busy weekend

Let's see lots going on. Had a happy father's day today. Kicked of with the Pittsburgh Father's Day 5k -- Did a decent time I clocked 29 minutes 26 seconds. About a minute better than my Greenfield Glide time, keeping a much steadier pace. Average pace was about a 9 minute 30 second mile. I am much happier about how I kept the pace. I expect to do much worse with a poor night's sleep and some stomache issues. Neither turned out to be a terrible hinderance. I do need to get more practice in as I think my worst problem was a lack of confidence. Not having the mile markers on the course to get a feel for how fast I was going was a big minus.

Had a dinner with A's family in the evening which was nice. Ate well, but not too horribly. Spent time talking with folks and playing with Z. Z hasn't slept much today, and got up extra early, so she's to bed a bit early. A plan I plan to follow!

Saturday was busy with errands. Hit up Half Price Books and got a nice mix of stuff. Picked up a copy of Book 6 of the Bone color graphic novels, one of the New Destroyer Adventures, a business book : Never Eat Lunch Alone, and a Men's Health 2008 exercise guide. I've read thru the exercise guide. Some good advice and exercise plans I look forward to trying. An excellent article on montivation for exercise that I plan to keep in mind. Also an article on LeBron James focused on career/personal development. The young man has done alot, by taking his natural talent and applying a ton of focus. He is on the Dynamic Path. Some inspiring ideas to work forward with. My favorite bit: Instead of asking "what do I want to do with my life?" he asks "What am I doing with my life?" This skews the focus in a direction of proactive work.

Other items: picked up a new Xul Workbench for eclipse, and giving it a test run. Tried QuoteURLText with FF3.0rc1, looks good so updated it on the site to handle the new version. Looking forward to playing with that again.

Need to get my Zero work and my DataPower Projects up and running. Also catch up on follow up items from Project A. Busy week ahead, but some up sides I look forward to exploring.

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.

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?

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.

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.