I figured since I had the post about selling the windsurfers for my mother, I’d post about a bunch of other stuff we’re trying to sell on craigslist and ebay. Cross promotion never hurt anyone, so take a look!
I’m helping my mom clear our her house of stuff she no longer uses or we kids can’t use anymore (or just don’t want for that matter). To that end, I’m helping her sell two Windsurfer rigs that my Dad and I used when I was a kid. I hate to see them go, but I just don’t have time (or any open water around) to get back into it.
You can check out the ad here as well as some pictures of the windsurfers themselves. I can always take more pictures if someone is really interested in making a purchase.
Today I found myself needing to delete a .svn directory from a Radiant CMS extension I wanted to use (the developer left them in the download, tsk tsk). Anyway, I didn’t want to traverse all of the folders myself, so I found this nifty article over at IBM that gave me what a wanted, which was this:
find . -name .svn -ok rm {} \;
I found Blund Beta since it was a referrer to YumDrop the other day. It struck me as a cool way to show a directory of sites that you’ve found and wanted to catalog. Then that got me to thinking some more. Why not use a layout/template such as this for link directories? Link directories are usually a mess of links to various sites. But Blund gives you a nice sharp image and a description to look at. Most people would rather see an image than a link or some text because we’re visually oriented. And the better the image for the site, the more likely people would be to visit it.
I was evaluating Radiant CMS for a site Kyle and I are developing, and couldn’t for the life of me find any documentation for the Radiant CMS search extension (though there was a thorough doc for the mailer extension). So here’s a little example of what I came up with looking at the ruby code for the extension itself.
<r:search:form label="" />
<r:search:empty>
<h2>No Results</h2>
</r:search:empty>
<r:search:results>
<h2>Search Results</h2>
<r:search:results:each>
<r:search:results:content />
</r:search:results:each>
</r:search:results>
In a nutshell, this will show “No Results” in an h2 tag if there were no results found, otherwise, the search results for the query will be displayed below the search form.
I guess you could consider this duplication of what has shown up on Digg and the author’s own blog, but I wanted to share this great compilation of Developer Cheat Sheets with anyone who stops by to read my blog. This is a great compilation of developer cheat sheets. Everything from A-Z, Python to C#, TSQL and MySQL, etc. Great stuff and thanks to the guy who whipped it up!
I just read this article over at CrunchGear about how there’s a rumor circulating about Apple licensing their upcoming iPhone operating system and multitouch technology. I’m not a Mac rumor expert, I just use their products and keep up on the latest (real) news out of one of my favorite companies.
That said, I have to say I don’t care where this rumor came from, I think its complete bunk. Steve Jobs himself has said that Apple’s success is attributed to the fact that they control their entire environment. Nobody else builds anything for the iPod other than an accessory and nobody else can use the iPod technology for their own MP3 player. If Apple bought into this business model, don’t you think they’d do it with OS X? They’d make a ton more money licensing OS X than they do now selling it on their own (see Dell wanting to license it) and definitely more than they would by licensing the technology that will come with the upcoming iPhone.
The article suggests that this is a HUGE rumor and don’t read anything into it. My educated guess is you won’t see it. Ever. That said, go buy some Apple stock. Make some Mad Money!
Just having come back from Vegas, I knew that the Stardust hotel would be imploded in the next few weeks. It will make way for a new $4.4 billion hotel/resort to come by 2010. Well, they finally did it last night with a bit of fanfare:
After a busy weekend, my fiancee and I decided to watch Stranger Than Fiction on DVD. We have had it for a week, but hadn’t had the time to watch it. I’m glad we finally got around to it. Will Ferrell is absolutely brilliant in this movie. He plays Harold Crick, an average joe, going to work every day as a IRS auditor. One day he finds himself the main character in a strange author’s book. The most bizarre part is he can hear the author narrating the book in his head!. Because of this, he looks to a literature professor for help in trying to to figure out who the author is and why he’s a part of her book. At the same time, the author herself is struggling to complete the final chapters of her book, which she’s been working on for the better part of 10 years. At times, the movie is a little bizarre (if the movie were actually a book, it’d be terrible), but it will make you laugh and chuckle the entire time. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend picking it up or renting it.
Do you ever think back to your college education where you were supposedly learning the basics on how to be a good software developer (or Computer Scientist in my case)? Think of all of those math courses (Differential Equations, yuck), those theoretical courses, etc. etc. Well, now that I’ve been out of college for almost 7 years, I can say that I definitely got a quality education for my $120,000. I can say that degree I have looks really pretty on my wall. And I can also say that college exposed me to my start in writing software applications, mostly UNIX console applications. Last but not least, that degree got me a job that I’m lucky to not have been without since I got that degree.
But what did I really learn that was useful on a daily basis? Basically, I learned how to program and learned a lot of useful things that could be applied to writing effective and efficient software systems. But did I really learn how to be an effective software developer.
I really don’t think I became an effective software developer until I had been out of college for about 3-4 years. There are principals that I wish that I had been exposed to earlier. Being a Computer Science major, I suppose I was learning all the tools it would take to do any job in the computer field from being an IT guy to working with artificial intelligence. What I probably really needed was a degree in Software Engineering.