New Addiction

I got my son an XBOX 360 a few weeks ago. We have been playing Halo 3 since then and what a game! Got it hooked up to my HD TV and the graphics are fantastic.

I had picked up an XBOX with Halo 2 from a good friend and got hooked on it. But the 360 is leagues ahead. We got a XBL Gold account and my son is having a great time playing Halo 3 with his friends.

One disappointment though.....only a single Profile on the 360 can be attached to the XBL account. So that means that only one of us (him of course) can get ranked. I only show up as a guest. What would be great is if you could add on additional profiles to an existing XBL account for a (small) additional cost. XBL itself is cheap enough ($20 = 3 months) but still.

Mobile and Android

Really think that Android has a shot at opening up the last (until we find another one..:)) closed computing frontier. Mobile computing. Unleash developers and the great ideas and code will flow. Verizon's announcement that they will be opening their network is a great sign. Will see if they follow through.

So I am digging into Android AWS (Aas We Speak). Trying to come up with an idea for an app that will exercise most of the capabilities and get me some hard/valuable experience.

Catching Up!

Been a looooong time. Lots of changes.
Commute...I work in Maryland now. No more 1-1.5 hour treks down the I270 to Virginia.
35 minutes door-to-door...SWEET!

Work...no more managing. I am a Rails grunt now. Trying to get the team to embrace writing automated tests for their code. Putting together a Continuous Integration (CI) capability. As of today we are automatically runing rake test:units whenever SVN based repository changes. I have Selenium based (HTML) tests running most of the app. Trying to get them into the CI suite.

Language...Ruby on Rails. I do most of the front end stuff. Lots of Prototype and Scriptaculous.

Rails and Amazon S3 and golf

Signed up for an Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) account today. S3 is one of Amazon's Web Services account. S3 is fast storage available anywhere. Don't know what I am going to do with it but at the prices (pennys a month) I can afford to play around with it a bit.

Michael has his last golf lesson today. Taught me a few things which greatly improved
my (non existent) game. Following a few simple rules can make it a lot more fun.

Checking in

Spring and (I hope) summer are finally here. Just a few weeks until off to Portland for RailsConf. No news yet on moving north to my new job...:( But getting to get my hands dirty with writing some code....part of it with Rails.

Have been playing with Camping also. If you use sqlite for your persistence you can create database driven web apps with a really small footprint. Will post actual numbers after I finish the app.

Caffeine and bandwidth

Not feeling well. But staying at home drives me nuts.
Hanging out at the Olney Caribou coffee. Wi-fi is free now.
Doing my part to keep it profitable though.
Buying stuff.

JuiceCasting

Decided to try out Juicecast. Pretty cool. Take pic with cell. Send pic to JuiceCaster account. Pic shows up on JuiceCaster account and wherever I put the JuiceCaster MediaBox like here.

My new (used) Powerbook

The Powerbook G4 arrived and I got busy quick. Rails is up and running (used Locomotive) to get it installed. Also have a trial version of TextMate and Subversion. The RoRFlix application is working also and checked into Subversion!

Finally moving up-town (getting an Apple laptop)

Ever since RailsEdge I have had Mac Envy. Been cruising eBay for used Mac laptops. Found a Powerbook G4 for $350. Also bought a broken G3 Wallstreet laptop. Went a little crazy this last weekend.

Trident 2.1 will roll out tommorow night

Another big release for Trident Friday night! 2.1 has 187+ features and bug fixes. Really need to get this stuff delivered to Production more frequently so we can do smaller releases.