back in the RTP...

Back in RTP again. Traveling for work and staying at the Wyndham again. Flight out was a little late a little bumpy, but manageable.

The flight out had me thinking about legislating technology. For the best reasons legislation was created to make airtravel safe. The down side to this legislation is that the Air companies are slow to adopt innovations. Our planes are old and unable to take advantage of all the advances that technology has put forward into other areas of transportation. Think how far our cars have come forward in the last few decades. I'm sure the issues is more complex than I lay out but I still that the current round of American air companies have become dependent on the outlays of the government and aviation rules which have led to a decaying infrastructure that is unable to cope with rapidly changing environments and requirements. I do enjoy travel but I really want to avoid American air companies as much as possible, whenever possible, at least until I see some changes.

The lab is coming along slowly. Built the first image for VMWare. Next step is going to be deploying to ESX. I'm a step behind in Xen, need to do a little more work to get that going. Also need to upload all this stuff tomorrow so that Cathy can test it.

Started reading "A Not So Small Life" not very far with it, but it is giving me some perspective. It is pulling me in the direction of additional introspection. The question I have next is whether I want do exhibit my introspection. On the one hand I think I can benefit from the feedback of my friends and family. On the other hand, it is a fairly public website connected to google. There is a limit to how much I need to share that wide :) Is there a penalty to how much I share? Probably. There are limits to what I should say. But at the same time I think there is something worthwhile to thinking about what I can say and putting more out there.

I should disclaim up front that these are my opinions and not those of my employers. Hmm. Something to update in the template I think.

Work, Writing and other foibles.

Last few days I've noticed I've been hitting the posts rather long. I'm remembering how to write and remembering that I kinda enjoy it. I used to try and journal more, but that fell by the wayside. Too many things to work thru or think thru and time just shriveled up. Not that I have much more time now, but I will see if I can do more writing. Writing as self discovery is always a fun form of cheap therapy. It is a lot easier to know oneself on a couple of lines than sitting around pondering. Not that sitting about pondering doesn't have its place but writing it out give it a sense of grounding and permanence. Of course I'd really like to keep it from degenerating into sophmoric, whiny, emo crap. There is too much to be excited about, to be angry about, to be sad about, to be happy about, that I really shouldn't spend all my time woe-is-me-ing.

I decided yesterday to pull back a little at work. I've been a bit obsessed with work lately, between PBCs and the new project, and meeting with Execs, I've been putting a lot of pressure on myself to really cave into the work. Since our final sprint of the last iteration I've been putting in a ton of hours, with very little relief. I need to stop. Part of the key to Agile is working at a sustainable pace. As one of the managers pointed out to me, if I'm violating the principal of Agile, how can I get my team to follow along with me as well? Do as I say not as I do, doesn't fly much with adults either.

I've been trying to focus my efforts on doing things that my management and team want, which in some ways is the right thing to do, but I've been neglecting my own personal drives and goal. My career plan is a pretty vague affair. I've been looking at the band ladder and saying --yeah, I should be scaling this. I need to really think about what I want to do. I will say I do enjoy working with a team and building something bigger than what I could do on my own. Leadership is hard but still a good challenge. I still enjoy doing individual development -- MDD while currently under wraps due to time constraints, is a good bit of fun.

One of the struggles I have with work has been that I've got a good insight into what will be useful for our team and for our company -- technologies like Object Grid or PHP or Virtualization, and while I've been right, I haven't been able to show the value to my management or grow the skills enough on my own to make them worthwhile. What hit me the other day is that understanding the need and the value of these skills and growing them either personally or within the team is really what technical leadership means. I should be exploring this stuff, and even if my management doesn't care or see value, I should take it as far as I can.
I've been focused a little too much on bands and certification, and not really enough on leadership. If I want to get better at it, I need to practice it more. So while I'm not going to stop listening to the needs of my management or the teams I'm working with, I still feel I need to be responsive to both, I need to trust my instincts a little more and be able to follow thru with what I think it is important and right.

