This is the blog of Brasten Sager, a software engineer, Mariners fan, guitarist, haphazard philosopher.
Something about the my hometown Seattle Seahawks going to the Super Bowl makes realize just how much I miss baseball.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited about the Seahawks… I’m happy for them… I’ll watch the Super Bowl. But, man… I miss the Mariners during the offseason.
I would like to have iBrasten running on a theme that I actually designed. To that end I’ve been throwing around some ideas. I figured I’d give you a sneak peek of some of them.. This is currently the front-runner… It’s a tribute to Apple’s marketing team. I call it iCandy.
The Website
Well, I finally got BrastenAndJessica.com up and running. This is good because the invitations went out a few days ago. We’ve got several RSVPs on the site already. You’re welcome to go check the site out. I know it’s simple, but it actually was designed to match the invitations, which I think it does very well. Please don’t play with the RSVPing though, you’ll mess up our stats and we’ll end up paying for a lot more catering than we need. ;)
The Wedding
The wedding itself it turning out to be quite an interesting event. I’ve talked about it before here, but just to recap, it’s exactly the kind of event we would want to attend! It’ll be at the Seattle Asian Art Museum… open galleries… tray-served catering… jazz band…. dancing… it’ll be a blast! More low-key than most weddings, we’re definitely going for that formal snobby party feel, and I think we’re going to nail it. From the location to the flowers to the decorating.
Anyway, I had to post something about it here, because the website links back to my blog. :)
Exceptions
There are several people who will not be receiving invitiations that are non-the-less invited. That list includes: Steve Jobs, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dave Thomas, Amy Hoy, James Gosling…
Well, Steve Jobs threw us all a litle curveball there. Everyone was expecting Intel iBooks, not Intel “PowerBooks”. But alas, the PowerBook is what we got! Although it’s been renamed to the MacBook Pro. I assume the iBooks will be called MacBooks also once they’re Intelized. Anyway, I can’t afford to get one just yet. But several months from now, I will be replacing my PowerBook with a MacBook, and I’m stoked!
My little attempt to sneak Ruby on Rails into my workplace is going well. I’m definitely committed to it at this point for this project. We’ve ended up with a lot more integration-type work than I was originally expecting. While I can’t give too many details, the project essentially entails accepting data embedded systems, and table PCs, and running various calculations on them.
At this point, I’m using Rails and Mozilla (set to kiosk mode) for the tablet PCs. The Tablet PC pings Rails via AJAX every couple of seconds for new information. The Rails server uses Distributed Ruby (DRb) to connect to a master application (plain ol’ Ruby service). The plain-ol-Ruby application is ALSO accepting web service calls from Java application on the embedded systems. (The Java application is, itself, just translating calls from a C++ application).
OH, and I didn’t get to start coding anything until late last week, and it’s supposed to be complete next week sometime. So it’s very exciting times indeed. Nevertheless, this is a good experiment, using Ruby in a production environment with a near-impossible deadline that MUST be met.
The thing I love about Ruby the most it the practically none-existent barrier-to-entry when it comes to quickly prototyping your ideas. In Java, I wouldn’t even start a project unless I was sure it was something I wanted to do. Now I just start. A good example of that: how many database schemas did you have on your machine before Rails? And after? MySQL had a good 4 or 5 databases on my laptop – pre Rails. Now I’ve got over 25 and growing rapidly. "rails <great\_new\_application>" is just too easy to do. In an hour you can have a decent skeleton of your idea, see it working, and THEN decide if it sucks or not.
Anyway, back to work I go.
OH! I almost forgot: I had a few free hours yesterday so I put together a new system for DellRumors.com. I will be transfering the stories over lunch, so if the site is blank, check back after noon.
Once I add commenting and some administration capabilities, it will be a fairly solid (basic) blogging system. Kind of neat actually! The primary requirement for the site was the ability to access submissions from users, notify the "editor" (me) and allow me to accept, reject, or modify the submissions before they are officially posted to the site. I don’t know if that type of system would be useful to any one else, but once I add the missing features, I may throw it up on RubyForge.
DellRumors.com - A satirical site, most appreciated by Mac users.
How do you sneak Ruby in to your company?
People have discussed that topic at length. Unfortunately I cannot find any of those articles at the moment (feel free to put URLS in the comments if you know of any.)
I’ve lamented on my blog before that I didn’t think it would be possible to get Ruby and/or Rails into my organization for a variety of reasons. BUT, I did keep my eyes open for an opportunity, and I think I’ve found it.
We have about two weeks to throw together a nearly impossible prototype (impossible due to time constraints) for a demo. The powers that be declared it must be done, "whatever it takes." Given the urgency, the whatever-it-takes declaration, and the fact that the prototype will be scrapped as soon as the demo’s over, I felt that was my opportunity.
Hopefully once this project is done, they will feel comfortable with Rails and would be willing to keep using it for production code.