It has been quite a while since my last post. There is a crazy amount of things going on in my life right now, so I thought I would go over a couple. I suggest you grab a cup of Joe and get comfortable, because this is one long post!
I am working on a cool side project with a guy from Michigan. I am trying to decide which technology I should use. My own MadCMS, which would need lots of updating to support some security features, or MovableType, which would need some updating to support custom features.
I have been using JBuilder at work exclusively. It has been rough, but CTRL+J out+ENTER is almost as easy as sout+TAB. I had a fit last Friday because it hid some class files and didn't clean them when I asked. Apparently Paul had the same problem except in IDEA. I personally have NEVER had that problem in IDEA, so I wonder if he usually uses JBuilder :) This all lead up to an interesting discussion about should you centralize your development around Ant or around your IDE with my friend Cris. I have been preaching Ant but Cris is pretty adament about IDE. Just another vi vs emacs.
Work has been pretty hairy. My team really likes some of my ideas and that feels great. It feels good to contribute and solve a couple of hard problems and then be recognized for the effort. This is actually something that is fairly new in my life. I look forward to going to work every day and talking with my coworkers. It is always a new adventure and I am learning alot. I am particularly glad that the leadership on the team is what it is. One guy is like a grandfather to the entire team. I have learned alot about how to interact with management from him. He mentions from time to time that he reads my blog, so I would like to say "Hi Paul! Thanks!"
Another side project that I am working on is an idea I had a while ago called Googled Favorites. The idea is that the browser should present a good idea of what I want to read when I open my browser. From time to time I just sit down and want to catch up with reading things that interest me. My expectation is that my favorites would be ordered by previous surfing habits. My first approach to this idea was to create a plugin for the browser that would watch the history. But then the surfing habits would only be measured from one computer. And I would have to stick with the same browser. And it would probably require some C or C++ both of which I am not familiar with or eager to learn. So I stopped thinking about it for quite a while.
Then one of my friends told me about his bookmarks that he keeps online and how he wished that there was some automation behind those bookmarks. That kinda got my juices flowing and then I remembered my bookmarks idea. So I started thinking about what my ultimate home page would be. It would have to have my bookmarks, a Google Search, My RSS feeds would be nice and... Googled Favorites! Since it is on a web server I thought about capturing the clicks and measuring them from the page, but then I thought "PROXY SERVER!" A proxy server has access to all of that information, so all I have to do is point my browser at a proxy server. I haven't worked out all of the kinks yet but there is progress.
I have been using Opera for the last couple of months and I really like it, but I like Mozilla as a browser more. What I really like about Opera is the email client. It just blows Outlook away. The spam filter isn't as good as SpamBayes, but it works. What really hacks me off is that I have to use the web based mail from work, so I don't delete the mail off of the web server. This means that I have to manually remove it from the server which is a real pain. My provider said that they will have Spam protection in a month or so which will be nice. On the other hand, I have a feeling that as soon as GMail is available, email clients will be a thing of the past.
I have started reading a couple of new blogs. SlayerOffice is all about favelets, JavaScript and CSS. Kevin works for Google and seems to be an all around nice guy. I am gonna shoot a couple of ideas about how to improve GMail to him in hopes of making it a better service.
Last but definately not least, family. My daughter is now 8, my son is now 11 and my wife and I are both a year older. All of these birthdays are within 32 days of each other. It makes for a fun month :) I am finding that I love my wife more every day. My kids are very funny and fun. It is exciting to watch them grow up and become young adults. I am very proud of all three of my munchkins. My wife has painted most of the first level of the house. She has done a marvelous job.
Well, that is all for now. Hopefully it won't be so long before my next post! I hope you all have a good weekend.
Posted by carl at April 17, 2004 01:32 AM
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