I may not have all the opportunities to deploy all of these cutting edge technologies like some of the leads in ISSW, but I can take the opportunities to play and grow in things that interest me. I can write this stuff and blog it with the best of them. Exploration is cool, but the important part is bring back what you discovered. I was challenged by my manager that no one gets paid to sit around and work with the cool toys and dreaming about what is important. I think I realized that to challenge back -- that is exactly what we're paying our leaders for --creating a vision of how we can deliver value back to our customers, and then executing on it. If I can transform a vision to a reality faster with PHP or Project Zero, then I am doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.

For promising to shrink back from work, this has been alot of words about work :) But it has proven cathartic. I've put the career thing in perspective rather than blowing it out of proportion. I have validated and focused on what I want to be important to me, solving difficult challenges with cool technology. I want to grow and lead technical direction, rather than being a n empty consumer driven by management whimsy. I can get back to reality a bit more and work on the rest of my life. I can work to those goals that are not covered in a PBC or a IDP, but rather my own goal list. Sucker that I am, I really like the " Say" Video from John Mayer for the Movie "The Bucket List". I may get around to seeing the film, but for now the video and wikipedia spoilers were good enough. It's good to have goals 43 or otherwise. My birthday is coming up so expect to see a few more goal related posts as I ponder last year and plan the years ahead.

Long Walk today

Had a good long walk this afternoon. Walked with A and Z from the end of the Jail Trail up over the bridge and around the South Side Works. It was a nice little walk. Weather was good, and it was good to get out for a stretch after fighting with my lab all day. Strolled around Joseph Beth Booksellers and grabbed dinner to go at Qboda. The only downsides were when A was almost hit by a car while we were crossing in a crosswalk and as we were crossing the bridge to get back to the jail trail, Z was asleep until a fire truck with full lights and sirens crossed underneath us. She wasn't thrilled with the sirens as a wakeup.

But dinner was tasty and the walk was nice. Probably something good to repeat this summer! Maybe even take the longer walk and start from home.

30 days in..

still searching for a theme. Sadly I think the actual theme is mostly around work. In truth nothing wrong with that, but I think I need to expand my topics a bit more. I still like taking about the geeky. The new PHP framework or the wierd little programming tic, but I think I've been a little too focused on those of late.

The reality of it is of course that I tend to wax and wane with all my interests. I think I follow a 3 month cycle of obsessions and then I point to one of the other ones. I tend to jump between work, financial planning, fitness and self improvement. I think my reading habit is taking a beating. Too many unfinished works. Having a hard time getting into fiction at all these days. From TV to books -- I just can't seem to dig anything. Kinda annoying. The closest I see is a few out takes from Cartoon Network. Of course I say that and then I pick up the sci-fi book club catalog and start paging thru it ;)

Enjoying the taste of chocolate after giving up candy for lent. I decided to try out Lent this year just because. Not a religious thing, but more of a personal challenge. Since I didn't grow up with it I had never heard the rules before. The whole 'you're allowed to give up your fasting on Sunday, since it represents a mini-Easter' sounded a bit like cheating to me. I thought it was made up until I read it on Wikipedia. Going in I allowed myself 1 cheat -- if it was a once in a life time event, I'd let myself indulge. The only qualifying criteria event was my nephew's birthday. An 7th birthday only comes once in his lifetime, so I figured that would qualify.

In general I'm seeing a trend towards simplification in my life. I'm not sure why at this point. It has a bit of an appeal for me. I'm not looking to become a monk or give up all my earthly possessions to walk the earth like Caine on Kung Fu or become a bum (Thank you Quintin Tarantino), but I would like to reduce. Part of it may just be a control thing, learning to make choices. Choosing what to keep and what to part with. Choosing what habits I keep and which I let go. Perhaps it will pass, and I'll go back to whatever it was I did before, but it doesn't feel like it. I'm not looking to become No Impact Man, but I want to think about the kind of impact I have. Maybe it's Z. She definitely put a new light on things. And V, I still feel his presence on my life every day. That is the nature of fatherhood I think.

