trisweb.com

This is a pretty incredible sight – a Hubble Space Telescope image of a planet orbiting a star 25 light years away from Earth. I am in awe. It’s not the first one ever taken of an extrasolar planet, but it’s certainly the clearest, and the first of one orbiting a normal star similar to the sun. The planet is about the size of Jupiter and estimated to be around 200 million years old. Amazing!

Read more about it here.

Wow, is it well into July already? How did that happen? Feels like it was winter just yesterday, and now suddenly everything’s exploding into Summer. And by that of course I mean the fireworks. I had a great 4th of July, marched in a parade in Sausalito, and afterward had the classic combination of barbecue and blowing stuff up! Sweet. Saturday and Sunday were spent mostly working out, climbing, playing tennis, or hanging with friends (mmm… Zachary’s pizza). Today, it’s back to the grind, sore in a good way from all that excercise, just sitting here recovering and working productively.

Well, during work I do two things: work, and listen to music. It’s a good combination. I’ve been using a few different music listening services, but mostly Pandora recently (especially now that they have this awesome desktop player, using Adobe’s AIR framework). I go on a Pandora spree to discover things, bookmark all the songs I like, and then go to Rhapsody or last.fm to listen when I want. If I like a whole album, I’ll buy it as mp3 off Amazon or go pick up the CD, and it gets into my collection, which I play with Winamp as I have for many years, or in my car on CD. When I get tired of a set of new stuff, there’s always more to discover. It’s a good music lifecycle.

So, read on for a list and comments on some great recent discoveries.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, isn’t it great when you get finished with a nice productive day of work and are rewarded with a few days to do whatever the heck you want? I love these long summer weekends.

Speaking of summer, it is, in fact, the first day of summer (woo!) – the summer solstice, and the longest day of the year. I actually almost woke up at 5:47am this morning just to watch the sunrise from the top of my building, but my awesome Ikea bed was way too comfortable. Sunset is at 8:34pm, making the day a good 14 hours and 47 minutes long. Sweet.

It’s also unnaturally hot here in the bay area – I can only imagine what it’s like further inland (sorry people from the central valley, I hope you have pools). It was 93 degrees here today, and it still feels like it. I went to the gym at lunch and worked up a sweat, and then stopped at the car wash just to feel the spray from the high pressure nozzle! Then after work I scrubbed my bathtub, cleaned my sink, and took a cold shower, just to cool down.

I’m not sure why I enjoy cleaning and organizing things, but I won’t question it too much, since I think it’s a good thing. It’s got to be something about being physically productive after spending all day being virtually productive. I mean, you can program all day and all you might have is something that goes a little bit faster than before, but scrub a grimy bathtub and man you can tell the difference! It feels good to get something real done in-between lines of code.

Aaaaand I’ll leave you with that thought. Besides cleaning bathtubs, what are y’all doing to beat the heat this summer?

Not that I’m perpetuating stereotypes, because I like all kinds of weather, but this actually does happen in the summer!

Summer is here at last, the weather’s been absolutely goregous these past few days and I’ve been trying to get outside as much as possible when I don’t have to be stuck working in front of a computer screen. Hence, no trisweb.com updates for the last… oh too many days to count. Sometimes you just have to take a break.

But I’ve decided to start fresh. We’ve finally got some new photos to grace the top of the page, and hopefully some new musings in the next couple weeks. I figured there’s no reason to keep being silent just because I have been for so long. Might as well pick it up and get back to normal.

So who’s still reading this anyway? What would you like to read about? I’m looking for new stuff to write and new paths to follow. Suggestions welcome

I’ve had an on-and-off relationship with Linux for the past 10 years. It all started with RedHat 5.2, which I got on a CD that came with a book (because it would have taken 3 days to download on the old 56k modem, and I thought the book was a good way to start). Now, just to clarify, I was thirteen at the time.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m staying in Boston working on my new startup with my business partner, who has a luxurious and geeked out condo here. Boston is a very interesting city. It’s completely different from what I’m used to, the young frontier of San Francisco and Berkeley. There’s a more mature feel to it for some reason, like everyone knows it’s been around for a really long time and they’re proud of it. Or maybe I’ve just been eating at too many upscale restaurants, I’m not sure.

