I’m taking break….

I’m under too much stress in both my personal and professional life right now. I’ve been getting quickly agitated lately and jumping the gun a lot. Now this is starting to spew over into my posting and comments on not only my blog, but other places on the net as well and I don’t want or need that.

Granted most of the time I’m very out spoken, but I’m not nasty, just direct. With the way I conducted myself yesterday with my answer to Peter, that really bothered me. So much so that I was up last night just thinking… “Why the fuck did I do that?”.

So rather then continuing to make a complete asshole out of myself, I just need to sign off for a while.

Happy Birthday Linny!!!

Happy Birthday to my wife Linny who turns (6^2) - 3 today. Love you honey!

Approaching 100,000 total views

A small milestone should be crossed within the next 48 hours: this blog will have it’s 100,000 visitor.

It all started with my first technical article.

Go me!

Ruby on Rails - All I need for the switch

For a while now I’ve been looking into Ruby on Rails (RoR) to replace ColdFusion (CF) as my primary programming language of choice. There are so many things about the framework that just dazzle me to death. I know I’m comparing a language to a framework here, but to be honest, to most people there really isn’t a difference. Plus the fact that I really haven’t found a CF framework out there that I really like nor one as feature rich as RoR.

For one, I like the idea of convention or configuration (COC). How many times have you taken over an app from someone where you’ve spent days on end trying to figure out what the hell they were doing? If you embrace COC then every app is structured the same so there is no guessing at all. I can also see how COC can speed up development amongst a group of developers since everyone has to follow the same directions.

ActiveRecord (AR) is just sexy beyond belief. I love SQL, don’t get me wrong, but I grow tired of writing the same queries day in and day out (This is why I created ICEGen). Furthermore, I’ve seen some of the SQL that others have written and makes me want to throw up. If AR can help me not write the same boring SQL while preventing others from just writing it altogether, I’m sold. Coupled with the fact that the built in validation methods are just so simple to use, why would you need further convincing?

Plugins and Gems just work. I’ve seen frameworks in ColdFusion claim that you could write or download a plugin, install it and it would just work; yeah, well it doesn’t. Half the time I’m hunting and configuring files all over the place only to expense my efforts in vain. With RoR, just a simple command line and within seconds the plugin and gem are installed and work beautifully. Sure sometimes there is a little configuration to do with them, but at least in the end the plugin works as expected.

I don’t do tests, I just don’t. I’ve tried using CFCUnit and failed since it warped my fragile little mind. Tests in Rails are dead simple. Because of this, you can’t even submit a patch to the RoR team unless you include your tests. This is all done thanks to fixtures.

Those are a few things that I just love about RoR, now let’s see what huge things it’s missing that CF has.

CFDOCUMENT - What CF developer today hasn’t used this tag. There is something just magical about wrapping the tag around your invoice written in HTML and having it pull up a PDF or Flashpaper file in the browser. No need for them to have Acrobat installed so they have to print the page to PDF, it does it all for them and it’s dead simple to use. RoR doesn’t have this. PDF::Writer sucks balls and it’s hard to use. HTMLDOC doesn’t support CSS so it’s impossible to get the page to look good. Plus Flashpaper it’s even an option.

CFIMAGE - Yeah I know we just got this tag, but before you could just download imagecfc which worked just as good in my opinion and you had your image manipulation. RoR has support for ImageMagick which, if you’ve ever used it, is a dog. It’s slow as hell and doesn’t scale worth a shit. I still to this day can’t believe that this library is the defacto amongst the open source world.

As you can see there really isn’t a lot that CF offers that RoR doesn’t already have. Hopefully the RoR team will see these shortcoming and create some plugins that address them soon. For now I’m still learning and loving RoR.

Forget digging, start zoning!

DZone is where it’s at baby!

Developer want certain types of articles that I notice just don’t cut it on digg. the digg technology section is extremely juvenile and beginnerish for my tastes and I crave more.

A couple of days ago, I found dzone after someone took one of my article and threw it up there. Now I’ve replace my digg bookmarklet with a dzone one and haven’t looked back. I love “zoning” instead of “digging”!