In any case I still feel like I have more to do. More clean up of my actions. A good bit of cleanup on the house :) A few more books to read and ponder. I think a good part of the reason that I've slowed my reading is that I thought that I should write more notes about what I'm reading. And organizing that process has been slow in coming forward. Perhaps I should start a wiki or a blog. I should take the lazy path -- I can create another blog here to capture what I want to write.

On a tangent to that -- I should figure out how to back up my blogs! I'm sure Google is good at keeping this stuff available, but I think I'd like to have a backup.

Can't get my brain in gear. Got a spare laptop today to work on my lab this weekend. Hope to get it 2/3s wrapped by Tuesday. Flying to RTP on Monday. Not looking forward to the trip. Not that the work is hard or bad, just long and potentially useless. Made a mistake with my lab selection for this year. It is very hard to do a good job with a lab if you don't have some sort of passion for the topic. Struggling to find some passion this year. So many other ideas feel more interesting right now. I still think Virtualization is critical. It is the win. But I think the Cloud computing model provides a much better reflection of virtualization's potential. Running multiple images on one machine -- nice, saves energy and effort; Running many images on multiple pieces of hardware smoothly transitioning from failed hw -- priceless! Of course nothing comes without cost and overhead but still.

I'm falling behind on the year of IC. At the end of March now. If I can finish up my lab, I'll have a piece for Jan/Feb and a piece for April. I may count this blog as a piece for March. I have a few ideas that I want to try and publish. As either a patent or as a piece to publish. I need to write faster. Both code and the other stuff.

On the otherhand I think I need to think about work a little bit less. I focus on work and Z, but I think I should be spreading my brain to other areas. My brain needs a change. Less development and work and more variety. Been reading a few different books lately, which help. "In Defense of Food" By Michael Pollen was pretty good. At first I didn't understand the title, but Pollan points out correctly that a lot of the products that we see at the grocery store are not really food. The cult of nutritionism has convinced us that it's not the food that it is important but the component parts. While I've followed nutrient guidelines for a long time I never gave this much thought. But at the heart of this is the idea that foods are simply components that can be well understood reduced to parts rather than pieces of a complex whole that is more than the sum it's parts. A fairly good read with decent advice on eating. Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants. Simple and to the point. I'm finding different ways to simplify my life right now, and this was right up my alley.

At some point I think I need to talk this out a bit more. But not tonight.

Out and about

Went out for a walk with Z this evening. Had a great walk. We went down to the park, strolled for a bit and came back. Out for around 40 minutes. I enjoyed getting out of the house, and I think she did too. I suspect if I walk with her anywhere she wouldn't care, so long as I didn't pause during the walk.

A few of the DeveloperWorks Editors spoke at our dept meeting to talk about opportunities to write for DW. As this year is the year of IC, I definitely want to take advantage of the opportunity. Fortunately it sounds like there could be some good opportunities for me.

career plan says what?

So it is that time of the year again to start thinking about career moves. Management has started asking to make a plan for the year. What are we doing today, what do we think we can do this year, how does this year impact your career plan? Tough questions, ok maybe I supplied about half but I hate think of the future in such little chunks. So much to accomplish, so little time!

In other news reading up on Portal 6.1. The beta is running and the new docs are out for Beta 3!

Post Early, Post often

With the near misses and tons of shame the last few posts, I've decided to try and get my posts done in the morning. I may also start drafting additional posts as backups and then just post them when I've polished them enough.

The danger of that is my post list may end up like my draft folder -- full of unfinished items. I'll play with this over time and see how it works. All this blogging is getting me thinking about blogging more for work. I'm going to suggest if we can create a blog for Project A. Since this is a customer centric service, it may be worthwhile to have some of these discussions in public forums. Either internally blogged, so others within IBM can understand our pain^H^H^H^H path, or preferably externally so our customers can contribute to the discussion.

If it worked for the TSA, it's gotta work for us.

Woot 30!

30 days of posting! Thanks to Joe for taking the challenge with me and keeping me motivated!

