Hard to believe that its finally here. I am really excited and can hardly believe that I have stuff there!

Riddle Racer

Dot Game

Buy Early, Buy Often :)

I am constantly blown away that the cool winding and twisting of life... I am done the Core Animation book, now just waiting for the iPhone NDA to lift so we can ship it. I started a book on iPhone for the prag's, which is very very fun and cool too.

I don't post much here because I spend most of my time on PrEV these days. Thanks for stopping by...

Scotty was kind enough to have me on the Mac Developer Roundtable tonight. If you are interested in WWDC or iPhone SDK please have a listen. It was tons of fun! Thanks again Scotty!

For those of you coming here from Scotty's site check out my Core Animation blog, its probably more relevant as this is my java blog...

As I documented here my poor old PPC mini was having trouble keeping up with the success of my wife's iPhone Games so I bought and configured a new Intel mini and shipped it off last week. It went on line yesterday and is now barely above 10% CPU usage (the PPC mini was at 100% since ballblast came out).

I took the opportunity to upgrade to Roller 4.0 and update the theme for my blog.

Way back in college I had the great privilege of working on a NeXTCube (started on system 0.9, yes I'm old...) with Mathematica doing some really cool non-linear stuff. It was my first exposure to Unix (which of course spoiled me rotten) and I was hooked. After the end of the semester I managed to land a job building code on the NeXT (doing 3d visualization of stress in materials). I had no idea what I was doing so I bought a book on object oriented programming, a book on smalltalk and a book that was a collection of research papers that mentioned Objective-C. I did not sleep much, got a second credit card and bought a NeXTStation (or pizza box as they were called). After I bought that baby (25MHz, 8MB Ram, 105 MB scsi hard drive, oh yeah!) I really did not sleep or study my aero space engr stuff either :) I still have it BTW and it boots just fine into NeXTStep 4.0, I put a 512MB SCSI disk in it (before I retired it). It also has the printer if anyone out there is in great need of a 25MHz 8MB computer I'm your guy.

After I graduated I looked around for a NeXT related job but nothing happened before my offer to go work at Rockwell Int. at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston expired so I took the job @ NASA and did some cool stuff. But other things were in store...

About 6 months into my full time employment I got a call from one of the consulting companies that I'd sent my resume to and they had some work doing NeXT training for Meijer. I jumped on that job in a second. While I was sad to leave behind astronauts, the space shuttle etc. The chance to work on NeXTStep full time was too tempting. That was 1992. I did professional NeXT stuff until 1998 when I jumped on the Java bandwagon and did a Java startup or two. Then went back to consulting doing enterprise java stuff etc etc, a lot of which has been documented on this blog...

Now to the point of this rather lengthy reminiscence. In November of 2007 I quit a great Java related gig to give the OSX world a shot (OSX is NeXTStep for those that don't know) and to focus on an OSX book for the Pragmatic Programmers. The book is finally beta, you can take a look at it here. I fell like I'm coming home writing a book about Cocoa related technologies. While hardware has come a long way the underlying philosophy of OSX has not changed since the NeXTStep days. It makes developing fun again (at least for me). Who knows if I'll do more java or not, best gig would be a combo, front end OSX, back end Java EE.

You can see some of the beauty possible with Core Animation on Apple's site or of course you could buy the book and mess with the samples. It has been a fun time and I'm really stoked about the transition.

So way back in the day when I worked at NASA one of the projects I was involved in was the space suits for Reagan's space station. That was supposed to be assembled from K'enx type things and they needed new suits to give the astronauts more time in space (among other things). Anyway as part of that work I got to go flying in what is affectionately known at NASA as the Vomit Comet.

Anyway I noticed that Virgin Galactic announced their space ship today.

At a cost of about $200,000 USD for 4 minutes of Zero-G (or around $830/second) it reminded me of the good ol' Vomit Comet. Which also reminded me of Zero G Corp. While its not orbital its a bit more cost effective at around $4000 (with 7 to 8 minutes of zero g or around $8.30/second). So while the Virgin Galactic flight might be cool, for the working class there is always Zero G Corp.

