Tuesday, 09 February, 2010. Tagged with: photography, iphone
I’m checking out the newly announced Aperture 3 info. There’s a lot to like about being able to split libraries, merge libraries and use brushes as to make adjustments. But, my hands down “Holy crap, oh my God that’s awesome” moment is seeing that Aperture 3 can use an iPhone photo to hint at GPS coordinates for digital photos from a different camera. Alternatively, you can use an iPhone app like RunKeeper to record a GPS track. Then, from the RunKeeper website, download a GPX track, which Aperture can then read.
That seems far more flexible for cameras without internal GPS than a GPS attachment. By itself, that sells the $99 upgrade for me.
Sunday, 07 February, 2010. Tagged with: fitness
Last year, I photographed the Krispy Kreme Challenge. This year, with WebAssign sponsoring the event, I took the opportunity to run the event while Robin took photos.
How did I do?
Not bad. I finished in 1:21:25 in the casual division. I ate seven doughnuts on site, two fully on the way back and the remaining three after I crossed the finish line. After running about a mile and a quarter with no real training program to speak of, I switched over to fast walking.
I managed to keep the doughnuts down, though in a couple of stints at running on the way back, that seemed iffy. The after-effects aren’t much to speak of, save the normal and completely expected pains of over-exertion.
Next year will be different.
Taking into account my own fitness level and the event logistics, I’m noting several things I want to do differently, in order to compete in the Challenger category:
- Be able to run four miles. I’m not even close to this right now. At a 10 minute pace, I should be able to complete the challenge in under an hour.
- Practice eating doughnuts. Easier, at least until considering I’m not talking about eating one or two, but six or nine, then running. This is a different sort of brick.
- Bring my own water. The Krispy Kreme water station was at the back of the parking lot. With 6,000 people or so trying to drink or just eat doughnuts — well, it was very crowded and you spend a lot of time trying to get something to drink.
- Plastic bag or paper towel. Something to help me mash multiple doughnuts together without getting my hands quite as glazed.
- Hand wipes. See the aforementioned glaze problem.
- Bottle of OJ or coffee on stand-by. I’d like something to cut the sweetness just a bit.
All-in-all, though, the weather stayed decent, I had fun and I didn’t injure myself. That’s a win.
Sunday, 07 February, 2010. Tagged with: links, travel
I blogged about smartphone-augmented travel over on the Crazy Like That blog. Check it out.
Monday, 25 January, 2010. Tagged with: development
This site and the others comprising our little company run on a Virtual Private Server. I’ve long thought about a staging or lab environment, but never acted on it. However, in the course of tracking down some performance issues earlier this month, it occurred to me that a VMWare image running Ubuntu would be perfect and easy to set-up. So, I’m giving it a shot.
Basically, I’ll have a much nicer way to experiment with adjustments to how I deploy Rails, have a place to learn Chef and be able to test system service configurations. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner, but I’m by no means the first.
There’s more to come, but it’s easy set-up. I just needed to download VMWare Fusion, the Ubuntu server ISO and my production data to get rolling. The VM is configured to run as closely as I can to how my node is running, down to available memory and disk. I just need to set-up databases, then add the VM as a Capistrano target for a few Git repositories and I can get to experimentation.
Sunday, 17 January, 2010. Tagged with: software, development
One of Chad Fowler’s recommendations in The Passionate Programmer is to practice Code Kata. Similar to musicians practicing scales or a martial artist practicing forms, this isn’t code that’s meant for practical value beyond practice. The means is the end.
I started with Fowler’s recommendation to implement programs that outputted the complete text of “99 bottles of beer on the wall” in a variety of languages. Very straightforward and I was pleased to observe/learn the following:
- Out of four languages attempted, I was able to get all four to work. Yay!
- I’m very familiar with Perl and Ruby. My career’s been spent on those two languages.
- I’m very rusty with PHP. I used PHP as a primary language for web development for about a year, back around 2000. I used it again from roughly 2005 to early 2007 on a client project, but I wouldn’t say I ever became conversant in the language. What I was looking at was bad code, too. In the time since, I’ve forgotten what little I did learn.
- I’ve never done anything with Python, but, for this exercise, it seemed pretty straight-forward.
- To accomplish the same task, the languages landed, in order of brevity, as follows: Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl.
- I don’t find using php tags for shell scripting ideal. At all.
- I learned a bit more about Ruby’s case/when statements. Most of my Ruby experience has been with Rails, and I’ve not found the need to write case/when statements.
- I wanted to use Perl 5.10’s features. You have to explicitly ask for them. I don’t like that so much. On the other hand, typing use strict; use warnings; doesn’t bother me.
Finally, I had David A. Black’s excellent The Well-Grounded Rubyist to draw from after seeing that my Ruby implementation was not doing what I expected. I used PHP Bible for finding what I needed for my PHP example. Language preference aside, there’s a broad-spectrum of programming book quality. One end offers encouragement to dig deeper and demonstrates best-practices. The other end is a fire hose of language info to write the site your uncle gave you $200 to build that he wants Monday. Regardless of the language, I need to find the first type of documentation and avoid the second.
If you’re interested, I’ve put all four languages into one gist on GitHub.
