iBrasten

Yay! iBrasten readership was stronger than ever this month! You’ll remember last month we had 360 unique visitors.. This month we hit 470 unique visitors! Furthermore, our unique-visitors-per-day numbers continue to be strong, averaging 58 unique visitors a day!

Thanks again to everyone who checks in on my little blog every now and then. :D

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I recently started diving into Ruby. This is quite the transition for me. For those who don’t know, I’ve essentially been an exclusive Java developer for my entire professional career (having left college for work about 6 years ago). Of course, that’s not to say I’ve never learned another development language… But as far as that go-to language that you turn to as your primary workhorse, for me that’s been Java.

So, I’ve been digging my way through Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas (‘the pickaxe book’, I’ve since learned). Around page 80 I intended on making a blog posting about how unstable I felt. I felt like I had just enough knowledge of Ruby to be REALLY dangerous, but not enough to know how to really put it all together. Thankfully I didn’t make that post, and I’m happy to report that somewhere between page 85 and page 115, everything clicked. Sometimes it takes an odd trigger for your brain to suddenly get something. For me, it was page 87-88, redefining operators. Literally making 2+2 = 5. OR, more usefully, defining operator logic for business objects. For example, Ruby knows what “Hello” + “World” is… but how can it know what Order1 + Order2 is?? But wouldn’t it be handy to be able to ‘add’ or ‘subtract’ your business model?? Understanding THAT, for some reason, suddenly made everything else I’d read about Ruby sink in. At this very moment I’m reading about Mixins. Sweet. :)

I don’t wish to participate in a flamewar… I was recently asked why Ruby. Why not Perl? That’s a fair question. I have nothing against Perl, necessarily. But as a Java developer, as someone who still really LIKES Java, I’ve never met a Perl developer that didn’t look down their nose at me. I realize that’s perhaps a bit exaggerated, but not much. On the flip side, I’ve found the Ruby community to be inviting and welcoming of Java developers. And I appreciate that. If you start off the conversation telling me my language of choice sucks, I’m not likely to listen to your alternative, even if that alternative is better. But that’s just me.

Thanks to Ilya from Russia for emailing me! I like to know when people read my blog, especially people from the other side of the world. :)

I will report iBrasten log results tomorrow for the month of October! Check back then!

Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination this morning….  I have to admit, the Dems played this one out PERFECTLY…  Not normally known for their good foresight, the Democratic Party as a whole basically just sat back and watched this whole thing happen.  The less intelligent thing to do - and in fact what I was expecting all along - would have been to attack Miers from the very beginning.  But instead they just let the whole thing fall apart without saying a word, which makes them look like they were willing to be fair and discuss the nomination, etc etc…  VERY well done.  We on the right would be wise to learn from that move.

For developers only…
I’ve recently ran across a couple blogs that are worth checking out, especially if you’re into software development (perhaps only if you’re into software development.  I dunno, could go either way.).  The first one I found while listening through some episodes of the Ruby on Rails podcast…  Slash7 is a blog by Amy Hoy.  I’d never heard of her until her interview on the podcast, but after doing a little looking around and reading her blog, she appears to be headed up the ladder of geek celebrity.  Great writing style, and obviously a very accomplished developer/designer/geek.

Secondly, I’ve been reading a blog by David Heinemeier Hansson the last couple days (called Loud Thinking).  David developed the Rails framework for Ruby.  Most of you know I recently started poking around with Ruby in general, and Rails specifically, and so far I’m enjoying it.  If you’re interesting in Ruby on Rails, check out LoudThinking.


Speaking of Rails...  I’m thinking that I could go back and try to redo a lot of my personal projects in Ruby on Rails.  I have several that I started in Java and just never quite finished…  CuteTogether.com, for example….  it’s ALMOST done… just needs to respect the gender preferences, handle images properly and provide actual results.  The thing is, it took me a long time to get to that point.  I was trying to learn some new Java technologies in the process, but regardless it took a decent amount of time.  Which is why I quit working on it.  I think I could redo the whole thing in Rails in the time it would take me to figure out where I left off on the current version.

Anyway, that’s all for now!



    Relevant Links
    David Heinemeier Hansson – http://www.loudthinking.com
    Amy Hoy – http://www.slash7.com

In August I wrote a little blurb about a way of making your AJAX apps responsive while reducing the frequency with which your clients ping your server.  It came out like so:

Today was a fun day at work. There’s something to be said for enjoying what you do. I was able to take a dreaded assignment and turn it in to something I love. Legitimately, too. We’re building essentially a touch-screen application for a point-of-sale system. Not literally for retail sales, these machines are designed for use by casinos at their tables. So my job is to build this application for this point-of-sale system. Originally it was requested that I do this using flash and Internet Explorer embedded into a custom app.

