Found a Project!

After some discussion with Inna came up with an interesting side project. Going to try and get a prototype going in Google App Engine. Looking to try and get a prototype up and running within the week. It is good practice on my Python development skills. Be interesting to see how far I could take this. Might also have some javascript practice in as well. I'd like to build the basic infrastructure first then enhance with AJAX/JS over time.

Other items that I'm thinking about:
- Learning Core Data for ObjectiveC
- picking up some functional langs : Erlang, Scala

Making progress in my algorithm and patterns refresher. I must admit the patters are more fun than the algorithms, but all good for stretching the head into shape.

Success!

Got my first app working and deployed on my iPod. Still lots of polish I'd like to do with it and then I need to decide if I want to try and publish to the AppStore, but overall really happy to just get something started. It has inspired me for a few other projects, but I am enjoying developing for this platform! Very easy compared to the day-to-day, but still interesting and fun.

Committed to the Pittsburgh Half Marathon today. I did my registration and now on to training! I started with some work on the exercise bike. Just an easy pace with a little bit of tension to get a feel for my condition. Didn't do too bad. I hit it up for 30 minutes and I'm feeling ok, broke a sweat but didn't push too hard. Will try and hit the bike for longer and with more tension. I need to see if I can do this for an hour and then for two hours. It's not the same as running, but it should help a little bit towards my cardio conditioning on days when I can't get out.

thursday already?

Not sure I'm happy or ticked that the week is going by so quick. To business.

115 days until the Pittsburgh Marathon. I hope to hit the Half Marathon. I have ~16 weeks to get myself in good enough shape for this event. We'll see how it goes. Getting back in the exercise groove is hard, but working on getting it going.

Trying to get an iPhone Developer's Kit. Still working thru the activation process. Not going very badly, but not exactly a smooth process either. I might be late for this goldrush, but it is an interesting space and doing mobile application development is something I've been interested in for a while. I've built WAP based sites before but mobile device programming would be a good thing to play with. Learning Objective-C and reminding myself how to do stuff in C is also a good challenge. Slow progress, the past few days, an the opening of the Situational App contest may delay making many more changes, but we'll see. Thinking about strategy for developing new apps. My plan is to start with a few free applications, and depending on adoption and feature requests, I may look at adding a paid version.

As I mentioned the Situational Application contest is back on so trying to get a sMash application out there. Also looking at moving an old PHP application to Zero, updating it to use ZRM instead of PHPDB. There was some AJAX items I wanted to add, and this would be a good way to handle that. I've got sMash running on my OSX box, going to reinstall it to my linux system.

Getting my feet wet with Portlet Factory, trying to update my Portal development skills. To date I've been heavy with portlet programming using the IBM Legacy Portlet API, JSR-168 and starting JSR-286, but as the tooling changes so to shall I.

today's progress

Almost have my first iphone app going. Having some strange times with basic math in Objective C, but at least I have the UI working. I suspect I'll have this wrapped up tomorrow.

Made good strides in cleaning the basement. Trying to organize the shelves, and toss as much junk as I can. I've made good strides consolidating like materials, cleaning out some space and trashing material I didn't even realize I was keeping. The space looks better, but still has more work to go. Something to continue chipping away at.

a touch at a time...

Built my first iPhone Application tonight. Only targeted the simulator, and it was an out of the box example. But I got it to work. Going to try and go back and fix my botched application next. It is essentially a very raw hello world, but it is a start. Getting the hang of Xcode and the tools associated with it.

Also made it out for my first run in a few months. Only hit up a mile, and I was hurting at the mile mark. Did about a 10 minute mile, but I have a lot of those to put in before I can get to the half marathon. Did find an appropriate amount of clothing so that felt good. Also tried to get some pushups in. That went ok-- I'm following the hundredpushups.com program. My baseline was 27, I have the option of starting at Week 3, but I think given my general conditioning from the last few months, I may roll back to Week 1 and build slowly.

A few flying ideas ...

but very few landing.

I want to use the Cake Framework to store my current reads and maintain the data local to my web site. I'd also like to cross post this information to my 43 Things, my Amazon account and a few other places. The local publish is easy. The remote publish shouldn't be too bad as each of those destinations support a REST interface.

Also have a few ideas for Firefox Plugins that should be simple to implement if I can just remember the details. Need to pick up the pace on my Zero Article. Still haven't finished the application, more database work to do. Found a good hint in the Project Zero discussion forums I'm going to try and take advantage of.

Blargh.

Insomnia is a bit of a pain. Having trouble sleeping two nights in a row is bad news all around.

On the plus side, got a new side project done. I rewrote my homepage. I developed a new look and wrote it up using CakePHP. It took a few tries, but I got it todo what I wanted. Some portions were fairly underdocumented, like using the webroot to serve files. Once I figured out how webroot worked, my last piece fell into place. I have reached a little beyond parity with the old site.