Finished Michael Pollan's book: In Defense of Food last night. Very interesting read. In short a good description of how nutrionism is replacing culture in deciding what we should eat.

EDIT: Wrote this last night, but only posted it at 9 AM this morning. Was a bit fried yesterday as Z only decided to sleep for 4 hours last night, and no naps all day.

Running late

Trying to get my lab together for WSTC and falling behind a good bit. Need to really pick up the pace. I have the outline together now, but the full lab instructions will take some work. Projects in the air at the moment:
- WSTC Lab
- Caching proposal for Project A
- Market Driven Development / CakePHP
- WSTC Lecture
- Presenting to the Project A Core Team Wednesday. Need to prep some slides.

Not quite in the air yet
- Firefox Extension : I want to update Quoteurltext, but I think I'd like to submit something new that plays with the new firefox 3 feature set.

At a different layer of play
- Between visitors and sickness we've stalled abit at the house cleanup. Need to start picking up on that again.
- Got to start running again. Went out last Sunday, and while it hurt, it was good. Managed the first mile well, the second and third -- not quite so proud. But April is almost here and the summer race season soon to follow. My goal for this year is to see if I can break an 8:30 for the Great Race.
- Reading 100 books this year is going slow. I've had a few slow starts in past years, but with Z here, I suspect I'm not really going to make good progress. Stuck in the middle of a bunch of books. Still need to log the last 4 I completed.

I have some bare outlines for the lab, but I need a draft for Monday. I need to get Xen going and try to upload a VM image to ESX on Monday.

The MDD/Cake PHP development is shaping up slowly, but it feels like therapy, of being able to touch the code and actually make some of my ideas real. I forget how good it feels to actually dig into to code and solve issues at that level. Very different from the juggling I do day-to-day.

Oh the shame, the shame!

So last night's missive was started at 10:15 but I got distracted so I didn't complete until 1 AM -- The shame -- the SHAME! I will hang my head in shame.

In other news: Extend Firefox 3 is Live!

Looking forward to competing again. Contest Ends July 4th, which I have learned from the last round comes a lot quicker than one expects.

Heading to RTP first week of April. May need to say howdy to some folks while I'm in the neighborhood.

Agile

Today I had two experiences that made me glad I'm working with an agile style team. The first is that looking at the progress we made thus far we could make an update to the plan in a resonable way very quickly. I can't say the numbers were perfect, or that we're totally happy with them, but we made a decent guess very quickly.

The second was talking to someone on an old project that was still mired up in deathmarches trying to get things wrapped up. We suffered with our last release, but I think that was a one time flaw rather than a way of life.

Happy Birthday Mr Rodgers.

Won't you wear a sweater?

resume

Seth Godin's bit about not needing a resume strikes me as interesting motivation. The gist of it being, the interesting, rewarding jobs don't require resumes, they require actions. To get an interesting job, you need to be interesting -- by building something, or blogging something or doing something of merit in the space you want.

In some ways it sounds a lot like 'it takes money to make money' -- I need an interesting job to get an interesting job, but I think it is doable to be amazing without an amazing job. Joshua Bloch was a programmer for a financial firm when he launched del.icio.us on the side. Building an project and growing it can be as rewarding, if not more rewarding than getting the perfect job.

So how does one build a reputation or an amazing project? Little steps, one day at a time.

privacy say what?

So I was looking to post a set of content here from my Google Docs, but at the last minute wanted to restrict it to the people I know who read it (Joe and my wife). Imagine my surprise that blogger does not support the concept of private posts. I can have a private blog, but that is the limit of the granularity. Annoying but there it is.

Thinking a good deal about my software development process. For some reason this rings true...

blargh

coming down with the cold. A forgone conclusion. Trying to hit up the extra fluids and vitamins.

Out to Barnes and Noble tonight. Mostly just browsing but picked up a copy of In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Looking forward to reading it. Too many items on my to read list at the moment.

Need more time!

