Chris Mar's Weblog Blog Different

I visited the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History exhibition "Butterflies Plants: Partners in Evolution". The exhibit is a sealed room of live butterflies surrounding you in their natural habitat. Having exotic butterflies fluttering around posing for photos is magnificent. There was an amazing manifold of colors and species to be found. I never imagined I would have an opportunity to take photos of these wonderful creatures; all in one location.

Check out the full gallery

While playing with Wordle, I processed Jonathan's blog in search for his true focus. Wordle produced the beautiful word cloud below. Jonathan's main focus is on customers, which is an important trait for a CEO. Storage, Software and Systems are prominent; but more interesting is the focus on being Open. Services could use more attention but given that Jonathan is my CEO, I'll let you decipher the rest.

For some reason, I purchased and started reading three books this month. My initial favorite is the recently released "Developing Facebook Platform Applications with Rails". Because I had preordered the book, it was an unexpected addition to my reading list. I really should pay attention to my preorder queue on Amazon. The book is a tutorial on building a feature full Facebook application using the Facebooker plug-in. After bulding a few small Facebook applications using PHP, I'm excited to use RAILS and the nicely integrated Facebooker library. I've accessed the canvas and profile sections of Facebook, but have yet to create messages or take advantage of the social graph. I will share my progress as the next great facebook application is being built.

I picked up "The Art of Agile Development" at the Web 2.0 NY conference back in September. It has been difficult to read the book end to end. I've skimmed most chapters and only found a few to be useful. Chapter 8 on "Planning" was immediately helpful for my debates at work. We spend a lot of time arguing over time boxing -vs- feature boxing our projects. A large portion of the book is devoted to test driven development, peer programming and code reviews, not as interesting to me as this has been covered by many other agile books. I'm searching for new insights on integrating Agile methodologies into existing companies and working with the business on estimations and expectations.

"High Performance MySQL" is a book I've hoped to read for a long time. Using a gift certificate for Borders, I picked it up for $49.99 (minus my 20% coorporate discount). I've decided this book should be required reading for all engineers who use MySQL. The database is easliy approachable and has a small learning curve; so, most developers build their tables or db migrations and move on to more important tasks. I've found this is a common mistake, even for seasoned engineers. MySQL has an advanced feature set and provides many unique ways to optimize for reads, writes or replication. I've realized that having used MySQL to build a basic database for a website is not enough experience for a highlite on your resume. I'm suggesting this book to my coworkers.. While it can be dry, the education is worth the dryness. My new interview question for candidates is "Describe the different use cases for the InnoDB and MyISAM engines in MySQL".

For my ratings, I'll give "Developing Facebook Platform Applications" 4 stars, "The Art of Agile Development" 2.5 stars and "High Performance MySQL" 3.5 stars.

A great piece of advice from Jason Fried at the Web 2.0 Conference:

"Design with a Sharpie"

This is a powerful concept in software design. Using a blunt force marker you are forced to focus on the primary problem and delay the interference of the details.

Jason Fried gave an amazing Web 2.0 Keynote last week. He uses an analogy that we need to be curators of the software we create. If a museum curator takes every painting suggested to him by the users and sticks them all in a room; that creates a warehouse. A curator carefully chooses the paintings that add to his vision and filters out the noise. As software developers we need pick and choose new features carefully. The business and users are a good source of information. We should not take all requirements and blindly implement them into our products.

There is also a great write up from a session given by Jason on Lessons learned at 37 Signals

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creater of Ruby on Rails, recently gave an inspired presentation on starting your own company. His big secret is "price". You create a great application, price it, and make money from your users. It is an amazingly simple concept. If you get past the need to make a billion dollars from every idea you have. Then you open the possibility for creating a great application that can make millions of dollars by providing a great service to your customers.

Like most of my friends, I am always trying to come up with the next great "Facebook". If you consider the odds, this is like trying to win the lottery. I've changed my views after this presentation. It is a nice course correction for the crowds chasing the next web 2.0 dream

Give it a watch, let me know what you think

Google does some of the most amazingly wonderful things. They have quietly released hosted AJAX Libraries. They are now hosting many of the standard ajax libraries used by developers including my favorite Prototype and Script.aculo.us.