I have a few ideas that I may want to try next.

• Set my reading list as a database
• Modify a version of quoteurltext to save to a Cake Plugin.
• JavaScript updates -- rollover previews of menu items from the mainpage

Also have some cleanup to do, including fixing the stylesheets, and tightening up some of the html. Still, pretty happy with the effort and the time it took.

90 Posts

So this is a little later than I intended.

Of course I thought I was going to send that 2 days ago. And then I thought I would post this yesterday. So much for that intent.

Well this is post number 90. By a few different metrics I've made my goal to post for 3 months. It has been an interesting experience. I'm not sure what I want to do with this next. I found some value of thinking things out on a blog. As I haven't shared this site with many people, I can't tell how much I should value how well it does as a communications tool. Overall, I'm happy with the experiment. I didn't think I had 90 days of posts in me, I'm glad to see I was wrong!

We'll see where my writing habit will take me next. My article is online and has made the Top Story for the WebSphere Category. The writing has been fun, and I look forward to doing more.

Broke from Vegas!

I had a nice set of habits that were apparently not perfect habits yet that disappeared when I was in Vegas and have yet to reassert themselves nicely. The ones I miss the most: Good eating habits, exercise habit and blogging. I'm SLOWLY getting back on the eating track.

I'm doing really baddly on the exercise track, but I think that one has been down for awhile. I think I'll go and do the Bodyweight 500 program again. I've also busted out my weights again, so I can start lifting on a regular basis. I'm running at least once a week, but I want to try and get more intervals in. Maybe I can mix it up with running and biking. I want to try biking to work one of these days. Doing a race tomorrow, the Greenfield Glide 5k. I ran it last year in 35:17.7 at an average pace of 11:23/M. I've inproved a good deal since then. I think I can do a 10 minute mile easy, so I'm shooting for a 9:30/M in this race. I really need to tone up the exercise and resume the good eating habits. I want to drop another 15 lbs this year. I think I can do it, but I need to start putting some effort back into it again.

As to the blogging, I suppose I could excuse myself and say I've been writing in other places, but to be honest I've just been forgetting. I need to start making my blogging habit a priority again. Posting earlier in the day instead of leaving it for last would help.
That said, I think I'm starting to find my writing groove again. I need to keep working it. I have a few articles I've got planned, I just need to execute now.

Done!

Article is over to the editor. I have the next article lined up so going to start writing soon. I set a goal of 10 articles this year, and that seems really unrealistic at the moment. I think I need to work with others to try and make that happens as I don't think I can get to 10 articles on my own. We'll see though.

Moving on

Draft is completed, but still feeling incomplete. Going to try and get a bit further with my Zero experiments. Hopefully I'll be able to get an app working in Zero. Next step will then be to chose the next project to turn to next. I suspect it will be related to virtualization, either in the cloud or perhaps building a VMWare image for use with Zero, either for my use or general use.

For the last few months I've been in a bit of malaise about what I was doing, but at the moment I feel myself getting engaged with different ideas and projects and it is really giving me a lot of energy.

mixing and other items.

So yesterday was pretty much just a pure quote but I think it reflects my thinking a good bit. I think I'll do a small remix exercise to turn into a mashup exercise. Lots of good information there to pick thru and reuse.

Got the P0/sMash Milestone 7 to run the Web Based IDE today. Works pretty well. Working on transforming it into something interesting now. Lots of new plans and ideas forming and growing. Realizing now that I need to bring more to work now to survive there. Reading Work-Life Balancing and recognizing how much I need to keep my passion in my work. Not by trying to be passionate about my Project A, but rather keeping side projects that reflect my passions and get me going. Time to remix my job.

in the office

After a week of travel and face to face meetings, I must admit it was a bit of a bummer to be in the office on calls again. Feeling the pain of not cleanly sharing my vision as a bunch of things hit the fan that shouldn't have. Apparently I was not clear enough with the team about what I wanted, so Monday will be a fun exercise in cleaning house.

Almost done with the lab, hope to finish this weekend. I need to put some hours in my presentation, which is also due soon. If I can get them both behind me I can spend more time on building the fun stuff. Looking forward to building fun apps as opposed to all the work related stuff. Talking to T on Project B, I'm not there officially but I am trying to lend a hand where I can. We'll see how that goes.

I want to get back to Market Driven Development soon. I'd like to post that on my website to measure my current projects. The MDD app and my Plugins. I haven't started working on my Firefox entry yet, but I need to start on that soon. Also want to start playing more with Project Zero. So many interesting things to tackle...

... I was going to say 'not enough time', but I'm thinking about that subject a little more these days. I make assumptions against my time and habits that consume my time, but I think I need to start revisiting all of those habits and assumptions. Just as the cleaning/decluttering of the house is giving me new insite about what I have and what my stuff means to me, I think I need to work out how to declutter my time. Something to explore and write about.

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.

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?