thoughts to blog

So I’ve done this before… you’ve seen it on all of the soc-net sites… you put your picture in and it tells you what celebrities you look like:

whoa!

Apparently I look like Laura Bush! HAHA

So you’ve got yourself a sweet new MacBook Pro… and you want to do some video transcoding…

…You go out and install MacPorts…

…You type ‘sudo port install ffmpeg‘…

…And you get a big fat ERROR…

WTF?

…Type ‘sudo port uninstall ffmpeg && sudo port clean ffmpeg‘… (if you have an older version)

…Type ‘sudo port install ffmpeg +lame +libogg +vorbis +theora +faac +faad +xvid +x264 +a52 +dts’…

What the heck? It will go through and install a bunch of common libraries and codecs… and it works

‘Nuff said. kthxbai

So there’s a nifty backup service called Mozy…

They give you 2 gigs of space for free and “unlimited” storage for $5.95 a month…

Not bad. Decent free space, decent speeds, works on a Mac or Windows variant…

I might continue to play with this until my uber geek inner self comes back and tries to play around with AWS S3…

UPDATE Yeah… so I uninstalled Mozy… and am going to go down the AWS S3 account… I’ll figure it out soon…

So it’s been about 5,000 miles since I purchased the new whip… the 2007 Honda Civic Si Sedan (Nighthawk Black Pearl)…

Here’s a rundown of points on what I think about the ride:

Exterior / Interior

• I LOVE the cockpit feeling of the driver’s seat. Deep bucket, small steering wheel, speedometer in the dash…short throw shifter.


• The HFP (read: Honda Factory Performance) Body kit + Lip kit looks good… makes the front end of the car look like Darth Vader


• Black is a tough exterior color to keep up… Imperfections are easy to see… it’s always dirty… yikes….


• Black interior is hard to keep clean as well…


• Wrap around bucket seats are nice when you’re pushing the edge of a turn at 60 mph… keeping you right in the spot you’re supposed to be.


• The Honda Navigation is pretty damn good, voice and GPS… plus a nice sound system to boot!

Handling / Performance

• 6 speeds (5 with one overdrive, essentially) is fun to play around with…


• I love the sound of the exhaust, nothing annoying or ricey.


• The iVTEC is freaking fantastic… very responsive and sounds wonderful when it hits iVTEC.


• Solid suspension that is a harder than what I had expected. Definitely not fun to drive in Iowa where the roads are terrible.


• Turning off Vehicle Stability Assist with a touch of a button and having that feeling of being on edge is fun.


• Letting that sucker go up to 8,000 RPMs is hot hot hot…


• Gas mileage of me fooling around on a daily basis is about 28 mpg… with 30 mpg total highway tank. I can pretty much get 350 miles out a tank on the highway…

Overall I am thouroughly impressed with this vehicle… my sticker price was $22,680… retailing at nearly $26,000… not bad at all.

I would give this a 5/5 for fun, appearance, and performance… Best bang for your buck!

I tell you what… I’m having a tough time at work keeping up with contexts of projects…

Especially when it comes to operating systems, syntax, and project status…

I’m constantly swapping back and forth between OS X and Windows XP … for a Ruby on Rails project and a .Net project respectively…

With the differences between ASP.Net and Rails… combined with C# syntax and Ruby syntax… combined with keyboard layouts and shortcuts in the OSes… I’m going to go nuts!

I ended up doing this in Ruby today, I knew I was screwed:

  def my_cool_function(int count)
     TopScore topScore = TopScore.new()
     topScore.points = count
     topScore.save
  end

(hint: parameter typing and type declaration for the variable)

Or when I did this in C#

  List things = collector_class.GetMyThings();
  things.each { |thing| thing.save }

(hint: .each iteration)

Yikes… and another thing… using Windows on a MacBook Pro is nice for a lot of reasons.. but using having a different key for keyboard shortcuts (Open Apple vs CTL) is tough… and then having the function key on the far bottom left makes me want to hit it (the normal spot for CTL on a Windows keyboard).

Talk about context switching in relation to efficiency… it’s tough!

As many of you know… I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails professionally for the last 10 months and have been playing with Rails since it’s inception…

And now they have me working on a .Net project. Once again I’m back into the world of strongly typed managed code. I have to say that I missed it… thus my talks on it and toy projects.

There are lots of good things happening in both the Ruby world and the Microsoft world… it makes me excited to be a developer!

IronRuby, Silverlight, Ruby on Rails 2.0, JRuby, RubyWorks, the list goes on and on…

Damn it feels good to be a developer