Coomey.net - Tech

Monolithic

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:02:29 -0400

I'm taking baby steps in the world of digital recording. I bought a halfway-decent Firewire input for my MacBook that I can plug the old Les Paul into and have been playing around with GarageBand. It's a lot of fun, even if you suck, like me.

My first attempt at a composition (it can on loosely be called a composition) is a song I call "Monolithic". It's got a few samples of my favorite neurotic computer, the HAL 9000 from 2001. I made it in honor of Sir Arthur C. Clarke who passed away at 92 recently. It's very much a rough work in progress.

Microsoft and Bungie... parting ways.

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 13:57:13 -0400

Looks like Bungie is going back to being an independent company. It'd be nice to go back to those halcyon days of Marathon, Myth and Oni. Full details found here.

Geni: The Web 2.0 Genealogy App

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:17:52 -0400

If you ever wanted to get into family trees at all like I have, I highly recommend a new site called Geni. Very cool stuff. Slick, easy to use interface, messaging, invites, the works. If you are related to our family at all, stop in there and add some info. The ultimate goal of the site is to show how everyone on the globe is interconnected by families. Very cool indeed.

Boombox

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:03:03 -0500

Hah! Saw this on Digg today. Apparently the company Lasonic is bringing to market a totally retro boombox. I gotta get me one of these to go with my parachute pants, THINK LIFE t-shirt and Japanese flag headband. Awesome.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/portable-media/lasonic-ghetto-blaster-228143.php

Life with a MacIntel

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 11:15:54 -0500

It's been about two weeks now that I've been using my new MacBook Pro. There are some definite upsides as well as downsides to life after the PowerPC to Intel switch.

The Good:

I can play World of Warcraft.
Not necessarily Intel related. I've got a couple of co-workers who are rabid players of this MMORPG and got me into playing. Addictive.
Virtualization
Because of the Intel architecture, I can run Parallels. This enables me to run other x86 native operating systems withinb virtual machines at about 95% native speed. No dual booting with Boot Camp necessary. Currently I have both Windows XP as well as Ubuntu Linux 6.10 running alongside Mac OS X. This stuff is just amazing.
Horsepower
Remember the day that RISC vs. CISC mattered? When Apple had commercials showing the Intel bunny guys getting toasted by the PowerPC? Those days really are over. The Core2Duo blazes.

The Bad:

Intel Compatability
Sure, Apple has done a more than admirable job of making PowerPC applications and libraries work on the new Intel hardware with Rosetta (seriously, it's damned seamless), but there is a definite performance hit when using it and there are a number of big software omissions that have yet to be Universal-ized. For instance, I am currently trying to build a PHP development environment on the MacBook, and everything works except for one thing: Oracle. Oracle provides the Instant Client libraries for Mac OS X, but only as PPC binaries! No Intel or univeral available. This means you absolutely cannot build PHP against them for OCI8 support, which is a prerequisite for me. Come on Oracle, get with the program. Thank the gods I can just build it all in my Linux VM.

I got a MacBook Pro

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:54:25 -0500

At work. It's sick. Now I can do things like this:

MySpace culture is ruining the Internet

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 15:46:27 -0400

First off, yes I am an old fart and an elitist jerk. Sue me. I've just about had it with what the MySpace mentality is doing to the Web. Sure, I'm on board the whole "Web 2.0" bandwagon, but somehow MySpace gets put into the same boat with folks like Meebo, Digg and Google. The whole idea of the social networking website is a valid one. But there are such better implementations of the idea out there.

But, with popularity comes the unwashed masses. Just when I thought the Web as a medium had finally moved beyond ridiculous animated GIFs that burn a hole in the users' collective retinas, the latest fad has become "pimping one's myspace". Where we get to see things like this:

...and this...

Stuff that would probably kill your average epileptic. Gone are the days when people created HTML to be lean, mean and 56k modem-ready. Here are the days of pages with 15 embedded 35 MB videos, embedded flash music players and broken, bloated markup that inevitably crash the visitor's computer like a flight over Lockerbee.

