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.

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.

Article is coming along nicely and I'm having fun playing with the different tech. Experimenting with the gadgets and fiddling with Zero/sMash feed flows actually works out pretty well. I may play with this further to build some interesting feeds and flows to do something interesting. But for now the playing is good enough.

I've got my eye on a few future projects, but I am trying to keep it real by focusing on one project at a time. Making a point of keeping only 8 hours to Project A (my official work project). And then taking any extra cycles towards my fun projects. It seems to be working better for me.

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.

short one.

Fried after a long day. Just keeping it short with some interesting links.

Super Mario in javascript.

Project Zero is taking on a new metamorphosis to WebSphere sMash. Expect more content on this from me when I get some more cycles. The short of it is a new platform for doing fast Web 2.0 development, writing in Java, Groovy or PHP. A just in time model closer to PHP than AppServer.

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.