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Ok, it’s unforgivable, I know. It’s been nearly two months since my last update. But I’ve been busy, I promise.

First and foremost, myself and several others are now officially Alacatia Labs, Inc. It’s great working with other people on projects, because it seems that every time I look, there’s something interesting that one of the others did.

At my day job, I’ve been working with C# 3.5 and Linq, and I must say I’m very impressed. Today, I solved a the last of the harder problems that were bugging me. It involved a particular query that required three separate group by’s, and I was impressed with the outcome of the query. Yes, it was big, but Linq has a certain readability that doesn’t come with straight SQL. Perhaps it’s just Visual Studio being nice, but overall I think Linq is one of those technologies that will change how a lot of people work everyday.

In my personal life, Erin and I took a week long vacation up to visit my parents in Alaska at the beginning of September. That’s where the picture above is from. There are more pictures if you head over to SmugMug, but not nearly as many as I’ve taken in the past. It was a great, relaxing trip.

I’ve also started taking piano lessons again, and I’m loving it. Erin found a voice teacher, and I noticed that they had some “family fee” for signing up to take lessons, so I figured why not make it worthwhile and try out a lesson. The teacher they paired me up with is great, and I’ve learned a lot already. Additionally, I like his style of teaching me much more than when I took lessons at College. Had I been taking lessons from my current teacher back then, I probably would have stuck with it rather than dropping the major.

I’m learning Chopin’s Ballade #1. It is in many ways the hardest piece I’ve ever undertaken. It’s not nearly as flashy as a few pieces I’ve worked on over the past few years on my own, but technically it’s much more difficult. If you’ve watched The Pianist, this is the piece that he plays in the very dramatic section when he is alone with the German officer. If you haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend it — it’s a great movie.

Erin and I are taking a trip up to New Jersey next week to visit her parents, and that should be fun. We also get to attend a recital being put on by her best friend from college.

All in all, I can’t complain. Except for the allergies — they’ve been driving me crazy this entire week. And that’s even more reason to look forward to a trip out of Texas.

How’s everyone else been? Do I actually still have readers?

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An interesting hobby of mine in traffic has always been to try to alleviate the stop and goes by doing a lot more coasting than jamming on the brakes. It has always annoyed me that people tailgate and keep flashing their brakes, which in turn causes the people behind them to flash their brakes as well. During the even slower times, I contemplate how fun it would be to write traffic simulation software — a project I just haven’t tackled yet.

I ran across this website the other day. It talks about how one person can make a difference in improving traffic. It talks about how traffic often moves in waves, and interesting situation and how you can solve a traffic jam in some situations. I don’t know if I fully agree on everything, but it certainly is an interesting read.

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So, this post is purely American politics, so feel free to skip over it if you aren’t interested. Ever since the last presidential debates, I’ve been hearing a lot about Ron Paul, or more specifically how his early success has been masked and/or spun.

In all honesty though, I didn’t watch the debates. It took a post on Reddit “BILL MAHER on the offensive against RON PAUL on “Real Time”” to get me to watch a video showcasing his views. And to me, they’re honestly refreshing.

After seeing another Ron Paul story come across Reddit this morning, I took the time to go to his site and have a look around, and I have to say that he talks the talk of what I have always felt the government should be. It’s quite refreshing to hear someone who has such drastically different ideas than we’ve seen in recent years, and also to hear that Americans like what they hear.

He has a video compilation of debate questions on his campaign website. If anyone is interested in finding out more about Ron Paul that’s a good starting place. But if you’re someone who is already familiar with him, I’m curious to hear what your likes or dislikes are about his policies, and whether or not you feel he’s stood up to what he says with his actions.

Sorry for the short aside into politics. I’d like to see us not make the same mistake again.

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Sorry for no updates. Been a busy holiday season, and I’ve been holding off posting for the last month because I didn’t want to come up the obligatory “here’s what’s been going on” post. So, I’m going to skip that post, and just offer this as the welcome back post, and relieve the pressure of posting such a message when I really do have something to say.

That’s all

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Here are a few things that I’ve read over the past month or two that I thought everyone here would be interested in. Enjoy!

Stroustrup on software development. Bjarne Stroustrup is the person who designed C++, and he offers some insight to his personal feelings of software today, languages, and more. My favorite quote:

… There are just two kinds of languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses.

A short, but great read.

Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford. He challenges Stanford graduates to “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” by recalling three stories of his life. A wonderful speech that should inspire all of us.

Getting Software Done. This article talks about the book Getting Things Done by David Allen and relating it back to the software development process. I’m a big believer in GTD, and you can get the book on Amazon for just a hair over $10 through the link above. I’m working on a todo application that I plan on releasing in January that encourages the GTD philosophy. It’s called, “The art of stress-free productivity,” and after a few weeks of using it myself, I can honestly say that it works wonders.

