random updates from a busy May-June
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on June 27th, 2009
Long-ish time no post. I’ve been neglecting my online personal stuff due to being busy at work and busy at home. Not much progress to report on any technical fronts of my own. My IPhone development has stalled out, but I’ll get to pick that up again soon. I have a few domains I’ve been meaning to write sites for, but haven’t gotten around to fleshing them out further. My brother in law is doing a way better job at them me over at neverfamous.com.
Just got a mac mini at work, and I’ve gotta say its a cool little piece of hardware for the money. Is there anything Apple doesn’t do right (I know, there’s a list: that hi-fi thing, the newton, their earbuds (and by extension the new shuffle), etc).
On another Apple fan boy note, Isabella just broke Joanie’s LG Env2, which meant we needed a new phone. We could have paid Verizon some coin and extended her contract with them another few years, but decided to just break our contract with Verizon and get her on an iPhone. Being on a shared minute plan will actually save us enough to pay off the cancellation fees and the cost differential between an iphone and a replacement verizon phone in about 6 months.
Hey naan
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on May 13th, 2009
Thanks to a combo of scratch cooking ( http://www.nandyala.org/mahanandi/archives/2006/06/06/naan/ ) and trader joes we had a tasty Indian meal last night. Tj’s has curry marinated chicken tenders, which fry up easily, and I followed the naan recipie using a hotter oven and pizza stone, instead of the batch method suggested. We also had Madras lentils from costco and mango lassi. The girls didn’t really like the chicken, but we sure did.
Ah, Rejection
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on April 29th, 2009
Oh well, apparently due to ” minimal user functionality” my phonewhale app doesn’t pass muster. Sorry Apple, I figured that in a world where there are how many metric tons of apps based solely on your ‘level’ example that minimal might be OK. I get it though. PhoneWhale was mainly about amusing my collegues, and learning. I’m gonna work on a few more ideas, something a bit less minimal.
First app submitted to the app store.
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on April 25th, 2009
W
ell, PhoneWhale has been submitted to the app store. It’s a simple application, little more than a hello world. It consists of a whale, drawn by Julianna, traced to vector art by me. You touch the whale, you hear a foghorn, you touch her mouth (trust me, it has to be a female, or should I say feWhale), you hear a groaning appology. Pretty simple really. It’s free, and up for approval. I’d like to enhance it with more sounds, animation, and maybe a feed of stupid stuff other people say, but for now it’s out there. I bought PhoneWhale.com, which is an extremely simple site, and will probably always remain so.
I’ve got an asp.net mvc app I’m working on, as well as another few iPhone apps I’d like to write. Also, the format of this blog changed, I’ve consolidated all my hosting under one account.
Man I never blog…
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on April 14th, 2009
So, what the heck has been happening in my life:
- I’m still happily married, still have two kids
- I still work at Toolbox.com, still digging it
- I twitter a few times a day, and post here a few times a year. that’s bad. I should work on that.
- I have been getting back to working out two or four times a week, but haven’t been on a bike outdoors in way too long.
- I read In Defense of Food, a really interesting look into the ‘Wester Diet’ that I’m trying to follow. Probably a blog post in its own right.
- I bought an iMac.
- I just signed up for the iPhone Dev program.
Yeah, those last three are pretty significant for me technically. See I’ve been a windows programmer my whole career. I’ve written CA-Clipper dbase apps, Win32 apps, MFC, Atl, console, .Net C# winforms, Asp.Net, etc. I’ve dabbled in php and perl, but by and large, I’m a windows Dev. So why the switch?
Here’s the thing: When I come home, or when I get a call from my wife, I don’t want to worry about who clicked on what email in outlook, or surfed by a hacked site with drive by download code. No thank you. I’ve played with Apple hardware before, my dad has had them, and I’ve had the odd g5 or mac book pro on my desk at work from time to time, but never as a primary box, and certainly never to code on.