Goatse Birthday Card

Today is my birthday and my co-workers decided to take me out to lunch (they’re such a thoughtful bunch). On top of that, our graphics intern made me the funniest birthday card I’ve ever seen. I asked her if it would be OK to scan it and throw it up on the web for others to enjoy and she said I could.

So here it is, the first goatse birthday card! Just click on the image, print, cut and then fold. Give it to someone you love.

Cool font list

Since the whole 2.0 thing, I’m really getting into fonts. This is just a personal list for myself of what my font decoration should be:

“Palatino Linotype”, “Book Antiqua”, Palatino, Georgia, “Times New Roman”, Times, serif

What I want for my Birthday and Christmas

Well my birthday is around the corner and already friends, family and co-workers are asking me what I want. Add to that that Christmas (I fucking hate that holiday) is also around the corner and I’m getting asked the same question as well: What do I want?

It finally came to me today when we were doing our annual office secret Santa. This year we were asked to choose 3 gifts that we would want that were under $25. From those 3 gifts our secret Santa would buy one of them. As I pondered what I could possibly get from ThinkGeek that was under $25 when I realized something: I didn’t want a fucking thing. No I’m serious, I have enough shit and I’m content with the shit that I have. I don’t need to be accumulating more shit.

I was planning on just writing down “nothing” and turning in the paper when I had an epiphany: why not have my secret Santa contribute the $25 to a charity. With that I combed the internet for some charities to make a donation to. The geek in me finally settled on 3 charities:

The Wikimedia Foundation - the maintainers of Wikipedia
Project Gutenberg - offers free e-books
Open Source Initiative - gives money to open source projects

I turned the paper in and felt good, now someone else would get a gift that they needed. I felt so good, that I decided to do the same thing for my birthday as well; So if any family or friends read this, here is what I want for my birthday and Christmas: make a donation to a charity for me. I don’t care what the amount is, just give what you want, but I want a copy of the receipt in a card to prove to me that you made the donation

I’m such a dork

Email exchange between me and the co-workers

CO1:

We will have our Secret Santa and Pot Luck gathering on Wednesday, December 19, 2007 at 12:00 noon sharp!! The pot luck theme will be Italian, and we’ll need two desserts and four food items. We’ll each be responsible for our own beverage. For our Secret Santa, by 4:00 today, please give me your name on a piece of paper with three suggested gift items keeping in mind the $25.00 limit we discussed.

CO2:

I’ll bring Meatballs.

ME:

I’ll make chicken parm.

CO3:

Ill do fettuccini alfredo!

CO4:

I’ll do dessert and bring regular and diet soda.

CO1:

we were all going to handle our own beverage. what kind of dessert and dish so we don’t duplicate each other?

CO4:

I can bring soda for everyone if I want… you can’t stop me.

Tiramisu

ME:

That’s very nice of you…. But I don’t remember an employee named Tiramisu in our department. Who are you?

CO4:

You’re such a dork.

I haven’t slept in 5 days

It’s 5:17 am and I’m still up. I’ve been up since Friday the 23rd. I can’t sleep.

It’s really weird though because it’s not like I’m tired at all either. I’ll go lay down in my bed at say 10:30pm and I’ll just lay there. Even if I close my eyes, I just never really get to sleep. Seems like I go into a twilight where I still know what’s going on but not like a really sleep.

I’m guessing that it must be the Wellbutrin I’m taking at the moment to help me stop smoking. I started to take the recommended dose of 300mg a day on Wednesday the 21st, before that I was taking only 150mg a day. My doctor told me that there was a side effect of insomnia but I didn’t think that it would be this bad.

I’ve always had problems sleeping. Usually about twice a month I’ll say up for 36 hours straight. I use to get really pissed off and upset when that happened, but over the years I’ve just come to accept it. Kewl thing is that it let’s me catch up with some personal projects that I want to code. However normally I’m crashing around the 40th hour and I have a good night’s sleep that night. This is weird though.

I just hope I can get through the work week and things start to get normal soon. Kinda funny though. I’ve always said that if there was a pill I could take that would never let me fall asleep, I’d would be first in line to get it. Now that I’m actually taking a pill and I’m not sleeping, I don’t think I’ll be saying that anymore