I miss the old days. Jakob Nielsen is dead. Long live Jakob Nielsen.

A Day in the Life of a Solid Rocket Booster

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 16:22:11 -0400

Today NASA released footage taken by a camera mounted on one of the SRBs during the shuttle's recent mission liftoff. This footage shows takeoff, SRB seperation and all the way back down into the Atlantic. Extremely cool video.

SRB-cam liftoff video

Walk the Walk...

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 10:52:24 -0500

I ran across a really good blog entry by Clay Loveless (of Feedster fame) yesterday that really cut to the heart of what it means to call yourself a software developer. In his words: discipline. I highly recommend everyone who considers themselves a developer to give this a read and check his bullet points against their own development methodologies. Here's some of my favorite points from his blog entry:

You must be disciplined enough to write well-documented code.
Yes, functionality counts, but if you're hit by a bus (or trampled by
your fan club at an ego-rally) tomorrow, someone else has to take over
your stuff and make sense out of it. For a pro, documentation isn't
grunt work left to the community, or the peons. The pro just does it
because it's what pros do.
You must be disciplined enough to write code with error reporting (by whatever name your language of choice calls it) cranked to the max. use strict error_reporting(E_STRICT) on PHP5 or error_reporting(E_ALL) on PHP4, whatever: these modes of development
weren't created to annoy you, they were created to save your ass and
hopefully help you evolve into a better developer. Writing new code
under something as sloppy as 'error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE)' should
be an absolute last resort.

Enjoy.

A Comprehensive PHP Framework (Finally!)

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 11:22:20 -0500

Somehow I missed this news back when it was announced, but Zend (the PHP Company) has announced the PHP Collaboration Project. The aim of this project is to leverage the power of some really big hitters in the IT world (IBM, Oracle, Intel and others) to drive PHP into the enterprise market and the future. If there is one trend when it comes to PHP (as well as other open source web app languages like Ruby), it is that it has been seeing steady uptake in the enterprise, by leaps and bounds over the last few years. Look out .Net and J2EE.

The most interesting development from this project I think is the announcement of a forthcoming Zend PHP Framework. What's a framework do you ask? Simply put, a framework is a re-usable set of code, or library, that is engineered to perform the common tasks that almost all web apps do like database connectivity, ldap directory searches, security, user management, etc. For instance, I've created several apps using PHP at work. All of them do these common things, and I had to re-write or re-tool the same code over and over again. With a framework, I've got this stuff already built to begin with. I don't have to worry about the plumbing, framing and infrastructure of an application, I just have to build the house around it.

Sure there are lots of PHP frameworks out there like PRADO, Symfony and others. I myself was seriously looking into using the absolutely fantastic, enterprise-grade Cerebral Cortex framework. (The maintainer, Davey Shafik has since stopped development of Cortex and has moved to the Zend PHP Framework team. Congrats, Mr. Shafik!)

The future is bright for the PHP community. Hang on to yer hats.

Screw you apple

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 10:42:01 -0500

So in less than a year I've gone through three iPods. My latest lasted
less than two months before the hard drive crapped out. Just send me a
new one Apple, this is crazy.

Where's my FIOS?

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 12:28:05 -0500

So I finally dropped my ridiculous business grade internet access plan with Charter. I was paying $160/mo for a connection that was 1.5mbps down and 384kbps up. (yeah you read that right). It was worth it for a while for the static IP. I'll miss you 66.189.35.193! Anyhow, I've 'downgraded' to 3mbps residential service, and it just blows. REALLY spotty speeds. REALLY slow upload bandwidth.. I think about 128kbps. Running this site on this line just ain't gonna cut it. I may have to end up doing a co-lo somewhere instead. Well at least they don't block ports 80, 22 and 23 anymore.

As I was looking into other options today, I ran across Verizon's FIOS service. That's right baby... fiber to the curb. The speeds START at 5mbps down and 768kbps up. All that at a much cheaper price than Charter, those price gouge-ing fucktards. So in a sudden rush of hopeful glee, I checked availability in Worcester...

