eris rising

This is long overdue... I finally replaced my crappy cell phone with a Droid Eris.

Why the Eris, and not the Motorola Droid? Here's a helpful comparison:
http://the-gadgeteer.com/2009/11/06/droid-eris-vs-droid/

My first Apps to install???
http://www.google.com/search?q=TasKiller
http://code.google.com/p/connectbot/

"Spooky" (groovy mix) - frigiD touch

"Spooky" (groovy mix) - frigiD touch
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summer hiatus

Apparently, I took the summer off from blogging.

Here's a little something that made me chuckle:

stackoverflow.com/questions/234075/what-is-your-best-programmer-joke/234170#234170

imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tech_support_cheat_sheet.png

wireless-g card deal

Just picked up a wireless-g USB key, Trendnet TEW-424UB. These cards are on special at Microcenter for ~$10 right now.

Many of the forums I visited didn't offer any info on the driver for Mac OS-X... I found it here: http://www.trendnet.com/downloads/list_subcategory.asp?SUBTYPE_ID=1155

I tried to reply on the forums, but unfortunately, they're "archived" and replies aren't allowed. (?!)

grails is groovy

Last Wednesday, I attended the Cleveland JUG meeting which featured a presentation on Groovy and Grails by Christopher Judd of Judd Solutions. The presentation was timely for me, as I was recently lamenting the overhead in creating a simple application in Java. I've long felt that the development cycle was far more cumbersome than it needed to be. When he suggested that this overhead takes time away from exploring new technologies, I could definitely relate.

Groovy is a dynamic scripting language for the Java platform. It is compiled to JVM bytecode which means it runs in standard Java containers and integrates seamlessly with existing Java code and libraries. The language also contains features inspired by Python, Ruby, Perl and Smalltalk. Grails is a webapp framework which supports Groovy, leverages desired open-source Java technologies (Hibernate, Spring, etc.), and places an emphasis on convention over configuration.

It was really impressive to see how fast one can create a basic app using Grails. My former CTO Gary Baney suggested this would be a great tool to create a quick "proof of concept" application, something that doesn't often come easy in Java. I'm curious as to how Grails will hold up to refactoring and debugging. I was pleased to find an Eclipse plug-in for Grails, and already have a few projects in mind. I'll write more as I learn more...

get your smithwicks off my guinness

Thank you to all of my friends and family for wishing me a happy birthday yesterday. I was floored by how many messages I received. This year, my brother Scott and I took the Rapid downtown and back. It was so packed going in, that they were turning away passengers at later stops. The great weather brought a huge crowd. I was on a stout kick this year, and so much Guinness drinking ensued.

Continuing on the theme of beer... I went to the Linked Cleveland event at Rock Bottom Brewery a few weeks back. Just before the end of happy hour, I went to order a pizza. The bartender in charge said it was too close to the end of happy hour. Huh...? Nice service, folks. Instead, we packed it up and went to Great Lakes for real beer, and an amazing dinner (the Pretzel Chicken is fantastic).

What kind of beer does Petey drink?

Why, Pete's Wicked Ale of course!

Here's the proof:

bigger blue?

BusinessWeek.com - Why IBM Wants Sun

ZDNet - IBM's potential purchase of Sun: Here's why it makes sense (see also the counterpoint)

intro to vista

Last night I saw Windows Vista for the first time. It was on a friend's laptop who is new to PCs in general. A couple of us were trying to walk him thru some basics including using MS Word, and navigating the file system. One consistent problem I noticed with Vista, is that the UI seems designed for the newbie and the experienced user at the same time, but is ultimately confusing to both.

Imagine you're a newbie looking for Word... There's a new "doc" at the top that looks vaguely Unix/OS-X--like, but doesn't contain Word (Update: This is apparently the Dell Dock). The "start bar" contains a menu featuring the selection "New Document". That's not real intuitive. If you scroll up the giant menu, you can eventually find MS Word, but this is highly unintuitive. We tried navigating the "programs" menu, but it still contains that horrible feature known as "personalized menus" and of course excluded Word in the process. Finally, using "New Document" we created and saved a sample Word document.

We tried to show him how to add headers and footers. Headers and Footers existed underneath two different menus. Each provided two completely different types of functionality. Fortunately, one of them was what we wanted.

Our friend ultimately wanted to copy his Word document to a USB flash drive. Figuring we should view the file system, we opened a Windows Vista Explorer window. The selections on the left displayed a list known as "Favorite Links" which seems roughly analogous to OS-X's "Places" on Finder. We quickly found the existence of our new Word document under "Documents". After attaching the USB flash drive, it was time to navigate to it. However, it did not appear under "Favorite Links." In fact, Favorite Links doesn't seem to match any actual hierarchy on the file system. It appears to be a list of shortcuts to common places you may use... But shouldn't a newly attached flash drive be among them?

So, how do we navigate to the flash drive? How does one view actual folders on the Vista file system in explorer? If you click the on the "Folders" arrow at the bottom of the list, it displays actual folders within a mammoth scroll bar, stunted so you can still access "Favorite Links". The list is a difficult to read, and includes most of the same directories as "Favorite Links" (Music, Pictures, etc...) which is confusing and redundant. Finally, if you scroll down, you can locate the drives by letter, including the flash drive which was mounted to drive F.

Eventually, we showed him how to copy the file over to the flash drive. After that, he started to remove the device, but we stopped him and explained that the drive needs to be removed "safely". Now if you right-click on the device icon, it gives you several options, including to safely remove the device, or eject (!?). We chose to 'safely remove the device' after which, Vista complained that 'the device is still in use', despite the fact that all applications were closed. Confused? We were. But I'm certainly no longer confused as to Vista's slow adaption rate.