Dread Pirate PJ’s House of Hacks and Tricks

(This post was inspired by Evil Genius Chronicles, Lunches at the Beach.)

I grew up in this very town, 37 miles west of San Juan on the north shore of Puerto Rico. This very house where I live now was my grandfather’s house when I was eight years old. It later became my home, from ages 11 to 17. After graduating from high school, I went to Pennsylvania, PA to study Computer Science and got a job straight out of college. I moved here again almost seven years ago, when the dot com bust left me looking for a job.

I live 5 minutes from the beach, a beautiful bay, in my not so humble opinion.

I loved the beach growing up. I visited the beach every chance I got, even though I didn’t learn to swim properly till I was 16 years old. I just liked to walk the beach, sink my toes in the warm sand, or chill my feet in the water. And my beach has these great hulks of stone nearly three stories high (eolianite according to this page .) I loved climbing them and sitting at the very top and just stare out over the endless stretch of the north Atlantic on the horizon. At different times of the week, you can see the cruise ships heading for the Bahamas or Florida, just a half mile or so from the rocks.

As mentioned at the beginning, after I graduated high school I studied and worked in southeastern Pennsylvania and the North Carolina piedmont for 13 years, several hundred miles from the nearest beach. You can’t imagine the joy I felt every time I returned home on vacation to visit family during those years and stopped to visit this beach. I’m sorry, eastern USA residents, but your beaches are lame. And don’t even get me started about Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. Psh!

For the last two years, I’ve been working from home as a freelance software developer and tech writer. I pretty much can keep my own hours and so I make a point of taking an hour break at least twice in my work week, to head to my beach, just 5 short miles away. There are times I just take the whole weekend away from computers, work, everything (except my iPod and my fiction reading stash.) Sometimes I feel so burned out I just sleep all day on a hammock, less than twenty yards from the breaking waves. The sound of the waves and the steady cool breeze lulls me to sleep every time.

Every year since I moved back here, I ask myself if I want to move back to the USA mainland. And this beach is one of the few reasons I’ve stayed as long as I have.

Yes, it’s a little colder in hell as I write this. If you look out your nearest window, you’re likely to see monkeys flying on the backs of pigs. Which means Armaggedon is starting any day now.

I’m talking about this:

Microsoft has recently released a public beta of IE8. Standards and security are of top importance in this release. To that end, the IE team is planning on releasing IE8 in full standards mode. Releasing in Full Standards Mode offers many benefits in the long term, but short term, could cause some end-user and developer issues. We would love to understand your thoughts around the impact of this specific issue and invite your suggestions on how we can best communicate it.

If you have thoughts and feedback on IE 8 releasing in full standards mode, please respond to the questions below and send your reply to jasontil@microsoft.com with “[IE8 Community Feedback]” in the subject line by this Friday, April 11th at Noon, PDT.

1) IE8 releasing in expected to release in “standards mode”.

(a) What do people in your communities space think about this decision?

(b) What do you predict the impact to be on the customer and/or Developer experience?

(c) Do you have a recommendations on how best to share this information?

2) Our current plan is to communicate this heavily with web site owners and developers. We will be contacting top sites directly, distributing developer FAQs, and writing Knowledge Base articles on authoring to these standards.

(a) Do you think that will be effective at improving the customer experience?

(b) Are there other suggestions do you could offer to transition web sites to be standards-based or to improve the experience for users?

and this:

Adobe is removing restrictions about how the specifications on the FLV [Flash Video] and SWF [Flash Application] files can be used, and we’re removing royalties on using Flash Player on mobile devices. We’re also publishing the FlashCast protocol as well as the device porting layer APIs for Flash Player. That will allow people to port Flash Player to a wider range of mobile devices, and also to create a Flash player from scratch, based on the Adobe specifications for the file formats.

Adobe will continue to try to not let the market fragment by providing the best Flash Player there is. We will continue to provide Flash Player across all the major operating systems, and try to make that the best player on each platform so people continue to adopt that one. But now anyone is free to build their own Flash Player.