Tonight we ate at a nice little pub in Harvard square called Grafton Street, so I’m practically a namesake. As a matter of fact, though, I’m more of a namesake than the Harvard grads – the names “Harvard” and “Harward” both came from “Here-weard”, old English for “army warden” (thanks to Tara for finding that out for me!). Clearly, “Harward” is closer to the original. I’m glad I didn’t go to Harvard or I would have a hell of a time not being a pretentious prick by explaining that to people every chance I got.

I haven’t done the history tours yet, but I’m really looking forward to it. Even driving around the streets here feels like a history tour, and it’s really cool to be in the middle of it for a bit, even if I am working most of the time.

Development is going fast — we started 4 months ago in Java EE and the Java Server Faces framework, but found it didn’t meet our needs to produce a truly rich user interface with a reasonable amount of effort. More on that later.

Two (working) weeks ago we evaluated our options and switched to Adobe Flex with a Ruby on Rails backend. In two weeks we had caught up with our previous Java prototype and we’ve seen major progress this week beyond our expectations. We’re a lot happier working in Flex and Rails (me especially, being a UI snob and all) and much more efficient too.

I have a few posts I’ve been meaning to write on why we chose the platforms we did. I will surely get to them this week, so stay tuned.

On top of that, we’re making great progress on Zenphoto! I’m sure you’re all happy to hear that finally. Version 1.1 is almost out the door, and it will be the first non-beta feature-complete version of Zenphoto, with tons of new features, bug fixes, speed improvements, and more. It’s looking and working great and staying as simple and elegant as it was from day one. I’d like to thank the whole team for their hard work in making this happen, and all the Zenphoto users out there for being so patient. I’m really impressed with how it’s coming together in a true open source manner.

So, back to Boston – the time change is very annoying. I’m trying to wake up early, but it’s hard to get to bed early enough too. And there’s always something else to do, it never stops. So I had better get to sleep on East Coast time, in my sofa bed in an office walled in whiteboards and computer monitors. Goodnight

Well, Go Bears, we beat Tennessee! That should silence any doubts about the Pac-10. What a game, it was a lot of fun to watch and see all of my old friends all in one place!

My new camera remains awesome, especially for those night scenes. [Nerdy photographer text follows, feel free to skip] I also picked up a 50mm f/2 Macro lens at a great bargain, widely regarded as the best lens available for the Olympus DSLRs, and I was amazed at all the beautiful portraits I got out of it, not to mention how fast it is! If you’ve never used an f/2 or wider lens, I highly recommend it. It sure it something to shoot at ISO100 under stadium lighting and still get 1/80-1/125 shutter speeds. My other lenses (f/3.5-5.6ish) were at ISO800-1600 for that, and the photos were barely passable with all the noise (though the E-510 is great about the noise, much more so than the older models). It certainly is a big step up.

So the point of this post, I guess, is that I’m turning 23 in a couple hours. This is my last post as a 22-year old. Woooo, big deal. Heh. I’m listening to Jimmy Eat World’s “23,” which is appropriate and a great song, and I always promised myself I’d listen to it when I turn 23. “Amazing still it seems / I’ll be 23 / I wont always love what Ill never have / I wont always live in my regrets.” God, that just hits me right now. I guess I’m growing up or something. And I think I ain’t doing half bad.

To my family and friends and everyone who has been a part of my life in the past year, Thank you. Now’s as good a time as any to say it. You’ve all made my life brilliant, and I can only hope I’ve been as good to all of you as you have been to me. Thank you all!

Alright then, now that I’ve said all that, time to have a fun birthday!