My House is for sale

4307 Brownsboro Glen Rd.
Louisville, KY 40241

Details:
Brick w/vinyl sides and back
Ample closet space
Laminated floors throughout
Gas fireplace in living room
Central gas heat
Central air
Double pane windows
Covered Porch
Large fenced back yard with trees.
1 1/2 yr. old 50 gal. gas water heater
New Roof (2009)
Large master bedroom
Quiet street
Separate dining room
Other small upgrades (kitchen sink/faucet, bathrooms, larger water heater)
Built in 2001
.20 acre lot
4 Bedrooms
2 ½ baths
Eat-in Kitchen with island
Unfinished Basement
2-car attached garage
Fenced back yard

Total = 2120 sq. feet
Asking price: $235,000

Pictures Available

House For Sale

Call for appointments:

Just What Are We Developing?

I've been thinking about this post for some time and I finally decided I should go ahead and try to express my frustration with current application development.

The root of the problem is that currently the applications that are given the most press and the most "excitement" are useless. We are at a time when there is computing power literally in the hands of users that until now was unprecedented. Yet what are we developing on these new platforms like the iPhone, Blackberry, and G1? Well a quick survey of the popular applications will tell you very quickly that apparently the great achievement of having a "smart" phone is being able to play games. I don't know about all programmers out there but I've never gotten excited about the potential of a game. After all it doesn't save a company money or make a user more productive or increase safety or anything that a really well designed application might be able to accomplish. If it isn't a game it is a restaurant finder or something that identifies a song on the radio or pretends to pour a beer. Well there is a great advancement to our society a device that pretends to pour a beer! However, one programmer did connect up a phone to a servo motor to pour a beer once you have loaded up the bottle and the empty glass of course.

Similar problems exist with the "run anywhere" platforms like Adobe AIR. So far I haven't found many real applications written in Adobe AIR. Sure there are little apps you can download that will show you twitter feeds or pull other RSS feeds to your screen but what about a real application. I actually did find one application called Klok for tracking time that seems to be an actual application and not another glorified RSS reader. But a quick review of the Adobe AIR marketplace will let you decide for yourself.

And what about the great web applications frameworks that are supposed to allow us to put together great applications on the web? Anything out there with meat to it? Rails, Grails, Django and others all claim to speed our development and to some degree they do but what are we developing? Another friend application so I can communicate useless status to people that I probably don't hang out with but for some reason need to be my friends. I laugh at social media applications that pull together all my RSS feeds from every useless service like facebook, twitter, linkedin and all my other "essential applications" (I apologize to my friends that have worked on these applications since I know the code does take some time but for the "real" aspect no such apology). I want to see really useful tools that people can use to really do something meaningful like save money on groceries, gas or save on heating costs.

All this useless development leads to a lot of dead ends. It causes rates to go down and makes it so that the average business person has about as much respect for programming as they have for what their kids are doing on their smart phones.

So what is the answer? I have a suggestion. Let's all start to look beyond games and communicating with our virtual friends. Real programmers can certainly make something useful for these platforms. Let's try to develop things that really matter? Of course this won't be easy. First we would like to get paid. Free software is for people without families and bills to pay. So that means real work. Not some weekend of coding that produces another RSS feed reader but real work with a long time line and possibly some real use in the future. If you are in college and considering programming as a career learn more about the real world connections to computers like embedded systems and hardware. Don't just think you can write the next facebook. Ad supported models are not good business plans. I think the future of application development is going to be in understanding how to use real data like temperature and energy use to then make real changes that can benefit users. If you are thinking about writing another game or "social" application then good luck to you. Personally I think that is the reason we will continue to see hard economic times...we can't focus on anything beyond a day or two and that leads to games and "social media". Which by the way tells me we are not in hard enough economic times when people are still paying an extra thirty to forty dollars a month for a data plan that allows them to look up restaurants, compare prices of other things to buy or send email.

Electric Scooter Arrives

My electric scooter arrived late yesterday afternoon. It is an R-30 from EVTAmerica. I spent some time last night un-crating, removing plastic wrap, and just a small handle bar adjustment.

I did a quick run late last night and this thing quickly hit 40 mph without any trouble. Very impressive. I can't wait for the weather to let up a bit so I can ride it to work. Supposed to rain all day today so I'll skip for now. Photos of my entire assembly process are on picassa web.

New Job with SolutionSet

I've been waiting to make this official announcement. I am taking a position with SolutionSet. Like some wild trip through the past I am going to be starting an office here in Louisville with Tom Osborne. Tom and I worked at TechRepublic a long time ago (10 years? wow!). Even a bit more strange is that we may actually be in the same building where TechRepublic started out.

The SolutionSet Blurb:
"Launched in 2003, SolutionSet (http://www.solutionset.com) combines
industry-leading technology with user-centered creative to deliver the
latest approaches in web development, digital marketing and brand
experience. As a brand technology and interactive agency, we utilize
the latest technology to turn our clients' visions into the website,
brand promise, ad campaign, application interface, or email campaign
they need to run their business.

With offices in San Francisco and Palo Alto, we stage the convergence
of brand and technology which allows us to view each client challenge
with a bigger picture in mind and offer strategic solutions based on
that visibility. We have a proven track record for delivering to
clients like Chevron, EBay, Tivo, Verisign, Cisco, Autodesk, and
LucasFilm. SolutionSet is a Webby Award recipient and is number 23 on
the Inc Magazine Top 500 Fastest Growing Companies overall list and
number 2 in the IT Services category."