Hope to see you there. I'll be talking about Spring vs Guice and Continuous Integration. Its going to be fun and a great spot to learn tons of good stuff. I'm really looking forward to Dion's gears talk.

Make sure to save some energy for Friday afternoon as A-Basin is open!

I don't know why it irked me so badly. I was looking at my javablogs email and saw that and thought oh wow I was just going on about this I wonder what the post is about. I read it and posted a comment. Now I'm thinking I have too much real work to do to get sucked into this debate again...

Open mouth, insert foot...

Did I mention that I'm really looking forward to CSS? :)

By way of macbytes, chuckle...

RedHat is not evil. This is.

Well it has been quite a while since I've blogged. As part of Virtuas shutting down I sort of lost interest in writing for while and I've spent the last six months or so getting my head back on straight. Well maybe not straight but at least back in the game.

Like Matt I had a great time at V and don't regret it at all, it was a blast and even knowing the outcome I'd still do it again in a flash, it was really cool. I've spent some time reflecting on what I want to do next and while I still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up, for now I'm going to continue to sling code and write and speak when the opportunity comes up.

So to get a bit philosophical I have a great family and we have a great time together. I can't belive how blessed I am. In the grand scheme of things who cares about the company failing. Of course its never fun to see something that you have worked hard at fail, its always a learning experience so its never a loss.

Now that that is said I have been doing some cool stuff with Rick Hightower out in LA. This place is crazy, there are more people in a half mile radius from the office than in all of Summit County :-). I miss the mountains but we are having a great time at the beach and going to Disneyland. So all in all, its been a great ride, i'm sure it will continue to be a great ride and I'm looking forward to getting back into the conversation.

I just recieved the Chinese translation of the J2EE AntiPatterns book. I don't understand anything on/in this book but its cool to see.

So I've built a couple of classes @ Virtuas over the last several months and I have had the chance to deliver them a few times. Some people seem to have really gotten it and others have not. After a few conversations with the other Practice Leaders I still have no idea how to make it so that everyone always gets it. Not that I really think that is possible but its a nice lofty goal. Anyway I've been thinking about how teaching my kids (we homeschool) is a lot like teaching in general. People have different learning styles and they learn in different ways. That is one of the reasons I do my classes the way I do. About half the time is spent talking and about half doing labs. But there is more to teaching a tech topic than how people learn.

There are more deminisions to the learning styles thing than you'd learn in a teaching class in college. I like to understand how things work, others like to know how to do things. What I'm wondering is what is the best way to explain something. For example in my MyFaces/JSF class I spend a lot of time the first day explaining the way JSF works and the lifecycle etc. Some people fall asleep during this (not literally, cause I throw stuff at people sleeping in my classes:) but others really dig it. The reason I like doing this is two fold. First I like to learn that way, Second I think that people who understand how something works will be better equiped to figure out how to fix problems when they come up.

Those that like to know how to do things approach the problem from a different perspective. First they want to understand how to make happen what they want to happen. They might not ever want to know how it works under the covers. You get to know how to get the job done without understanding how things work, under the covers. I have a lot of respect for this approach too. I adopt it in all kinds of ways. I generally know how a car works but I don't know or want to know the details. I generally understand how a CPU does its magic but I don't know or care about the details. I've not done assembly code in 15 years and I've forgotten everything I ever knew, and I'm OK with that.

I don't want to grok the physics/chemistry of how energy is released from gasoline to make my car move, I just want it to go when I press the accelartor. But I do want to understand the inards of my web framework or my persistence framework etc. So anyway I don't have the answer but its fun to think through this kind of stuff.

Well its been almost a week since I applied the fix that Matt gave me to get rid of trackback spam. I will start posting useful stuff again after Christmas if I'm still spam free at that point. If you need it feel free to email me.

I was getting 100's of spam trackbacks a day, I finally tired of logging into my db everyday and deleting them so I turned things off. Thanks to Matt I've got a hopefully working solution.