Or rather, I need to more stuff in less time! Pondering building faster prototypes. Maybe this is an opportunity to play with RAILS or Django? Either seems like a good platform to try and build some quick prototypes. I have a few ideas that I want to try out and I don't want to do the full prototyping in Java. PHP is my normal vector of choice, but running into issues getting the right packages to do what I want.

Maybe the answer is Cake? I've heard on good authority that the answer is usually cake.

a few threads...

Family is dealing with illness, Z got us started, then Amy and I might be getting hit as well. Tried to take a nap this afternoon while Z slept. Mostly worked, had a few thoughts I wanted to try and follow up on. Budding them here, to drive further later.

- Managing requirements for a project is a lot like managing clutter. Few ever say "I want to have 36 McDonald's Souvenir Cups with Grimmace." Much the same way no one asks for a project to come in over budget and late. But scope creep is just like clutter, it starts by reacting to a desire, rather than working towards a vision. Just because you want something doesn't mean it has a place in your life(for clutter)/project.

Now there is something to be said for the vision changing and growing, but at key points when you're starting to grow you vision statement, then you need to stop and reevaluate your project. Is it the right place to grow, or is it better to start a separate project. Sometimes the right thing is to grow the project. Some times not. Growth is a natural process that works within the process of Supply and Demand. Growth that is uncontrolled tends to be bad. Cancer is unrestrained growth of bad ideas.
There is something to be said for dealing with the principles of simplicity and good architectural practice. There is something slightly disturbing about parallels between projects at work and episodes of Clean Sweep. :)

- In starting a project, I am increasingly seeing the need to capture a vision statement. It sounds all hokey and typical management bs, but at the end of the day, if you can't explain a simple vision of what you're trying to do, that probably means, you don't know what you want to to do. Once you have a vision you need to look at Strategies and Tactics. Strategies are the steps you need to take to meet your vision. Tactics are the actions you take to implement your strategy.

- The care and feeding of a project are not hard rules to figure out. It kinda goes along with keeping healthy. The rules are simple -- eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly. Screw with either of those options and the risk of bad things happening grows. Compare with a project-- you want to make sure you're getting the right inputs -- requirements, funding, approvals, and the right actions -- clearing technical debt, quality control, doable benchmarks and voila -- project success.

- Often projects come in like the patient who comes in with a gunshot wound and finds out they have a heart condition. If you don't deal with the gunshot wound, the patient dies. If you fix the gunshot would, and neglect the long term care necessary to treat the heart condition, well, the odds to not stack up in their favor. In a crisis, triage is important, and getting the biggest wound out of the way is critical, but unless the long term behavior of the project changes, the project is doomed anyway.

-- Perhaps that last example would work better thinking about a patient with a heart attack or stroke. You have the immediate crisis, but long term care and change are necessary to improve.

-- The hardest job as an architect is figuring out what the problem the customer needs to solve is. Finding out what their problem is, when most of the time they can't express the nature of the problems, only a glimpse of the ideas they had. Started reading "The Not So Big Life" by Sarah Susanka. I suspect there is a good bit of learning I can do as a software architect from reading from construction architects.

As an aside, we're in the process of de-cluttering our house. With Z soon to be on the move we want to give her a safe and friendly place to move through. In examining my own relationships to my stuff and my space, I'm learning a lot about my stuff and myself. Highly recommend reading "It's All Too Much" by Peter Walsh. Very useful if you're wondering why things get so messy.

Next Gen quoteurltext.

Always an interesting task figuring out what the next generation of a software will be. I'm mostly happy with what I have in quoteurltext, but there is always room for improvement. I'm looking at ways I can improve the capabilities. Perhaps giving more options for quote templates? Or adding a web service integration to allow users to store quotes to servers? Not sure I want to run a software as a service around this, but the concept is kinda neat.

That kinda give me an idea of a plugin that syncs with my history and my quotes to give me the paths I follow from a given quote. Or a way to interact with the web of sites connected to quoted material. Actually, let me take that step forward -- linking items chronologically as well as thematically.