I don’t know about you, but I’m buying my tickets to Ice Cap Hades today!

When WordPress 2.5 was announced, I decided to stay on 2.3.x for a while. I finally upgraded to 2.5.1, and I’m glad. My Bad Behavior plugin was outdated, and WP offered to upgrade for me. It happened without a glitch. From reading the upgrade information, it seems that when 2.5.2 comes out, I’ll be able to update by just clicking a self-update button on the administrative interface.

The new WordPress administrative interface is a lot less cluttered, and more useful information is shown on the main page. The look is cleaner while remaining usable. It looks like a lot of time and effort was spent improving it.

Rather than tip my hat at the WordPress folks one more time (it’s getting old to do that every few months) I’m just going to give them Dread Pirate PJ’s Hoard of Loot lifetime award.

The image is from playrough’s photostream on Flickr.

On Friday, April 11, 2008, I went to see Rush open their 2008 Snakes and Arrows concert tour at Coliseo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR. I had an awesome time with my pals Alejandro, Cesar and Kevin. We were seated about six rows from the stage.

There were a couple of guys from the Philadelphia suburbs right next to us. Some guy from Dallas, TX was two rows ahead of us, and was stranded in PR because of the American Airlines fiasco.

The concert was awesome, three hours of great live music. Truly the best live performance I’ve seen in ages. There was a six minute drum solo by Neil Peart, that was just amazing.

I took my iPhone to use as a camera, knowing digital cameras per se were not allowed. I used an iPhone application called Snapture. This great little app is made for “jailbroken” iPhones. That is, iPhones that have been modified to load and run applications not “blessed” by Apple.

You’ll notice that some pictures are blurry/shakey, followed by two steady, clear ones. Snapture has an optional feature where it takes three pictures within a second or so of each other. This helps you steady the phone and get at least one clear shot.

I took 1426 photos. Yeah, that’s right, 1426 photos. I did this by using the 3-consecutive-shots feature of Snapture, pushing the volume button to trigger the photo capture twice per minute or so.

Set 1 of photos is here.

Set 2 of photos is here.

Each ZIP file contains 713 photos and is less than 260MB.

The pictures I’m uploading are totally unprocessed. They’re right off of the iPhone at 1600×1200 resolution.

I started deleting blurry pictures, and pictures where the stage was too dark or too bright and lacking contrast. But there are so many pictures to go through, I eventually decided not to bother.

The last 250+ pictures are in black and white. I think my finger slipped at some point, and I touched one of Snapture’s on-screen controls. Sorry about that!

Over on the WordPress Development Blog, they’re pimping the upcoming WordPress 2.5 and the release candidates process before final release, and it sounds awesome. It includes a boatload of new features, but my favorite has got to be one-click plugin upgrades.

Upgrading WordPress itself is fairly easy, but upgrading your plugins can be an annoying manual process. You have to disable the plugin on the admin dashboard, download the new version, move the old files out of the way and put the new ones in place, then re-enable the plugin on the dashboard. You typically do this one plugin at a time, to check for problems and rollback as needed. Take my word, it’s annoying doing this for more than two plugins at a time, even though it is still a fairly easy process.

In 2.5, the WordPress developers have now made plugin updates as easy as in desktop applications like Firefox. That makes the whole management of the weblog much easier and more hassle-free than it ever was.

I am probably going to wait a few weeks once 2.5 is out, to let any bugs and issues shake out. But it sounds like a really worthwhile upgrade. I’m really glad to run WordPress here. Hats off once again to the WordPress developers.

Technorati Tags:
weblog.engines, upgrades, wordpress

I just got word from my editor at Developer.com that my latest article was published yesterday.

The article is called “Writing Facebook Applications with Java EE” and you can find it here.

The amount of information out there on writing Facebook apps with Java is scarce, and what is out there for Java Facebook applications, is often incomplete. I hope the article helps Java Facebook developers start on the right foot.