This means all your favorite web applications can refer the same scripts hosted by Google. This will save bandwidth for your hosted web applications and decrease load times for clients as their browser can cache the scripts since they are all from the same Google host.

The API even provides a version specification. So, you don't have to worry about upgrading and managing your Rails versions to get script library upgrades. Just watch your use of the AJAX helpers

It looks like you can use their Javascript API or provide a direct link:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
google.load("prototype", "1.6.0.2");

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js

In April, we had a very enjoyable trip visiting some friends in Frankfurt. We visited the Mercedes and Porsche Museums in Stuttgart. We also spent a day in Heidelberg, which I would recommend to anyone visiting Germany.

The second half of our trip we spent in Amsterdam. The city is amazing and you should go soon as the rumors are the Red Light District will be shut down this year. The most memorable part of the trip was a heading out to the Kenkenhof area. While the gardens are amazing and worth a visit, they are very crowded in mid April which is the peak time for the tulips. From the parking lot of the Kenkenhof, you can rent bicycles for 8.5 euros and ride around the bulb fields. I found that to be one of the more enjoyable adventures I've had in Europe. They provide a very well laid out route map and the ground is very flat so the riding is very easy. Judging from the amount of people we saw on the trails, most people don't take advantage of the opportunity, so make sure you do when you visit.

A few of my pictures are displayed in the badge below, you can see my full set at Flickr

www.flickr.com

Over the last year, Textmate has become my favorite editor. Today, I finally figured out how to use the blogging bundle with blogs.sun.com.

The secret was getting the xml-rpc url correct in the setup file. The URL I'm using is: http://cmar@blogs.sun.com/roller-services/xmlrpc#cmar . In the URL, you'll notice 2 "cmar", the first is my username the 2nd is the name of my blog. For blogs.sun.com your username is the same as your blog name. It took me while to realize this because most examples just use http://blogs.sun.com/roller-services/xmlrpc and don't include the #blogname. For example, in MarsEdit you don't need the #blogname.

The Blogging bundle includes all the features you need to fetch posts, set properties like Category and Title. The only quirk for me so far, is you don't "command-s" to save, but rather do "control-command-p" to post. I'm happy now, using my favorite text editor on the mac and blogging with it, no need for another application.

In case your wondering, yes this is my first post from Textmate

Randy Pausch is a Carnegie Mellon Professor of Computer Science. He is fighting Pancreatic Cancer and sadly his prognosis is not very good. Last Fall, he was asked to give a traditional Last Lecture for Carnegie Mellon. Usually, the Last Lecture is just a metaphor and an opportunity for a professor to pass on the lessons he's learned in life and his career. In this case , it really was his last lecture. It is one of the more inspirational things I've ever heard and I had many take aways that I will carry with me the rest of my life.

I encourage you to watch this video, plan to spend at least an hour to watch it. Randy lived an amazing life, and is fighting until the end actually speaking to congress about Pancreatic Cancer. In the computer science field he is one of the experts on Virtual Reality and also the creator of Alice.

In the latest issue of Time, there was an article titled "Freshen Up Your Drink". The main point of the article was that reusing single use water bottles is bad for your health. The typical purchased water bottle (Dasani, Kirkland, Deer Park) comes in a bottle made of Polyethylene Terephthalate and is only designed for single use. You buy it at the store, drink the water and throw it away. Typically, I buy one of these bottles and refill it many times from the office water cooler. I thought I was helping save the earth but reusing these bottles multiple times before throwing them away.

Apparently, the plastic used for these bottles degrades with use and actually hosts germs and bacteria from your mouth. The more you use one of these bottles the more contaminated it becomes. Its just disgusting.

