read and easier to maintain long term. I also moved a lot of in-line functionality to within functions which has made long term maintainability and new feature development a breeze.
Not only does this re-factoring provide more readable code, but having everything generalized into functions made adding a few new features a breeze. For instance I just added a capture feature to Traskpro for capturing more than one task (and tag array) at once. This makes capturing action items in a meeting brain dead simple and removes the need for a round trip to the server between each individual addition. Because of the functions for adding/editings tasks, or adding tags to tasks this new feature was developed in a far more efficient fashion - rather than building from scratch I could re-use code.
Simple stuff I know, but not developing for a living really does give me appreciation for elegant, maintainable, and readable code.
Renewed and renowned
Thursday, December 20th, 2007Funny how getting my car detailed can kick my auto-passion into high gear. Tuesday evening I picked up my A6 from Mirrorworks from having a full detail and some paint work done. It’s shiny and like-new again - I’m swooning all over my precious car again!
Aside from the car life has been good. Traskpro has his a solid and stable 0.9 (and graduated from alpha to beta) and is rocking my task list right and left. I even have acquired a few other heavy users which is oddly gratifying. I’ve still got 31 remaining features/tweaks to make, but those can happen gradually over the next few weeks as I continue to ramp up on JavaScript.
Also in the world of good things Scott came over last night. He hadn’t experienced a proper viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End so we did dinner and a showing of that. As silly and overly-Disney as the film is I really do enjoy watching it. I really do hope that big budget swashbucklers never die - they are just so much fun to experience.
Right - back to work now. I have to finish up a ton of stuff today and tomorrow to be ready to take off a few days to be home for Christmas!
Traskpro is conceived
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007The dev bug has bitten me again and I’m playing with code. This time it was prompted by a few missing features in Backpack and the brilliant idea to roll my own life management solution. Thus Traskpro (Task Tracking Pro) was born. Unlike most of my development stings in the last 5 years I actually sat down and did a little planning before I dived into it this time.
I have spent the last couple of days analyzing and designing my user scenarios and figuring out exactly how best to implement a task tracking solution so that it’s as flexible as possible and requires the fewest number of actions to operate. The Traskpro specification is now complete for version 0.1 and I started to dive into coding tonight. Having spent my first few days planning is making a huge difference - coding is easier this way and I suspect the end result will be a lot cleaner.
I’ve started my development with MAMP (PHP/MySQL on the Mac), but am toying with switching over to Ruby on Rails at some point. For now I’d rather stick to a language I’m more comfortable with given that I have a big learning curve ahead for SQL which I haven’t touched in ages.
More to come - I need to get a few more of my classes built out and then get to bed. I have two more days of ‘day job’ ahead before the much needed weekend arrives.
Something very small causing big problems
Thursday, December 6th, 2007It’s amazing in this increasingly technical world how something so small can cause such big problems. My Thinkpad T61 laptop at work developed a single bad sector in one of it’s 2GB RAM modules (specifically a 6 byte range) which has caused endless random behaviors and blue screens. Funny how a single bad transistor, less than a trillionth of an inch across can cause an entire computing system to careen out of control.
Thankfully Lenovo was quite gracious about it and sent a new stick via 2 day air and I got it installed. Aside from perhaps an overly-aggressive feedback cycle they managed to impress me with their customer service. I just received and installed the RAM module and a quick 10 minute pass of MemTest86 revealed no errors and so far Vista seems much more stable. Here’s hoping that the stability continues - as best as Windows can provide.
Photosnobbery
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007I saw this and it made me smile.
Via Photododo
Launching
Thursday, November 1st, 2007Yesterday brought 12 hours of production issues, troubleshooting, and delayed launches. I hate days like that and really can’t wait for the weekend now (2 days left). We have another busy day of launch activity ahead of us today, but hopefully we will complete everything and be ready for a nice relaxing Friday.
On the plus side I picked up an Airport Extreme to replace my slowly dying Linksys Gigabit-N router. The Airport Extreme has blown my socks off - not only is it drop dead simple to configure, but my Macbook Pro Lanshark connects at 300Mbps and gets 21MB/sec actual throughput at 1.4ms latency. Impressive!
Your Apple ID requires harvesting?!
Saturday, October 27th, 2007
While at the Leopard launch last night Mike picked up an 8Gb 3rd generation iPod Nano for his daughter. While over at their house this morning I was amused to see he was having trouble registering the Nano. Every time he tries to sign in with his Apple ID he gets the puzzling error “This person record requires harvesting.” (click the image above for a full sized view).
While I’m sure it has a valid technical meaning it’s a strange message to show to an end user. It almost makes me wonder - what kind of harvesting is Apple talking about here, a kidney or a crop?
Life’s little pleasures: Leopard, IMAP, and Puzzle Quest
Saturday, October 27th, 2007The past 24 hours has brought a number of great things into my life. Yesterday night I went to the Bell Square Apple Store for the Leopard launch with Mike and picked myself up a copy of the shiny new version of OS X.
The launch event itself was an interesting experience. Apple really does know how to work a crowd, and the energy and passion it’s employees (retail and engineering alike) bring to work with them makes for a really positive experience for Apple’s customers.
Leopard itself is a neat little upgrade. The upgrade itself actually works really well - I didn’t lose any of my documents, settings, or preferences. Aside from Quicksilver being stuck in my dock (not the menubar where it really belongs) everything works flawlessly on Lanshark - Photoshop even stayed fully activated. Leopard is nothing revolutionary, but it really does add a lot of polish to OS X and makes for a worthwhile upgrade.
For the first time ever I actually kind of like the Finder. Quicklook (the ability to preview just about any document without the overhead of opening it’s parent application) is handy and makes confirmation that you have the document you are looking for brain dead simple. Spotlight is vastly improved featuring much faster searches, operators, and network search abilities.
Aside from the Leopard launch I was also thrilled to find out my Gmail account finally got IMAP enabled. The IMAP implementation is well done, and it makes Gmail’s iPhone experience as slick as their browser experience. Being able to have Mail.app cache my gmail account is handy as well for having my webmail searchable via the OS just like the rest of my personal knowledge store.
The final great thing to enter my life yesterday was Puzzle Quest for the DS. Puzzle Quest is a fun little RPG/Puzzler game that a couple of friends had suggested and it’s quite fun. It offers quick-in, quick-out gameplay - a fun addition to my go bag.
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