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February 27, 2006
February 19, 2006
music experimentation
Juliana loves music. Unfortunately she also loves some bad music that i won't get into here.
On the ride to rockford this afternoon, she was humming along to the melody for half of the songs on the new Death Cab for Cutie album.
before bedtime tonight, i fired up itunes and played a couple of tracks for her, to see what she thought. She ended up liking them both, so i burned them on cd for her. The first song i played was the Miles Davis version of "Some Day My Prince Will Come" which i picked because she loves old disney films. The second song was the first track from Brian Eno's Ambient 1 - Music for Airports. The Eno disc was spinning when i tucked her in tonight.
Who knows how long this will last, but i can try. I plan on letting her troll through our iTunes library and burning discs fairly regularly. I can't make her like good music, but i can make sure she knows it is out there.
February 18, 2006
Rails Bitching
I don't want to title this post, "How I learned to stop worrying and love the rails" but it is a fairly good fit.
I have been really enjoying Ruby on Rails. At the same time, it has been pissing me off as much as I have been enjoying it. See my post on error handling in the view. Note to self: post my "solution" to that particular problem.
After spending a couple days with it, i actually did set something up that was nicer than what i had started with. I reduced an application's main form down to 10 lines of helper method calls and implemented the error handling in exactly the way i wanted. I still ended up learning a bit more than i wanted to about the rails internals, but in the end, i kind of think i don't care. If i don't like the included HTML generating methods, i can always write my own.
This realization was underscored after the recent Chicago Ruby User
Group meeting. I had the pleasure of chatting with marcel and sam from the
rails core team. They had the distinct displeasure of listening to me
piss and moan. Rather than calling me a troll they were super polite.
After a while they basically made me realize that what i was complaining
about was that rails was not 100% molded to my brain's way of determining
the right way to solve problem X. The fact that i was able to use the
plugin system to override the internals was not terribly elegant, but
was functional. The real solution to that is to make my own helper
methods that implement the widgets in the way that i want to. And ultimately,
I think that is OK. I still think the strength of rails is in the
adherence to MVC separation and its two killer components, ActiveRecord
and ActionController.
All in all, Rails is making me think about my web development in a smarter way and making me much less tolerant of wasteful repetition. My first couple of rails projects are coming along nicely and I am happy. what could be better?
Anyway, i thought that my decision to stop bitching about something was post-worthy.
February 14, 2006
Happy Valentine's Day
I know that Valentine's day is a Hallmark holiday and all, but seeing Juliana diligently cutting out dozens of hand colored paper heart cards for her classmates warmed even my cold, cold heart.
So on this day of Valentine's, where coworkers are attempting to buy wondrous gifts for ridiculously underwhelming budgets, and friends are spending extreme amounts on "this special night" i have a very simple statement.
To my girls (all three of them) i send these words of love: Thank you all for being here with me. Thank you for making me laugh at 3:30 in the morning when you can't sleep because you are so excited about a field trip the next morning. Thank you for asking me to sing the theme song to "My Neighbor Totoro" when I tuck you into bed. Thank you for wrapping your arms around me when i walk in the door from work. Thank you for letting me teach you about art and music, and teaching me how to do beautiful things in return. That you for learning to love comic books. Thanks for being a nerd (secretly. your secret is safe with me). Thank you for dancing and coyly waving for company.
In conclusion, thank you for loving me in return (especially you, Tracey. It is easier for the girls to love me. :) ). Smooch!
Hey, it isn't thanksgiving? What gives with this message? Someone should teach me how to respect the holidays.
February 3, 2006
Current Bookshelf
There are 3 computer books that I am reading right now. I am making my way through them at different paces, but will have reviews of them all as I finish them.
Practical Development Environments by Matthew B. Doar. I am about a third of the way through this one. While definitely practical, the first third is spent explaining what a development environment is. I am just getting into the meat of the comparisons between different tools and philosophies. While the first section of the book is geared towards a beginner, it may not be adequately declared as such. I would suggest that someone looking for an in depth comparison between different strategies skip the first portion of the book. I don't fault the author for this trait, but I am already familiar with a number of development environments and am distinctly looking for a lucid explanation of why I should consider X over Y or Z+C over B.
My Job Went To India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job, by Chad Fowler. This book may sound a bit offensive, or brash, but from all of the reading I have done from Chad Fowler, and especially from his recent Perlcast Interview, i believe that this book is a very well-considered take on this issue. It never ceases to amaze me that as a people, Americans complain as much as they do. There is a simple reason why jobs move overseas: labor is cheaper, and a well educated, well-paid workforce severely impacts bottom lines. While that is heartless (and is not nearly as simple in reality as I made it sound in that line), the increasing globalisation is an amazing opportunity for American workers (programmers especially) to branch out and find something that is not as readily commoditizable, some not so boiler plate. I have just started this book, but am anxiously awaiting reading the rest of it.
Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots by Stephane Ducasse. This book is probably the one I am most excited about. I remember so vividly the few times my elementary school classed was bused to the one school in the district that had a Macintosh lab. We would program (in Logo, perhaps? I need to nail that detail down. ) in a graphical environment and would have several different tasks: Draw lines (of various shapes, sizes and colors), draw shapes, do basic animation and program a course for a car on a track to take. The Squeak environment has fascinated me, primarily as the most practical way to learn Smalltalk. The environment that accompanies this book is very similar to the environment I used as a child. The premise is that you are in charge of a bunch of robots. Your raw materials are: Bot (a class or factory for making robots), and a few simple commands for the robots themselves( Go, Jump, turnLeft, turnRight, etc) and a Color factory. The book is not designed for children necessarily, but the environment and some of the exercises are definitely child-friendly. I spent some time Friday night introducing Juliana to this environment and it was a blast. We spent some time drawing lines, making the robots turn, and trying to draw rectangles and triangles. Hearing my 5 year old say, "I am giving the robot the "Go" message!" is pretty cool. Much, much, much more info on this will be coming soon.
Also, in the vein of learning to program, I am anxious to pick up Learn To Program from the pragmatic programmers. There is a great picture on flickr of a little girl reading this book. I'll update this post with that pic when i dig it out. Yay! As I was typing this post, I noticed that Perlcast has an interview with Chris Pine, the author of Learn To Program. Excellent.
What are you reading?
Andrew Bird @ The Miramar in Milwaukee
Billy, Heather, Nate and I went to see Andrew Bird last night at the Mirarmar in Milwaukee.
I can't tell you how excited I am that i can get home from a show in 10 minutes. :D
This photo is from my Treo, but Stephanie Anne on flickr has a much prettier set of photos from the show.
I was impressed by how much music 2 people could make. Andrew Bird and Martin Dosh both used repeater pedals and samplers live, as extensions of their instruments, to flesh out "the band." I know that is not a novel technique, but it was the first time that I had seen it live.
I bought my first Andrew Bird album because Chris Ware had drawn the cover. What random luck!