I’m not a fan of Flash or IE. I’m not very GOOD at Flash either. So, after thoroughly investigating the requirements of the application, I realized that I could put the thing together much faster as a standard web-based application. It would require some pretty intense JavaScript, yes… lots of AJAX, lots of CSS positioning… All stuff I want to learn. So, I set up a quick demo of my idea, and thankfully the powers that be quickly agreed. Earlier today we ran into a roadblock building that application on IE. It simply wasn’t going to do what we needed, so now we’re going to deploy to Firefox.

So, I went from Flash on IE to AJAX-enabled web-app on Firefox. Life is good.

Ruby in the rough…

So, my first week with Ruby has gone well, I think. I’m still learning the ins and outs of the language, but I can tell I’m going to like it. I started reading a Ruby on Rails book, but I realized that I wasn’t actually learning how Ruby worked. So I put that book down and started over with a Ruby book. It’s a little frustrating to be writing “Hello world” applications, but I’m slowly figuring this language out. I’ve never been in to dynamically-typed languages (as in, I’ve never used them heavily), so that’s a new experience for me. From what I can tell, the Ruby developer community is awesome. I signed up for the Seattle Ruby group… maybe I’ll attend one of the meetings soon…

Anyway, it’s late, I gotta sleep.

No Fluff Just Stuff

I love software conventions and other related activities (users groups, etc).  So when the announcement showed up on the Seattle Java Users Group email list that the No Fluff Just Stuff software symposium was coming to Seattle, I was thrilled!  Every few years or so Sun makes their way to Seattle with their free TechDays convention, but they haven’t been here in a couple years, so I decided to pony up the $700+- and go to NFJS.

Wow!  It was fantastic!  5 different tracks of lectures going at any given time… great food… great speakers.  I didn’t recognize most of the names, so I was a tad skeptical when I first registered… but once I got there and these people started mentioning what books they’d written, I realized most of these guys are authors of tech books that I’ve read and own!

I can feel already that I could go on and on for paragraphs detailing what this convention was like, so instead I’ll just stop myself here and and point out a few highlights.

Best Quote of the Weekend:  Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks was asked why nobody seems interested in EJB3, even though it seems to fix a lot of the problems from EJB2.x…  Quote: "Plan 9 from Outer Space is considered by most the worst movie ever made.  Would you go see Plan 10 from Outer Space?"

Apple laptops outnumbered PCs…  by a dramatic margin.  Easily 3:1 or higher.

For the first time (that I’VE noticed), the Java crowd was very bitchy about Java.  I think it’s because we’re finally feeling secure that Java’s not being wiped out by .NET, so we can stop putting on a happy face.  There were a lot of critiques and lamenting about what to do now.

Out of that came my next pursuit:  Ruby on Rails.  For a Java conference, there was a LOT of talk going on about Ruby of Rails.  And after going to one of the RoR lectures, I understand why.  So I picked up a book today and will be learning that.  If you’re doing web development, I seriously recommend picking up a book on Ruby on Rails.  The alpha-geeks in Java-land are flocking to it…  claims of 10x productivity over Java are being thrown around (and not disputed).


First Math Exam in 7 Years

I got back my first math exam I’d taken in 7ish years.  Ready for this….??   110 / 100 points!  WOOO.  (Yes, there was 10 extra credit points).

I’m kickin’ ass.


I had more to say but I want to get back to my Ruby book.  Below are some photos from No Fluff Just Stuff.

A few changes to the links worth noting.  Changed TheMusingPost’s description to say "finacee" instead of "Girlfriend"... a minor change in text, not so minor in real life. :)

Secondly, My friend, The Squire, decided to quit posting at his blog, SquireOfGothos.BlogSpot.com.  So I removed him.  In what may or may not be a related event, Ryan Sankey - also a friend - has decided to start a blog at www.RyanSankey.com.  Added that link.

Enjoy the changes!

This is not a NEW post.  It is something I wrote a while ago.  But I re-read it recently and thought I should post it here:

Cringe
Do you have situations in life, things that have happened in the past, that still pop up in your mind once in a while and make you cringe? Things where you said or did something that was entirely misunderstood, or perhaps wasn’t but in hindsight, was just plain stupid? Why is it these things continue to haunt us?

There are two things in particular that pop immediately to mind for me, so in the interest of mental purging, I will explain one of them to you now.

Firstly, 5 years ago I was just beginning my first year at a new university. I wasn’t a freshman, I was a transfer student, but I didn’t know anyone there of course. I’ve always been a quiet person, even a little shy, but much more so back then. Anyway, we were having a little ‘get-to-know-everyone’ session in my dorm lobby. About 50 people were there. This was the chance that everyone had to get to know you for the first time… Going around the circle, we were each to explain ourselves in a few short sentences. You all know the drill. My time came and went uneventfully, thankfully.