That could be fun to write. Have a service that accepts a quote, source, timestamp and tags. Then generate maps that link items based on tags, or timestamp/progressions or any combo there of. Ambitious, but interesting. The tough part would be the visualization tech. Perhaps Flex?

Certified Madness

Looking at the certification stuff for work again. Management has decided it would be best if we would all certify with as many product certifications as possible. Not my favorite route. I suppose I can study up and certify for WSTC, but I think I need to grow my skills in other areas. I'm also debating further career certification, either for Senior IT Specialist, or IT Architect. I need to find the architectural thinking course to complete my coursework for IT Architect.

The plus side is this stuff carries very nicely with the Open Group Certifications.

Perhaps I could get my LSI cert or a Zend Cert. Not really what my mangement is looking for, but I'm looking for a little more diversity in my path.

blogger blogger blogger

So started exploring the blogger interface today, to see what it can do. Went to the Edit Posts tab and found a) I had a few posts that I had roughed out and forgotten and b) there are more comments than I had realized. Need to figure out a way to get alerted when I get comments.

Looking for ways to integrate what I do daily with blogger. Looking for the API to see what tools have been created and what tools I have to work with. Google has such fun APIs to deal with, I really want to figure out how to play with them more.

ah progress

A few hours after I post QuoteURLText with FF3b3 compatibility, they provide FF3b4.

I'll catch up with it tomorrow.

New Quotetexturl

Released the new version of QuoteURLText today -v1.0.8. This one has been updated for Firefox 3.0b3. I've added a debug mode to try and figure out what's been going on with some of the strange versions I've been seeing. We'll see if it helps with error reports.

Updates and such

Thanks to Amy for reminding me 10 to midnite that I still need to post.

So searching further for a server solution for the house, the build vs buy debate seems to be falling clearly toward build. The max memory supported from most of the desktop machines out there seems to be 8GB of memory. Normally more that enough, but if I max it out now, can I expand later? I've found a few motherboards that support 16 GB of memory. I'll probably only max out at 8 GB for now, but nice to know I have some headroom available.

Coded up some updates to QuoteURLText. Submitted for review. Should publish version 1.0.7 sometime tomorrow. I'll link when I get confirmation. Reading thru the reviews and comments there seems to be a set of errors that I haven't been able to track down. I've added a debug mode so we'll see if that helps me figure out what's going on.

Home Servers

I'm considering upgrading the house server. I currently have an old Athlon 2000 running as my main server. I've got it Ubuntu Gutsy with Apache and a few other knick-knacks installed. I've been playing around with VMWare server for the past year or so and I've decided I'd like to have a heafy box at home to handle a couple of virtual images.

I'd like to be able to run images I use for work from the server rather than running them from my laptop, unfortunately that requires a ton of memory. So looking for a decent box with a ton of memory to keep multiple VMs up and running. I was considering buying but after exploring the options it might just be best to build to get what I'm after.

speed saves

So thinking about web projects, I'm curious what people actually do with their hardware. From a development point of view, most developers kinda throw it over the wall to the operations folks to make it go fast. Most of the architects I know give some basic consideration to making a solution scalable, but few rarely look at it as carving more cycles out of the existing hardware vs throwing more money and hardware at the situation. Is this endemic of all large companies? By comparison reading about different Web companies, who have grown out of very, very cheap servers with some great strategies for increasing capacity, decreasing latency and keeping costs down. Google's tech talk on Dapper, their RPC monitoring unit shined a light on how their site has grown over time. From a set of borrowed machines in 1997 to warehouses of servers today.

At work our standard is a sub-6 second response time for most apps. Google would not discuss what their threshold was for response time, but the impression is that data needed to leave the datacenter in a sub 1 second response time, and all of their development was geared towards that goal.

I think I need to spend a bit more time figuring out guidelines for better performance. I should restate that. I need to study the existing performance guidelines and learn to apply them better to my work.

deadlines deadlines deadlines!