...and got the expected result: not available. Why must we citizens of our fair city in the heart of the commonwealth be treated like red-headed stepchildren all the time? GIMME MY SP33DZ0RZ!

Anybody know when it's coming to Worcester? I've heard rumblings ranging from 'mid-2006' to 'when hell freezes over'.

AJAX: It's not just for cleaning your toilet.

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 17:44:11 -0500

AJAX is cool. I'm not entirely sold on the fact that it's absolutely necessary, but it definitely is neat.

So what on this blue globe is AJAX do you ask? Well, first of all, it's not just a household detergent. Its an acronym that stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. What it does is give you the ability to communicate with a webserver from a webpage without resending the page request or submitting a form.

For those who aren't web programmers (basically anyone who reads this blog), the web is what is called stateless. All that means is that when you open up a page in a web browser, a request is sent to the server at the other end, and the server sends the page you are looking for back to your browser for display. Once that transaction is complete, all bets are essentially off. Your next request will have absolutely no relation to the one before. That's why cookies were invented to hold data for use between pages. It's also why you see almost entirely static web pages: any data you need for a page needs to be loaded ahead of time before a page is rendered in a browser.

Well, some folks have found a neat way around this: AJAX. What it does is give you the ability to send requests to a webserver AFTER a page has been loaded using what is called the Javascript XMLHttpRequest object.

An example of this idea would be in something I just built for Picasso (my Intranet portal at work) -- the new corporate directory. AJAX seemed to be a good solution to this problem. I needed to show everyone in the company categorized by organization and sub-categorized by department, and this is a rather large amount of data to pull all at once and try to jam into the loading of a page. With AJAX, I was able to break up the processeing into discreet chunks:

Example: at the inital page load, the server grabs a list of all the organizations in the company and displays them. Once a user clicks on an organization, the XMLHttpRequest object opens up a request in the background for a list of all sub-departments. It waits for an XML response And builds the list of sub-departments. Seamlessly. Without rereshing the page. On the fly.

This may seem a bit esoteric, but in practical use it is very slick. I'll try to put up an exampke of it in action.

A new poll. I need your help.

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 14:07:49 -0400

One of the many cool features of the new Coomey.net weblog system is the ability to easily create and implement *themes*. Serendipity comes with a ton of bundled themes. I've sort of settled on a theme called *MT3-Squash*. I dig it. However, I'd love for everyone to get a chance to check out the different themes and vote for their favorite!

So... in the right hand column you should see a list of themes that you can try. Give them a try and then below that, vote for your fave. After a week or two, I'll take a look at the most popular and make that the default theme, at least until I create one of my own.

\m/

Welcome to the new Coomey.net

nospam@example.com (Shawn Coomey) — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 22:00:59 -0400

So this is the new Coomey.net. Hope you like it. I decided a while back that I would completely overhaul the codebase for the blog engine I wrote for the original Coomey.net. I wanted more blog-worthy features implemented (trackback, better media library, threaded comments, easier editing tools, etc...)

I started to rewrite the damned thing, and then realized that I really didn't need to reinvent the wheel, as much as my ego wanted me to. So instead, I started looking for good blog software. Thanks to a suggestion from my pal and fellow PHP cowboy Jeff Loiselle, I've found one. It's called Serendipity... and it rules.

While I was at it, I completely ripped out my home-brewed photo album and moved it to the excellent Gallery 2 photo management system. It rocks! Commenting, ordering photos, you name it! You'll notice too the neat little random photo that shows up on the right hand column: a cool little integration of Serendipity and Gallery. By the way... I've posted all the pics from our recent trip to Orlando. Cool stuff.

A few things remain: Re-establishing the random taglines that existed in the old coomey.net and finding a way to incorporate polls. Any ideas?

EDIT: I figured out the polls! They're built in! w00t! First poll is up on the right hand side.