I'm fired up about starting out with SolutionSet. We are going to have some great times and do some really incredible work. We will also be filling a number of positions for Java developers and CSS/XHTML people.

Hopefully all my clients (current and old) can come on board to do work with us at SolutionSet.

Animals Up Close With a Wide Angle Lens

Drupal 6 Module Development

In my continued quest to increase my Drupal 6 knowledge I picked up this book on module development for version 6.

Over all this is an excellent book. This is definitely targeted more at a developer which is probably why I liked this book. I think the author does a great job of explaining the basics of how Drupal works and specifically covers a lot of information on hooks which are key to understanding how to accomplish most any task in Drupal.
The modules that are developed through the book are well chosen because they cover the essential pieces of module development and at the same time allow a little time for some more advanced topics. I was surprised at how well the theming code was covered in this book. Most module development books usually leave all the user interface development out but this book shows how you implement your module in a way to take advantage of the theming capabilities in Drupal.
Over all this is a great book and if you are familiar with Drupal a great way to either learn about module development or get up to speed on some of the Drupal 6 changes to modules.

Ninety-nine cent gas in Louisville

People waited since midnight to get .99 cent gas with a limit on 15 gallons. Would you wait all night long in order to save fifty bucks? That is assuming you of course could use the entire 15 gallons which means your tank would have to be very close to empty or large enough.

If you do the math that works out to about 8 dollars an hour to spend the night on the side of the street while waiting for the 6 a.m. start.

Book: While America Aged

Just finished reading While America Aged by Roger Lowenstein. While this book can sometime drag with large numbers of details about various players in past pension negotiations I can still highly recommend this book.
If you think the failures of large American car companies are an isolated incident then this is a must read. Mr Lowenstein describes how these events repeated with the New York Subways and the City of San Diego. Unfortunately for all of us this paints a sad future for most governments and of course the biggest pension system of all Social Security. The last chapter hints at some easy ways to help prevent this but those methods are easy just difficult in our political climate to make happen. He mentions the push to Government supported healthcare as well as an attempt by President Bush to stop borrowing against Social Security. Of course both these measures have never achieved support.
A good informative read that I can highly recommend.

Drupal 6 Book

Just finished reading "Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6" by David Mercer from Packt Publishing.


This is a general beginners book for Drupal and web development in general. Overall I'd say it is a good book for those wanting to learn about Drupal. My biggest issue is with some of the more generic advice on how to develop a site or how to decide about what you want your site to do. These are just extra elements that I think should be left to a different book.
Still I'd recommend this book if you are interested in learning about how Drupal works and whether you can use it for your site. Combine it with a book on module development that I am currently reading and you have a good round view of the basics of Drupal.

Planting a Tree

Last month I was planting a tree in the back yard. Nothing big just about 8 feet tall. I dug the hole for it and this is the all the stuff that came out of the hole I dug for the tree.

Can you believe that? Looks like left over building material and this was 50 yards out in the back yard.

Gas Prices Are Not High Enough

Just keep noticing that despite high gas prices people continue to speed. Coming out of downtown today in a 55 mph zone people were passing me doing 75 mph. Anybody that remembers their physics knows that this is eating up gas. I did some surfing around to get some more precise data. So on average you can think of every 10 mph you are losing approximately 4 mpg in efficiency.

So speed on as long as you are not one of those complainers about gas prices.

HD signal compression hurts picture

Take a look at this article on CNN.

From my experience the SciFi Channel suffers the worst from this compression. But I have a simple and easy solution.

Stop broadcasting twelve versions of shopping channels and get rid of the countless Spanish channels. Put these things on some sort of subscription service and you will free up a ton of bandwidth on the wire.

Panera Blocks Tinyurl

After some research and a few emails with Panera and then SonicWall it is definitely confirmed. Tinyurl is blocked by Panera. They are using SonicWall and tiny url is rated as (27.IT/Computers and 28.Hacking/Proxy Avoidance).

So I exchanged email with Panera customer support. They referred me to SonicWall and I put in ticket to change the rating on tinyurl. Well that was like talking to a brick wall. I requested it be rated as IT related only and removed as a hacking site and this is the response.

Dear Customer:

You submitted the following rating request to SonicWALL CFS Support:
Rate tinyurl.com as "27.Information Tech/Computers" at 2008-04-18 15:25:00.277

The request has been reviewed and rated as:
"27.Information Tech/Computers, 28.Hacking/Proxy Avoidance" at 2008-04-18 15:26:00.447

You should see this rating change reflected within 1 to 3 business days.

Thank you for your request,
SonicWALL CFS Support

Well this is about stupid. They act like they responded to my request but what they did was leave it still rated as a hacking/proxy avoidance site. Perhaps I'm missing something but does anybody know how tinyurl works around a proxy? Doesn't it just give you a redirect to the site. The redirect still has to pass through the proxy.

Anyway thanks to this and their somewhat slow Internet anyway I'm thinking it is becoming a less desirable place to land in the mornings and work. Sad

More Earthquake Information

This mornings earthquake (5.2).

And the second one (4.5) from a short while ago.

Just a bit more info. Little story on Wired about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. According to this story that earthquake occurred just about 25 minutes before the one this morning.

Earthquake In Louisville

This morning we had an earthquake. It was actually centered in Illinois but we got a good little shake right here in Louisville. Ironically this is the same day that the 1906 earthquake destroyed San Francisco. This one tied our biggest ever and it is the 3rd earthquake I can recall. There was one in 1986 that tied this one and another around 1988 I think and then today.

5.2 magnitude earthquake felt across Louisville | courier-journal | The Courier-Journal