I have a lot to do in a little time. Project A from work is eating a ton of time at this point. Way more hours that I was hoping to work. I have a WSTC Lab 1st draft due by the 21st, my Firefox plugin has to be updated by the 18th, and I have a WSTC presentation due in early April.

Of course it doesn't help that my lack of time is making me look at other projects as well. I want to try and build that market driven development engine using Project Zero. I also want to wrangle a bit with Google Gears. After hearing about the App Server that runs javascript on the server and client, I wonder if that's a better solution for Gears like functionality. Of course gears has the requirement to work on all browsers. For my curiosity I could build a Firefox plugin only version to run my own apps both from a server or in a connected -less mode. Perhaps Python might be an other accessible choice... there was code samples available for compling python into a plugin. ..or perhaps not, this note from Brandon Eich suggests this might not be a great idea.

Goodbye GG

Gary Gygax passed away. The father of Dungeons and Dragons has moved on to other planes. I haven't played a game in forever, but I still love it had have a good number of happy memories connected to the game and the other games that have spawned off it. The game has moved on in different directions, and allowed a lot of geeks a chance to spread our minds to other worlds as well.

Thanks Gary.

PghGooglePlex

Spent the evening hanging out at the Pittsburgh Google Plex for a talk on RPC tracing with Dapper.  Dapper is the google tool for measuring how much time RPC calls are spending at different layers of the Google stack.  Interesting from the pov of what does it take to make google go and some of the assumptions of what they can expect from their infrastructure.  The talk wrapped up with a tour of the facilities.  Very cool overall.

Also interesting to see the tons of smart folk out to hear a bit more of what Google is up to and the side conversations they were having.

Hats

Ah in a misspent youth I had a flair for hats. I had a fedora, a jester's cap a couple of berets, a Cat in the Hat Tophat and a few caps as well. Never really went for the baseball hat, but I found the ones I like best. These days I wear the occasional winter cap, for the cold, but that's about it.

On a whim I hit hats.com, and I must admit, the old jonesin for a hat came back. the boris. the porkpie, an agean greek fisherman's hat. So many wonderful hats.

I'd look ridiculous in most, but man, I do admire a really nice hat. A clean style. A well made hat is a wonderful thing. Styles a thing I appreciate even if I'm not one to invoke, and while I won't be mistaken as stylish or in vogue, I will say, I do appreciate a true timeless style. There is something very classic about hats. What would Indy be without the fedora? Or Steed without his bowler? An elegant artifact of a more civilized era... Perhaps their gone, perhaps they'll make a comeback. I'd never say for sure.

All I know is, I think I need a few new hats.

... Now with Gaming!

So originally I looked at Brainstorm from Ubuntu, and digging a little deeper I can see a similar idea from Dell in their IdeaStorm site. These sites are good for taking the pulse of an audience, finding what users like and dislike, and what they'd like to see more of, but what about for owners? When we have a team of people who are shareholders in a project. Would a market based approach work out better? Give each a stack of 'dev points' and let them spend by priority? What is the payoff? How do you measure the 'win'.

Predictive Markets seem like a good source of material to explore in this vein.

I keep looking for new projects to undertake in new languages. Learning the nuances of new languages gives me a new headspace to think about things. The patterns that a language provides gives some new insight into old problems. Perl, Java, PHP all have very different intents, strengths and weaknesses. Each makes a subset of problems very easy to deal with. Perl is whiz at system administration, Java for making standardized modular code and PHP for whipping out web apps. It can be an interesting challenge to push those languages to other domains to see how they swim or sink as the occasion arises.

On the other hand, there is something to be said for trying out new frameworks for old languages. There are subtle differences in execution that can make all the difference. For instance plumbing together WebSphere Applications on a J2EE stack has a completely different model than running some PHP apps or a Ruby On Rails application. But something like Project Zero gives a fusion blend of Java with PHP in Rails like framework. Still very course and working it's way to maturation it does have a few possibilities to play with. I'm looking to build a few apps in the next few days. This may be a good time to brush off a few project notes and find a good language or framework to measure against these apps.