Changing Latitudes, Changing Attitudes

I did something last week that I had never “offically” done before. I handed in my two week notice at Time Warner Cable. My final day is the 7th, making it 5 years, 2 months and 28 days since I first started as a I/R Tech up in Akron. So why am I resigning? Melissa and I are moving to Alabama.

While Columbus has been good, Melissa has always wanted to be closer to her family. With her father’s stroke earlier this year, we started really looking hard at moving. I have been keeping an eye on over 40 companies, and put in about 30 applications since I started keeping track in June. Finally I got a bite, and interview, and finally a job. On September 12th, I start as a Business Customer Service Tech for Knology.

The job is a bit of a mix of what I do now and what I did in Akron. Essentially I’m a cable tech with a focus on Business and Fiber-to-the-Home customers. Yep, I’ll be doing work on Fiber! Melissa is going to help take care of her brother, and focus on her business. She already has an actual wedding cake she is going to bake for a customer, and wants to get into the cake decorating business. I’m still going to try and do development under my RomLabs business, but its on hold till October when the new iPhones come out. With iOS 5 around the corner, it makes little sense to try and develop for iOS 3, and I lack any good iOS 4 devices.

Of course, there are a few downsides to this move. First, for the immediate future, there is no wire based HSD options. My HSD connection will be a VZW 3G USB stick and a Cradlepoint router. I know 3G speeds and a 5GB data cap are not the best, but it beats the pants off a satellite connection. Satellite ping times might as well be measured in seconds! Second, I doubt I’ll be making it to another DasLAN unless I’m in the area. The upside is I’m planning on making it to QuakeCon’s more often, starting in 2012. PaxEast is a possibility, but I have to see how things work out.

In a way, while I’m going to miss Columbus and Time Warner Cable, I know its time to move on. So onward and upward! We move down on the 10th and hopefully be back online sometime on the 11th.

 Title style suggestions?

So as I play around with Baked Potato more, I have ran into a bit of a conundrum. Essentially, I'm looking for suggestions on how to handle website titles for blog posts. A quick Googling and impromptu pole of various sites has not show a clear consensus either way.

Currently, my title is just the title of the blog post or whatever page your on, but i was wondering tossing my sites title (Romb.us) in there somewhere is a good idea. Here are some examples:

A. Blog Post Title (Current Style)
B. Romb.us | Blog Post Title
C. Blog Post Style | Romb.us

I'm somewhat leaning towards C. It makes the title of the post primary, while still tagging it with my site. The delimiter ( | ) could be varied easily.

So what do you all think? Think tagging is necessary or am I cluttering up my titles?

 BakedPotato - An attempt at Baked Blogging

I have been vocal in the past about my feelings on Drupal and other Blogging/CMS platforms. It’s not they are inherently “bad”, just difficult to work with. They tend to become complex as they mature, making it harder to work in the code and set it up the way I want. I’ve considered writing my own blogging system before, but it becomes daunting when you start considering everything that goes into a a PHP based blogging engine that uses a MYSQL database as content storage. So why not just go back to static files?

That's right, cut out the database. Cut out the PHP scripts that generate the pages per request. Simply make a website using html files. A friend of mine (Krhanios) already does this, but he links to other sites that have the dynamic content. What I’m going to attempt is building all the static files dynamically in the background when I make a post. It solves a lot of problems inherent to PHP/MYSQL based sites. it does introduce some problems of its own, but nothing very complex. Part of the fun is figuring that all out, Right?

I by no means take any credit for this idea. I actually heard about it on Build and Analyze Episode 18 where they discussed ”A plea for baked weblogs”. I’ve spent the past few weeks thinking about it and I simply love the idea and want to play with it. So did Marco Arment , he has been working on his own version called Second Crack. It sounds great and I cant wait to see it, but he has not open sourced it yet. So what I’m going to play around with my own version I have dubbed “Baked Potato”.

This is going to sound odd, but I don't ever intend for Baked Potato to be finished. Its really just a way for me to play with the idea until Second Crack gets open sourced. You can watch me (or even help if your interested) play around with Baked Potato on GitHub. You can check it out here: Baked Potato on GitHub. Nothing will be there yet, but hopefully the first Proof of concepts will be posted. The first proof of concept is geting a file generator together and do conversion from Markdown Syntax to a complete HTML document. My plan is to have it by next week!

 Creativity Atrophy

Creativity has been on my mind recently. I realized that for the past 5 years I’ve been doing jobs that are not exactly a creativity work out. That's not to say there is no mental challenge, but the solutions tend to be the same. Its one of the banes of the IT/Networking field, problems tend to have known solutions, unless things are very broken.

Now normally this would not present a problem, but I’ve noticed its impacting my ability to program and come up with new ideas and creative solutions to problems. This is where the rub comes in. I really don't want to be in IT and Networking for the rest of my life. I’m trying to change and improve!

To combat creative atrophy I’ve been trying a pretty obvious technique I heard about on the Back to Work podcast. Essentially it can be summed up as “Just Do Something.” I know, groundbreaking right? Sometimes the most obvious advice is the best. I’ve been trying to do a few things to not only improve my creativity but to also improve other skills I’ve always felt lacked. I’ve been trying to fill up a sheet of paper each day with sketches and drawings. I’ve also been trying to write at least once a day. Now a majority of the drawing and writing will probably never see the light of day, but that's OK to me. I’m already starting to notice some improvements.