Here’s where it got weird.

About 10 people later, some girl in the middle of her explanation made a completely derogatory remark about the people who live in the particular town I lived in. In trying to defend myself, I made a loud, snobby comment right back to her. Complete silence. A couple random chuckles. After what felt like an eternity, she continued with her story. Upon reflection later that night, I had realized that this girl had not said what I thought she’d said. She hadn’t said anything close to it. In fact, she was just explaining where she was from. From everyone else’s viewpoint, there would have been absolutely NO connection to what she had just said and me, let alone from her statement to what I said to her. It would have appeared as if I’d just randomly blurted out what – out of the context I had believed - would’ve been extremely insensitive and rude.

I know that the next day, nobody thought about that. Nobody to this day would probably remember that incident.

But I do. And to this day, when that thought enters my mind, I cringe.

—-

As a follow up, one of my favorite quotes is from Dr. Phil, who said: "You wouldn’t worry so much about what people thought about you if you knew how seldom they did."

It’s true. And so, as I head off to bed, a couple things I’ve learned today:

Sometimes when you check your answers, you do the checking wrong. I had my first math exam today in like 7 years. The first week or two of class was a little touch and go, but I’ve gotten my head back into the college math game I think. That’s not to say that I’m completely comfortable, I’m not… I never was. Math doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m not able to look at numbers and quickly decide what to do with them. BUT, I ENJOY math very much, and I’m capable of keeping up enough to do well.

That said, I think I did very well on my first exam. I double and triple checked my answers, and feel very comfortable almost all. There was one question that was a short answer question.. you can’t check those of course, but I think I did well. Nevertheless, I did discover on TWO occasions during the exam that the answer I came up with the first time I did a problem ended up being correct, but when I checked the answer (by plugging it back into the equation), it didn’t work. It turns out, on both occasions, I was making a mistake during the checking process, not the original problem.

Sometimes bias is warranted. I spent most of today at work learning and working in C#. Being a Java guy, that’s kind of a big deal. And I discovered I really DON’T like C#. Which I could have told you all along, but I had no way of truly knowing before.

So there you go, a couple things I learned today.

Everyone pretty much agrees that the marketing for Serenity sucked big time.  The previews were bad.  Anyway, someone had a great idea and released the first nine minutes of Serenity to iFilm.  If you’re been sitting on the fence about this movie, watch the first few scenes.

First Nine Minutes of Serenity.

Old Attitude.

Decided to make some changes to the blog.  Hope all you like it.  It’s still got some quirks, but I’ll be working on those.  Several of the menu options at the top don’t yet function.

BUT, on the right hand side, note the presence of a tagboard!  Give it a shot!  It’s kind of a way to let people comment in general instead of in a post.  Like mini-posts.  200 character limit, keep it brief, but enjoy!

... You can’t take the sky from me.

It kind of hurts, actually.  I’ve been waiting and rooting for the movie Serenity for nearly a year.  Based on the short-lived television show Firefly by Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Serenity represented vindication for the group of fans who felt Firefly was wrongly canceled.  So as soon as word of a movie was leaked, we’ve been waiting.

And it was worth the wait.  I’m not going to say much about it, because if you haven’t seen it I don’t want to spoil it.  But, it was good.  Don’t just take my word for it though.  Most surveys I’ve seen have said 90-95% of moviegoers reported liking-to-loving the movie.  And critics have been raving.  Ebert and Roeper - no fans of Sci-Fi from what I’ve seen - gave it two thumbs up.  Critics describe the movie as ‘fresh’, ‘laugh-out-loud hilarious’, and there’s definitely a ton of action.

So what hurts?  It’s tanking.  Universal and Joss Whedon are trying to spin the box office returns, but the fact is, the movie is getting slaughtered.  Still, I’m hopeful that all the positive reviews this week will drive attendence next weekend,   We shall see.

If you haven’t seen it, and think Sci-Fi is even remotely tolerable, go see it.  You’ll like it.

Congratulations, iBrasten readers…
For the second month in a row, iBrasten readership hit all-time highs.  For the month of September, we had 360 unique visitors registering over 1,500 visits, averaging about 52 unique visitors a day.  Those numbers tailed off slightly towards the end of the month, which I’m guessing is because I haven’t been posting as often.  I’ll work on that.

A couple of the more interesting search terms that were used to discover iBrasten:  "little finger numb with a pinched nerve", "going away cake", "superyo samurai", and "eesv.pk".

Thank you readers!