The article continues by evaluating reusable bottles by Nalgene made out of Polycarbonate. These are the the most common reusable bottle I've seen. But these bottles seep BPA, a synthetic hormone that mimics estrogen. This means if your using a Polycarbonate bottle, your drinking estrogen. If that isn't bad enough, if you put hot water in one of these it seeps 55x as fast.

After some research, I decided to purchase a Klean Kanteen. This is made out of the same stainless steel used in professional kitchens and is as inert as drinking out of a glass. If you read the FAQ on the Klean website it explains how they are one of the cleanest drinking containers you can use. I never knew how bad plastic water bottles could be, and was happy and fine reusing my bottles. But once you take the blue pill you can never go back.

Any experienced developer knows not to use a regular glass during coding sessions. I've learned over the years after spilling on my keyboard and laptops one to many times. Yes, I need a water bottle sippy cup :) but my computer thanks for me for it.

Update (4/10/08) The Today show has done a special on this subject:

After spending more time researching then any human should. I have finally found the perfect laptop sleeve for my Macbook Pro. Gary Waterfield hand makes these in San Francisco to custom fit your laptop. It is a soft neoprene covered with ballistic nylon. The stitching and seams are impeccable. I ordered mine with the extra d-rings and strap so I can use the sleeve as a light weight carrying case. I firmly believe in supporting Made in the USA products and the quality of this sleeve is a perfect example of what someone can accomplish when they build it themselves rather then outsourcing to overseas factories. You do pay a premium, but its well worth it. The quote from their website says it all.

No mass production or overseas workforce. WaterField bags are designed and made in San Francisco, where rent is high, labor is expensive and competition is intense. We wouldn’t go anywhere else!

http://www.sfbags.com/products/sleevecases/sleevecases.htm (I got the sleeve with the extra flap so I could use it in both my backpack and in a messenger bag)

Facebook has added Sun Microsystems. You can now join facebook with your sun.com email. There are already a good number of people in the Sun Microsystems network. Don't be left out! www.facebook.com

Make sure you join as "work", and it will automatically place you in the sun network.

CNN/Money rated Software Engineer as the best job to have in America. I have to say I agree

Read the Full Story

Excerpt:

1. Software Engineer

Why it's great Software engineers are needed in virtually every part of the economy, making this one of the fastest-growing job titles in the U.S. Even so, it's not for everybody.

Designing, developing and testing computer programs requires some pretty advanced math skills and creative problem-solving ability. If you've got them, though, you can work and live where you want: Telecommuting is quickly becoming widespread.

The profession skews young -- the up-all-night-coding thing gets tired -- but consulting and management positions aren't hard to come by once you're experienced.

What's cool Cutting-edge projects, like designing a new video game or tweaking that military laser. Extra cash from freelance gigs. Plus, nothing says cool like great prospects.

What's not Jobs at the biggest companies tend to be less creative (think Neo, pre-Matrix). Outsourcing is a worry. Eyestrain and back, hand and wrist problems are common.

Top-paying job Release engineers, who are responsible for the final version of any software product, earn six figures.

Education Bachelor's degree, but moving up the ladder often requires a master's.

Its midnight and I just got home from the rockin After Party at Java One. I can't believe the party Sun threw for us. They had 2 bands perform and Dennis Miller. The first band was an all female Led Zepplin cover band called Zepperella. They were really good, funny hearing a girl sing Robert Plant, because she sounded just like him. Then came Dennis Miller. He is so funny, he was killing tonight. Everyone seemed to be enjoying him. Most of the hour was his typical rants and satires on politics and current affairs. I'm sure most of the international attendees were offended or at least missed most of the jokes. He seems to have a lot of hatred towards the French and Germans. I laughed a lot, I guess thats all that matters. To end the evening, Sun brought out a band named Camp Freddy. This is a great cover band with members from Incubus, Janes Addiction, Alice in Chains, Sex Pistols and The Cult. They rocked the crowd, and even the geekest of us seemed to really enjoy them. Of course, Sun provided great food, and entertainment in the party. Plenty of video games, fooseball and pool tables. Thank you Sun!