This Mac flies. The simple tasks that should be simple, but aren’t in Windows, are simple on this. All my usb stuff works, the backup utility (time machine) is actually fun to use, safari and Firefox work great, and Parallels emulation actually runs windows vista and my quicken install faster than my previous three year old Dell, and lets me code windows apps when I want to. The Dell has been re-purposed as an edubuntu / ubuntu running a proxy/filtering/firewall solution, sitting in my daughters room. It runs ubuntu a heck of a lot better than it ever ran windowsXPMCE.
So tonight I was working on an iPhone app that uses the built in accelerometer, but the iPhone simulator, while really useful in other respects, doesn’t support simulating the accelerator. So I applied for the developer program. Yes it’s 99 dollars, and yes, I probably won’t see a profit on the next great iPhone app (although given what sells, maybe my stupid ideas aren’t that terrible). But I figure getting a bit of skin in the game will make me committed to actually developing something saleable, and at the worst, I’ll have a cost of doing business to use at tax time.
Sore, but in a good way.
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on January 4th, 2009
My biking buddies Kevin and Dave and I hit a new segment of trail yesterday. The Black Canyon Trail runs from Cave Creek up to Black Canyon City. It’s been mainly built by horseback riders and mountain bikers. We hit a segment that starts in Black Canyon and rode about 5 or 6 miles in to a logical turn around point and back. It was perfect weather, a little cold, with water running in the agua fria river, which left my socks wet on the ride and the return, and a grin on my face. The trail has been really well laid out so that climbs are long and gradual, and the scenery was amazing. I took a set of photos with my iPhone from a nice resting place and composed a photosynth of them here. The light levels are a bit off, but you get the idea. The trail doesn’t see a ton of traffic, we probably passed about 5 bikers and 4 horse/riders. I was wearing my heart rate monitor and recorded 3:20 of ride time, with 2551 calories expended. I feel pretty sore today, since I had lifted at the gym the preceeding day, but it was really nice to put tire to new trail. I’m hoping 2009 is the year I get back to riding a lot.
Picking the right technology
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on December 22nd, 2008
So we’re at the mall, and they have these vertically oriented plasma displays rotating ads. Or normally they display ads, but at the height of the commercial season, they’re showing errors. If I worked for that company I’d do three things:
step 1: change the desktop background image to a static image of my most important client’s ad.
step 2: put a global exception handler into my program.
step 3: fix it.
Honestly, why would you pick Windows, and .Net to develop a mall kiosk application? And if you did, wouldn’t you run some tests? Granted this isn’t life or death software here, but it is the life of this business.
The error up close
Mall Advert Fail
monthly blog entry
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on December 4th, 2008
sitting here eating dinner at 9:30. haven’t ridden in like a month, and I’m thinking I’ll gain about 10 pounds this winter. Gotta get back out there. I’ve been keeping busy working, hanging with the family, and killing zombies (my gamer card )
my gamer card
playing with people I actually know makes the game about 3 times more enjoyable. anyway. that’s about it.
Monthly? update
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on November 12th, 2008
Looking like I never post, I’ve actually been pretty busy in my work life. I’ve just been to Microsoft’s PDC., which I journaled extensively in my it.toolbox.com journal. Hey, they footed the bill for that, so they get my meager writing skills. As a followup to playing with some of Microsoft’s newest stuff, I’ve got a work laptop running windows 7, with Visual Studio 2008 installed. To come up with a way to give away all the vendor t-shirts and related swag, I wrote a raff;e web app using ASP.NET MVC talking to a db via ADO.NET Entity Framework. Gotta say, so far I’m not loving the EF. It is nice not having to write DAL code, but the resulting entities are tightly bound to the EF, and don’t support nHibernate staples like lazy loading, and caching. (Yes, I know there are work arounds. and EF is headed for PI Nirvahna, but till it’s ready, it’s just not gonna be my favorite.). I am really diggin MVC, once I got my head into that space, and I also found jQuery to be a joy to get. Fluent interfaces are a lot of fun.
Anyway, sorry for the short rambling post, just wanted to blog something. anything.