It was interesting returning to work with Java, even if only for the few weekends during which I wrote this article. I hadn’t developed in Java at all in almost two years. I was surprised I hadn’t forgotten any important details.

I have another article for Amazon Web Services submitted and in the editing pipeline. It should be coming out in the next few weeks

Hiya, folks!

As is tradition in most blogging circles, I’m posting to let you know I’ve upgraded WordPress to the latest version. My buddy Ken already beat me to it, as always.

I upgraded the Bad Behavior plugin while I was at it. One of my pet theories regarding why I have fewer akismet spam caught than other sites, like Ken’s, is that Bad Behavior blocks most malicious spam bot-like behavior. That leaves akismet with less spam getting through and being caught.

I like my pet theories, they help me sleep at night.

I wanted to write this post before 2008 started, but better late than never, huh?

–

I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails for over 18 months now, and it continues to be a lot of fun. There are still challenges, as projects are never a total walk in the park. There is also new stuff to learn almost every week. The Rails team keeps improving the framework, and the community keeps authoring more plugins. Keeping up is a demanding part of the job, but it adds to the fun factor.

One activity I’ve been doing lately on my own time is learning different programming languages, development environments, and frameworks. The move to Rails from Java seems to have been a good choice career-wise, and I did it by trying to keep current on technology. I want to be ready for the next shift, whatever that may happen to be and whenever it comes into prominence.

–

After many attempts, I finally had published not just one IT-related article, but three, at IBM DeveloperWorks and Amazon Web Services Developer Portal. The articles were published between late October and late December 2007. They are:

Display Google Calendar events on your PHP Web site with XPath

Don’t Get Caught with Your Instance Down

Using Parameterized Launches to Customize Your AMIs

These articles are just the start of a shift from developing software as one of the faceless multitude of IT geeks, to being somewhat more known among my peers. I hope to turn these and other articles into presentations at software development conferences in 2008. Hopefully this enhanced exposure and networking will lead to great new things in 2008 and beyond.

–

Just before beginning this post, I updated Wordpress to the latest stable version. I am always amazed by how easy Wordpress upgrades are. Considering how easy it is to write unmaintainable crap in PHP, the Wordpress team deserves a big standing ovation for doing software right in PHP.

The theme I had up for the last year was not compatible with the change to Wordpress 2.3.x, so I picked out a totally different theme this once. It’s really simple and unobtrusive. If I get creative, I may tweak it or pick another theme altogether.

–

That’s it for now. I’ll try to post more often. Feel free to give me a nudge in the comments if I let posting to the weblog slide again.

Technorati Tags:
life, weblogs, software.development, wordpress

I’ve been at my new job only four weeks, and my first project is nearly finished. My task these past four weeks has been the re-implementation of the company’s website in Rails. I was to do this from scratch, while keeping the site’s design and existing link structure. Among my requirements is adding support for multiple languages, as the company wants to show it knows how to make websites for a diverse, multi-ethnic audience. Another requirement was, that I was to do this re-implementation by myself. The company only has one other experienced Rails developer, and he is busy doing maintenance work on older non-Rails projects for company customers.

It’s been a pleasure working on this project, and I am very pleased in the progress I’ve made in such a short time. I look forward to going live in another two to three weeks, once the site has been through QA and any changes required.

—

This coming Wednesday, May 16, I am off to RailsConf 2007, in the lovely city of Portland, Oregon. Portland is great, I have been there twice and I’ve had a great time each trip. I look forward to the visit very much.

Two of my coworkers from the Williams F1 project, Kyle Drake and Nick Wright, are going to be attending RailsConf as well. It’s gonna be great to meet them face-to-face. Daniel Browning, one of my fellow coworkers at my new job, lives just north of Portland. My college buddy Ken Williams lives in the Portland area too. I plan to meet with them at some time during this, my third visit to Portland.

