DevelopingStorm

Time to update your links.

In the next few days I will be discontinuing this feed and moving all my new posting to my new Rails based blog. The new RSS feed is:

http://www.developingstorm.com/pete/blog/rss

If you're just interested in bookmarking the new blog, the URL is:

http://www.developingstorm.com/pete/blog

Dave in the Guardian

I was trying to figure out how I should point out my friend Dave's mention in the Guardian Initially I planned to point the link and congratulate him, but that seemed rather pointless. I considered elaborating on our parallel careers; we've worked together at 3 companies and he was the person who brought me into Iris but 90% of my readers already know that so that's not very interesting. Then I considered writing an essay comparing Lotus Notes to the works of Thomas Pynchon - difficult to handle for the average person but beautiful to those who have persisted. As much as that sounds fun I have no time so you're stuck with this ramble instead. Congrats Dave! (via Bob).

Jumping Fish Movie

I've seen fish jump before but nothing like this. You have to see this movie to believe it.

Gay Cowboys

I was watching the old movie Tombstone last weekend and noticed something I hadn't before. Buried down among some secondary characters there are pretty explicit hints of a homosexual relationship. Jason Priestley's character Deputy Breckinridge becomes smitten with traveling actor Mr. Fabian as portrayed by Billy Zane. We get this view just from looks and smiles but it's clear this isn't simple brotherly love. The point it brought home near the end of the film when Breckenridge breaks down upon seeing the dead body of Fabien. It's not the same kissing and hugging that has people all uncomfortable about Brokeback Mountain but it's gay cowboys western characters, nonetheless.

Ancient Chinese Secrets

Nice post by Andrew Johnson relating some old Chinese quotes and a fable relevant to the art of writing software.

Hello from the new blog

This is my first offical post created with my new blogging tool I've been calling Dog. It's still a bit rough, so I will be dual posting on Dog and Blogger for a while until I work out the kinks. If you want to switch your RSS feed to the new system, subscribe to http://www.developingstorm.com/pete/blog/rss. You can find the regular html blog at http://www.developingstorm.com/pete/blog

I should never have left IBM

Agile Web Development with Rails

I've been reading the book Agile Web Development with Rails and building some Rails applications over the past few days. I like the book a lot. Previously, I had played around with Rails and read a few of the web tutorials but they all left me a bit underwhelmed. The tutorials all showed how you can get a lot done with just a few lines of code but none of them really teach you about Rails and how to use it. This book really filled in the gaps.

The book follows the standard format of starting out with a tutorial and then diving into a deeper analysis of the technology. The tutorial in Agile Web Development with Rails is more in-depth but still left me a bit cold. Where the book really started to shine is when it went deep on the underlying technologies. I've not finished the book yet, but the section on Active Record, the object relational mapping service used in Rails, alone was worth the price of the book.

With the help of the book I'm building a new blogging system I call Dog Blog. Why Dog Blog? Because I like dogs and it sounds funny. I know the world doesn't need another blogging system but it's fun to write and Rails makes if easy. My master plan is to move off of Blogger to Dog Blog at some point in the future, but I still have more Rails to learn and bunch more code to write before that will happen.

Time management in a feed happy world

Time is a precious commodity and I never have enough of it. As I've complained before, my stack of unread books keeps growing, my list of pet projects I would like to work on is never ending and my thirst for knowledge (and beer) of all sorts is unquenchable.

I'm sure this is a truism of life but I've reached a point now where I need to reset some priorities. As much as I enjoy reading articles like The 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005 (on Redit), Company bets on woman to die quickly. Woman lives, company sues (on Metafilter) and the wealth of other interesting but frivolous tidbits that cross my path thanks to the likes of Digg, Slashdot, Kuro5hin and Memepool, I feel the need to make a late new year resolution. I'm going to unsubscribe all those feeds and try and forget all the URLs and live without those sources of trivia. I don't know if I'll use the extra time wisely, but It's worth a shot.