Nine things developers want more than money. While this article clearly is written for management, it also can help pinpoint what you like and dislike about your job. Give yourself a point for each item that is well done, and monitor the score over the course of time. If you see your score dropping, make sure to bring up why you’re unhappy with your managers. Nine times out of ten they would much rather keep you happy and productive rather than see you move on to another company. Best of all, these things don’t require more money, just a bit of creative thinking on their part!

I hope you’ve all enjoyed these reads. Are there any good articles relating to work/development that you’ve come across recently? If so, leave them in the comments section to spread the wealth.

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Many of you who have read the NUG or frequented the forums remember talk and an early beta of RBDocGen by Joe Ranieri. He asked me to post a link to his poll to try to guage interest in it.

For those who aren’t familiar with RBDocGen, it’s a utility that can be used to generate documentation from your REALbasic classes, similar to DoxyGen or JavaDoc. It reads your native rbp project, and it is extremely customizable via RBScript. This is mostly useful for people who release classes or modules for other users, and need to provide documentation. Instead of maintaining documentation externally, you can add special comments to your method, or add notes which will be turned into HTML documentation.

If this sounds interesting and you would like to see this product be released, I urge you to go place a vote on his poll. The more people interested, the more motivation he has at releasing it publicly. And FYI, I already voted

Thanks!

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Here’s a few before (even before I moved in) and after pictures of my weekend and this evening projects:

Still a few projects left for these two rooms — ceiling fan, mounting a few pictures, burnishing the venetian plaster in the kitchen/dining room, and putting up a tile backsplash.

But now I’m worn out

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Well, I had a pretty good time away from work. I took off Wednesday through Friday, giving me in essence a 5-day weekend. I’m still digging through all the messages piled up in my inbox, so forgive me if yours is one of them.

I purposely didn’t use my computer much except for in the mornings to goof around with the NetFlix challenge. I have a lot of potentially unique ideas on how to solve the problem, and I’ve written up a quick program that takes about one hour to parse the data into a binary format and gather some very simple information in the process, and then on subsequent runs it loads up instantaneously using “mmap”. The entire data set in my binary format still takes up a whopping 1.3 gigs.

I didn’t end up using REALbasic for it though. I started out using the REALSQLDatabase, but to import the records using Insert with an occasional commit took nearly four hours when run. This isn’t a condemnation of the REALSQLDatabase — it’s darn fast. However, a generic database can never see the speed of a custom format that gets highly optimized. The REALSQLDatabase must be able to expand and contract with new and deleted records. My format is set in stone — the test data never changes.

So now with that done, I started implementing my various heuristics, and I’m theoretically ready to take an input of customers and what movies to predict their ratings of. But I guess that will probably wait until tomorrow night.

Alas it is back to me catching up on hundreds of incoming emails, building up my incoming to-do list, and starting to knock those items off the list.

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My in-laws are in town visiting and I’m taking the rest of the week off to hopefully have a little fun and take a break from work. We’re going to do some fun stuff like go to the riverwalk in San Antonio, visit the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, perhaps see a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse, and eat some good Texas food.

I’m thinking of using my mornings before everyone else gets up to attempt a very fun problem — the NetFlix Challenge. In the background I am downloading their dataset: over 600MB compressed! Ever since I heard the announcement it had been on my mind how I would optimally suggest a movie based on prior ratings, and I wonder how my algorithm compares to CineMatch. I don’t really have high hopes of getting the $1 million prize, but rather I just find these types of algorithmic problems fun to attempt solving.

Has anyone else tried the NetFlix challenge?

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So where have I been for the last few weeks? Well, long story short: I got married.

Short story a bit longer: On July 7, the day after my birthday, I began my road trip from Austin, TX to Washington, NJ. I finally got packed and ready, leaving my house at about 10:30, and after completing a couple errands, actually left Austin at 11:30. On my way!

I drove about 4 hours, stopping at around Greenville, TX. Slept in a Motel 6 until I left at about 9:30, on the road again. My next day journey was from there to Lexington, KY, a full 13.5 hours of driving. I stayed in a Quality Inn that wasn’t very high quality, but it sufficed for the night. Finally, I finished up my drive to Washington, NJ and got in at about 8:00 after another 10 hours of driving. Total trip mileage: 1,735 miles (2792 km).

I then worked remotely for the week leading up to the wedding. Some weird hours some days, working around picking relatives up at Newark Airport (another 6-8 hours of driving that week). Finally, the day came: July 15. It was a great day, and now I have my better half.

I then went completely out of touch with the world except for my wife, Erin. My cell phone was off, computer left in its bag, no internet access, nothing. For an entire week. It felt wonderful. Of course, there’s a downside to being incommunicado — my work inbox was overflowing with 1171 messages. It literally took me hours to go through it this morning, but I’m caught up now.

I’m working on a good post called How to Draw Flicker Free. While it’ll teach a newbie to draw flicker free, it’ll also teach even advanced users why to draw the way I’m teaching it. It’s coming along nicely, but I figured it was easier to post this than it was to try to finish that up this morning

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