Now a few things are going to be a bit more public. I’m going to start writing more blog posts. The Learning to Program series has been good, but I want to go further. In the past, I've been rather quite about personal thoughts on Romb.us. In part because I figure most people are not interested in what I have to say. And to a point, I’m probably right. But it’s also a bit of a disservice to me, I cant improve if I don't try. So expect more “Whats on my mind” style posting.

Also I’ve also been kicking around the idea of rebuilding Romb.us and building my own blog engine. Another bolt of inspiration came this week in the from this blog post: ”A plea for baked weblogs” discussed on the Build and Analyze podcast. I’ll go into more details later this week. Its safe to say I'm going to attempt some of the ideas presented, if only for practice.

More L2P Friday! I’m taking a bit of a break before the final push into the CS193P classes.

 L2P: the “Parts” of a Program - Spinning some mad loops!

At some point in your application, your going to want to do something again. Maybe you will want to do it multiple times. Now its pretty easy to cut and copy the same command code over and over again, but what if you don't know how many times you will need to do something? What if you want to do something until something else happens? Don't fear, Loops are the answer! More »

 L2P: the “Parts” of a Program - Decisions Decisions

You would be hard pressed to find a program that did not use some sort of logic or decision making during its execution. There is some form of “IF” in just about every programming language. So lets discuss how we use it in programs and how its implemented in Objective C! More »

 L2P: the “Parts” of a Program - Returns, Accessor Methods, and Synthesizing

So far the PrintCount class methods we have created do not send anything back to the code that calls it. What if you want to get something back from a method you call? Well that would be a “Return” in programming parlance. This is yet another Wall-O-Text post that I'm going to hide behind a cut. More »

 L2P: The “Parts” of a Program - Hello World with a OOP Twist, Part 5

Now that we have our basic class working, we can play with it a bit. First I want to introduced an easier way of allocating and initializing your instances. In part 4, I used 2 lines of code to setup an instance of a class. One line allocated it, and the other initialized it. Both these steps can be done in one line, as shown below:

PrintCount * phraseb = [[PrintCount alloc] init]

So what if you wanted to count the number of times you printed another line of text? Simple, just invoke another instance of our class, then use the same methods we have before. Here is an example using 3 instance of our PrintCount class:

PrintCount * phraseA = [[PrintCount alloc]init];
PrintCount * phraseB = [[PrintCount alloc]init];
PrintCount * phraseC = [[PrintCount alloc]init];
 
[phraseA setText: @"This is Phrase A, Hello!"];
[phraseB setText: @"This is Phrase B, How are you?"];
[phraseC setText: @"This is Phrase C, I am fine!"];
[phraseA printText];
[phraseB printText];
[phraseC printText];
[phraseA printNum];
[phraseB printNum];
[phraseC printNum];

This code should output:
2011-03-16 11:39:53.797 HelloOOP[23059:a0f] This is Phrase A, Hello!
2011-03-16 11:39:53.799 HelloOOP[23059:a0f] This is Phrase B, How are you?
2011-03-16 11:39:53.800 HelloOOP[23059:a0f] This is Phrase C, I am fine!
2011-03-16 11:39:53.801 HelloOOP[23059:a0f] The string 'This is Phrase A, Hello!' has been printed 1 times
2011-03-16 11:39:53.801 HelloOOP[23059:a0f] The string 'This is Phrase B, How are you?' has been printed 1 times
2011-03-16 11:39:53.802 HelloOOP[23059:a0f] The string 'This is Phrase C, I am fine!' has been printed 1 times

Hopefully this is starting to show the true power of classes. The deeper we get into programming for iOS devices, the more we will uses classes. In fact, the foundation library defines a bunch of classes we are already using, like NSString and NSLog. Almost everything we will use is part of a class somehow!

Next up we are going to be building up our class a bit and using the additions to learn about if Statements, For/while loops, and finally a simple iPhone application. This should get us comfortable enough so we don't feel lost starting the Stanford iOS Development course. If the CS193P section this year is not online, we will use the Winter 2010 one. As a bit of a note, From here on out, I’ll be using Xcode 4 unless for some random reason CS193P uses the older version. Even in that case I may still use it and translate everything into Xcode 4 anyway to get accustomed to it.

So are there any ObjectiveC or iOS topics YOU think we should hit? Let me know in the comments!

 L2P: Pax East and Xcode 4

So L2P is going on a bit of hiatus till next Wednesday due to Pax East 2011. I’m looking forward to the developer sessions they are going to have, and some of the other dev centric things going on along side all the awesome gaming!

So whats coming up next for the L2P? We are going to be playing around with our class and expanding upon it, then using it to learn some logic. Then we will build a basic iPhone app before hopping into the CS193P Stanford classes. The good news, the Spring 2011 section of CS193p is starting on March 29th, and I’ll do my best to keep up with them.

Also interesting is the release of Xcode 4. There are some very compelling reasons to upgrade, most importantly that the new LLVM compiler should produce faster code. One surprising thing is that its free to registered paid developers, but its $4.99 though the app store if your not a paid dev. I’ll probably upgrade since I know I’m going to need it, but its a odd move considering it was free in the past. It’s still a steal at $4.99 for what you get. It’s just a bit of a barrier for people to get into iOS/OSX development.

Cya next Wednesday!

 L2P: The “Parts” of a Program - Hello World with a OOP Twist, Part 4

We have the project, we have the PrintCount class built, Now its time to use it! After this post, we will have our first, real, OOP program. More »