Flashing design

Yes, another minor design tweak for the blog (shouldn't affect the RSS feed to much ;D)
Figured it was time to try out some webfont use, and to push up the font size a bit - ease of reading being a major point with me after using the iPad (and now the iPad2) for 3/4 of a year
Still using one of the predefined templates as a base - content is king here, I'll do my coding and CSS tweaking at work instead

Easter hacking nights

this is an extended draft and sort of placeholder posting - it started off with just getting the basic points in before chrome did a belly up, or the mbp gets a reboot for system updates - still to come is a bit of background and some meta

So, now that Easter is coming to a close here in Norway as well (yes, we all take monday off as well - another public holiday to tide us over after winter, and part of the reason we have no official breaks between summer and xmas) - it is time to finish off this post on the subject of easter hacking.

I've spent a couple of hours some days over the last week trying out some different techs, sort of an extended but split up hackday. I guess that is part of the reason I enjoy working in my current job as much as the previous consulting gigs - spend my days doing and learning things that really get the juices flowing.

Another part of the 'goal' for my part, was the same as during the official company hackday #2 earlier this spring; getting to know the Macbook Pro a bit better as a working tool - outside of testing and learning a bit about iOS development that is. So setting up things like homebrew, finding out how to play nicely with Terminal, getting !# working in textwrangler and discovering the outliner in xcode were as important as the coding in and of itself.


The most direct inspiration for actually exerting some mental energy over the holiday, was the latest "manifesto" from the Domino Project - "Do the Work", which is basically a short and intense version of "War of Art" also by Steven Pressfield (and finally available as a kindle digital version - need to get one and replicate my highlights to store them, so I can relend the book)

Have been doing quite a bit of Java work lately, but with a solid dose of jQuery and CSS thrown in. But being raised 'multilingual' - started off with Pascal and C++, later spent quite some time with both VBA and Java - the allure of jumping into something new was strong. And with so much talk about both server side javascript (node) and jQuery coming to Rails 3.1, the scene was set.

There are some long planned wired posts coming up as well - several small stacks of back issues just waiting to be 'processed' so they can head down into storage.



First off;

some server side javascript - node.js

Experimenting With Node.js And Server-Side Javascript post from Ben, I ran through the basic set-up from another tutorial, then re-wrote his code to work for node 0.46 version -had to make some minor changes to the code to get it running on node version .46 (response.writeHead and .end rather than -close)

possible next steps include looking into more framework type solutions, like geddy, and getting npm up (after reading up a bit on the brew 'controversy' background)


then on to a long planned excursion

testing nosql style database solutions - couchDB

This kicked off with the Nettuts tutotial and some background info, got the system up and running quite easily, before getting sidetracked into organizing and cleaning up my iTunes library. Thus ended trip the second a bit on the early side, but the iPad still has the O'reilly book all prepped and ready to go. Planning to do some small jQuery based test before calling it good, but we'll see what comes first.


the final lap was,

traversing the maze of information to get Ruby and Rails on track

The best info seems to be the 2008 mac dev article, even if rails 3 differs in some ways (action script/server no good, had to use /rails and server as option), it was a nice read. Really useful advice for using xcode as well. It gives you syntax highlighting, but also quick access to basic rails commands along the way including DB migrate.

So now the expense app is taking shape, planning on taking some time for webcasts later - and maybe even read up a bit on ruby in and of itself... not so much learning these tools to use them right now, but more to understand a bit better how the work, and get a glimpse into what it would take to learn them more fully for everyday use.

One thing I really enjoyed was the ease of switching output formats - sure the scaffolding puts up default html output, and includes an xml option. But one single simple line of code got me full json export. Not such a big deal in and of itself, but it sure makes it easier to see how we could plug a small rails app into a bigger java/jsp based site - care of a simple jQuery call. Sweet!



All in all I'd say it had been a productive easter so far. Probably helped a bit to be out of it for the days leading up to the holiday, thereby cleaning out the mind in terms of daily tasks (pushing the task list back a bit once more, but only one real task from my planning board that is still open going into the next sprint)


NOTE; lots of localhost links - for my own reference, remembering what goes where in terms of ports, but if you follow the tutorials they should work in part along the way


...and the sun feels great in the afternoon, almost like summer already...