There are so many sessions I want to attend at RailsConf. But interestingly enough, I feel I won’t get any value out of the tutorial sessions, so I didn’t sign up for any of them. That means I’m out of the tutorial-attending n00b league, yeah! We’ll see whether I can hang on to that thought in the other, more advanced sessions.

A few of the sessions sound downright dull. I guess some of the n00bs will find them interesting, since they’re looking for ‘insight’ and whatnot. Whatever.

What am I looking for from RailsConf? I’m looking for some nitty-gritty I can sink my teeth into, some new tech I can experiment with and learn more from. I’m looking forward to have my brain blown by something cool but complicated that I can learn over the next few months. I want to learn about some new-to-me techniques and plugins or gems that I can master and take my Ruby and Rails to a higher level.

I also look forward to meeting some people face to face. Tim Bray is going to be delivering the keynote on Saturday morning. If you’ve been reading my blog for the last year, you already know what I think of him: he’s the d00d!

The JRuby guys will be presenting one session, and I think their work is of importance for the growth of Rails outside the leading edge. I think JRuby will be the thing to help Rails cross the chasm and be adopted by mainstream.

At OSCON 2005, DHH signed my Agile Web Development With Rails 1st Edition, so I will try to get Robert Martin, Dave Thomas, and Andy Hunt to sign some of my other books that they wrote.

Anyway, I’ll talk to you all later!

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, hacks, open.source, web.architecture, web.technologies, railsconf

After three weeks of development from scratch and four weeks of tuning and debugging, the team of Rubyists I have been working with for the last two months finally launched our last project. At 8:30 a.m. EST on Thursday, April 11, 2007, the Williams UK Formula 1 team’s new website went live!

Full credit where credit is due:

Endemol UK was contracted by Williams F1 to develop the site. After some months of dicking around, Endemol subcontracted Futurecorp to finish the job. Futurecorp is the UK virtual IT shop that hired me and other developers on an hourly basis for this project. We rewrote the full app in seven weeks and went live with it.

Not to be picky, but I wanted to make sure that the above was not left unsaid.

During the last seven weeks, we developed a complete content management system for Williams F1 news reports, event calendar, podcast and video content delivery, and Flash content management. The news, audio, video and event calendar is displayed in a user-friendly manner in a xhtml-strict compliant web front end for sports journalist access. The CMS also produces and manages content for a Flash front end for use by us common folk.

It has been a crazy time, especially the first three 65-plus-hour weeks of horror. I am particularly proud of those three weeks, because we had a fully functional application finished by that time. Rails really is that productive, folks. This was not a small application by any means.

The last four weeks have been more tame, with interminable boring hours of online chit chat BS sessions in Campfire, as developers waited and waited for QA to finish testing and maybe find a few lowly bugs for us developers to squash. The bug count was really low and we developers went home hungry some days.

Congratulations to all of the people below. I will miss working with all of you, it’s been a great time.

Ruby on Rails Team

Team Lead: Nick Wright, Colorado, USA

Kyle Drake, Minnesota, USA
Mark Selby, UK
Dougal Shearer, Scotland
Steven Holloway, Australia
Yury Kotlyarov, Russia
Brad Bollenbach, Montreal, Canada
and myself, Puerto Rico, USA territory

–

HTML Team

Team Lead: Dan Whitmarsh, Sweden

Gary Robinson, UK & Ben Miller, UK

–

Flash Team

Team Lead: Matt Folkard, UK

Tim Cooper, UK & Julian Wilson, L.A., California, USA

–

Support & Infrastructure Team

Team Lead: Jason Griffiths, UK

–

Project Leads:

Michael Christenson, Ohio, USA
Williams Project Lead, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Shaun Laughey, UK
Director of Operations, Futurecorp UK Ltd

–

Management:

Max Haggenmiller, UK
General Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Radha Stirling, UK
Head of Development, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Justin Fanning, UK
Senior Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Eddie Bosticco, UK
Senior Manager, Futurecorp UK Ltd

Technorati Tags:
rails, ruby, software.development