Resolutions for me?

1. Rails. Become an absolute master.
2. PHP frameworks. Likewise, play with various PHP codebases (so far Akelos, Symfony and CakePHP are on the list) and build at least one site with each over a period of a few months. Figure out which I like best and for what reasons.
3. Music. Make more of it. As soon as things settle down a bit on the job front (I’ve got a new one starting in just under two weeks…) I want to make a minimum of 3 “finished” beats a week. I think it’s doable, if a bit hectic. Share them all with the Internet via this blog and a redesigned dcbeats.net (sub-resolution: redesign DC Beats)
4. Lose weight. This is probably on at least 50% of Americans’ lists of resolutions, I’m sure. I’d like to drop at least 50 pounds, all through aerobic workouts and bicycling/inline skating. Anyone who wants to skate with me in the Alexandria/Fairfax County area, drop me a line! thynctank@thynctank.com or 703-585-4576.
5. Move out. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve been living with family for some time now. Finally I’ve got a job where I can support myself and my wife without bleeding dry the fun fund.
6. Make babies. Some time this year, we’ve got to get started with the family propagation. Soon as Terri’s healed up from her terrible set of surgeries this past year has brought her.

No, she’s dealt with post-op fever, elevated heart rate and other ailments, and has actually been operated on once more to discern whether the previous operation was causing her additional problems, which they determined that it, thankfully, was not. Almost immediately after the second surgery her heart rate started coming down and she seems almost infinitely better. She was very scared and, being a worrier in the first place, was quite upset prior to going into surgery.

A group of friends stayed with us through it all for this last round and again I want to express my sincere thanks for their vigilance and support. It would have been a much lonelier, and much more solemn night without them and I’m sure even I would have worried quite a lot. I tend to be more of a positive thinker but it has been stressful, as well as terribly tiring.

Now that things are looking up again, I’ve got work to go to (though I’m still not sure whether there’s work today, it being Columbus Day and all) and my car in the shop to worry about, not to mention a contract for BreatheMedia and work I’ve yet to do for hooyip! Let’s hope it all comes together somehow.

Akai and all the fam miss you, Terri! We’re looking forward to having you home soon!

When I got to the part in the installer where [Ubuntu] where it asks on which partition I want to install the system, it shows a single partition. “This can’t be right,” I think. “Maybe BootCamp hides the OS X partition from [Ubuntu].” So I go ahead and run the install, rather than run through the long and involved BootCamp process again.

2 hours later (it was a strangely Microsoftian copy of Ubuntu, what can I say?) I find I’ve erased everything I’ve grown to love about this machine, and am thoroughly pissed in the pants. Fuming at the mouth. Barking at the tree. Whatever the current colloquialism is that the kids are using these days.

So in about 45 minutes I’ve reinstated OS X as the ruler of the MacBook, and it’s time to find all of my beloved software again.

Luckily, I have a list (note to self: Post list for the nice people) of all the Mac apps I love and want on my machine. Thanks to this list, and the Power of Broadband, I had all of these apps downloaded in less than an hour. I was moving along so swiftly I decided to just install them all and got on with it posthaste.

Another hour or so later, and I finally had my machine (essentially) in the same condition it was in yesterday. Only now I’m missing my iTunes library, which I’ll have to reinstate immediately! I had just spent like 4 hours 6 hours fixing it so all songs lined up in the proper albums, I had as many album covers as iTunes would allow me, and was going to wipe my iPod and transfer this new and improved version of the library to it. Guess that’ll have to wait.

Oh well. Least there’s alcohol to comfort me. And drinks on someone else’s tab! Sweet!

In the time I’ve been employed there, I’ve bought myself a 17″ MacBook Pro, I grew fond of OS X and the whole Mac phenom while working for InPhonic. I’m not a robot, and yes I feel gouged at the 2500+ bucks this hunk of aluminum cost me, (did I mention I also ordered a 20″ Cinema Display?) but it was fair enough I was willing to spend. I’ve purchased only one application for it, and that’s TextMate. All else I need is FLOSS or I don’t need it yet. I installed my old Cubase (which comes with discs for Mac and PC both!) to it and it’s humming along fairly well for a product that came out before the Universal Binary. As soon as I make something nice with it (or finish anyhow, I did start something tonight…) I’ll share it here and on DC Beats. (both of which are long overdue for face lifts)

Also during this time, my wife has lost her job, and has been spiraling downward emotionally. I feel terrible about it, mostly because nothing I do ever seems to help. To cheer her up, her HP Compaq laptop decided to break down, and it’s been in the shop since something like July 18. They claim it’s an issue of backordered parts. I don’t know that that’s reasonable to them, but keeping her computer for nigh on 2 months (for a broken headphone jack!) is completely out of all reasonable expectations. They’ve pushed back the “estimated date of arrival” for the return shipment 7 times (!) and every time I’ve gone and run down to the porch like a schmuck with a rapidly-reverting smile on my face. Every time I’ve called them up and simply been told the part is still on backorder. Finally I had enough of it and spoke to a Quality Manager about a week ago, and supposedly they’ll be sending us out a new laptop, with enough upgrades to constitute over twice the original pricetag of the barrel-bottom machine I got her before. (don’t poke fun, she’s not a power user in the least, and doesn’t need even that!)

We shall see.

I’ve been learning ever more RoR. (mostly thanks to the great “Agile Web Development with Rails” but also in part simply reading API docs, etc.) I intend to spread the word as best I can. I’m using it on my current project.

I’ve recently become a fan of, and have begun religiously using and promoting, Todoist. This is simply the best online todo list I’ve ever seen, has keyboard shortcuts, easily rearrangeable task lists, sub projects, priority and due dates. There are even a couple great Firefox plugins. Definitely not to be missed. I’ve also started using Newshutch, the best feed reader I’ve ever touched. Being an online tool, all the weight is on the server’s shoulders, not your machine. All storage too. I freakin love it. One of the coolest Rails projects I’ve come across. I’m also Feed Burning now, so subscribe already and boost my morale a bit!

Anyway. Time to go save the world and get some sleep, (not necessarily in that order) I’ve got another day of morning ahead of me before the blissful night arrives again. [EDIT]

Oh shoot! I forgot to mention one of the cooler things that’s been occupying my time lately! Metroid Prime 3!!! One of the coolest FPS-like experiences in a long time, and certainly the first outstanding FPS-style control scheme for Wii. Retro hasn’t lost their touch one bit! I’m on to Elysia, the second planet in the game. Booyah!

• Most importantly for the moment, it crashes occasionally. I haven’t pinpointed any specific causes for this, at least yet.
• No Google Suggest
• Back button keyboard shortcut is awkwardly assigned to “Ctrl + [", perhaps the worst shortcut in history. Non-user-configurable. (it does appear Alt + arrows works, if intermittantly
• No decent shortcut for switching tabs!

Keep an eye on it, though. With the iPhone running Safari now, and with iTunes [mostly] whole-heartedly embraced by the masses, it’s only a matter of time before Apple apps see more facetime on Windows.

More tech news after the jump.

Got the wife a new cheapo (sub-$500) HP (cough cough Compaq) laptop running Vista Home Basic. Discovered Basic does not, out of the box, come equipped with a codec for DVDs, which is one of the stupidest fucking moves ever. Luckily HP pre-installs their own DVD software on top of it and all is well with the world. So far, she’s been pretty lucky and hasn’t had any snags with major crashes, though it has already locked up on her once.

Discovered jEdit. This cross-platform, lightweight Java-based editor can do almost everything TextMate (which is Mac-only) can do and more, when it comes to Ruby and Rails. The plugin system is also quick and light, and can accomplish most tasks you’d want to handle (like project management) and more (like IRC and an RSS feed reader?!) though it is suspiciously lacking SVN support. (CVS and Visual SourceSafe are represented, to be sure) PHP highlighting is ok but there’s no code completion and it even lacks automatic delimiters (“”, {}, [], (), etc) which TextMate of course has, in PHP mode.

The Ruby plugin for jEdit is massively feature-packed: Snippets a la TextMate, actual old school code completion, (which TextMate lacks) and on-the-fly RDoc lookup (which TM also lacks) as code completion is in progress. What more could you want? Well it also does automatic delimiters and using macros you can simulate any keyboard-shortcut-induced features of TextMate. (my most-frequently used one in TextMate is Ctrl + Alt + Shift + W to wrap all selected lines with <li> tags, which took all of 4 lines of BeanShell code. (BeanShell is a simplified, interpreted Java derivative with full access to most base Java classes and with a WELL-documented set of objects, documentation which comes in the box with jEdit. If only EclipseMonkey were so well-defined… cough)

The only thing jEdit doesn’t have that I really would miss from TextMate is completion of any word previously-entered into the current document. In TM this is accomplished by hitting Esc after one or two characters or so of a word have been typed. In Scribes this is accomplished through Ctrl + Space fashion. (Scribes, which can only do word-completion on words where three characters or more have been typed already, has no proper code-completion, as it’s more bare-bones like TM)

All in all an excellent choice for any programmer, particularly Rails developers. You can assign shortcuts for external commands like compilers or browsers, and it’s almost infinitely extensible through macros. The only other issue I’ve had so far is with the XML plugin, which annoyingly pops a dialog any time you select a tag name from a dropdown using code-completion. I’ve been unable to find a way to disable or circumvent the dialog box, which I find quite unnecessary. Other than that, zero crashes on either Windows or Mac. (have yet to try on Ubuntu, but that might be nice not having to load Eclipse [it's sloooow])

Earlier today Mylar/Mylyn would not stop crapping out my Eclipse session. A dialog kept popping asking for me to submit my user data to the project, which I tried obliging, ignoring, etc to no avail, there was an inifinite loop in there somewhere. I had to manually remove the .jar files for the plugin from the install before Eclipse stopped getting stuck on that dialog. Bah! Hopefully a fresh install won’t have this problem. (still have to get Trac or Bugzilla working with Mylyn to test out the basic task list, and hammer the Aptana folks to implement some of the features that will make Mylyn task-based contextual masking of project files work beautifully and without user intervention!)

Lastly, I’ve discovered (Scratch that. Reread and finally tried out) RadRails’ snippet-handling functionality, if ever-so-briefly. My Eclipse on Windows was very out of date so I had to restart a few times after adding one plugin after another. (Aptana just released an iPhone plug, could be useful!) Essentially it looks to operate TextMate-style, only it’s only available in RadRails editors, not any other. (like PHP Eclipse, for instance) Like Scribes, it’s triggered by Ctrl + Space entry, so it’s apparently wrapped around the normal code-completion features of Eclipse. Seems to work real well, and tabbing/shift-tabbing through fields works a treat. Will look into this more later, as I do love Eclipse.

Anyone who knows how to get the “complete any word” functionality out of jEdit (or Eclipse/RadRails!) let me know! Also, anyone who discovers full-on documentation of the Eclipse DOM somewheres for Eclipse Monkey, let me know about that too!