trisweb.com

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!

I’m back! Woo. I just want to say, I just took a really long shower, and I think it was the best shower I have ever had.

Lots of pictures to come. I really like my new camera, the photos are amazing!

I’m going to Yosemite (not the valley, up in the high country) for a week-long camping trip with the family. I haven’t been in about 3 years, despite it being my 2nd favorite place in the world (so far).

I’ll return with pictures. I’ve been waiting for a Yosemite trip ever since I got an SLR, and finally I’ll get to (or try to) take some great pictures of the plants, animals, and people in a very beautiful place. See you in a week!

P.S. – Does anyone else experience Firefox taking up over 2 GB of memory after using Google Maps? I don’t know whether to blame Firefox or Google, but it’s really a bad memory leak… or maybe I just get carried away browsing the Earth for too long

Okay, now, normally when you see a blog post titled “I have the best girlfriend in the world” it’s some sappy lovey-dovey thing meant for said girlfriend to read and gush over. While she’s every bit deserving of such high praise, I’m posting this for another reason. I’m totally serious.

I have the best girlfriend in the world because she paid her sister $5 to try Firefox for a week.

See! Told you so.

Everytime I see that I’m getting absolutely zero spam AND zero legitimate comments, I should look to the logical and wonder if my comment form is broken. Turns out it was, thanks to Brad K. (and Levi and several others) for pointing it out! Comment away (please, I’ve been deprived!). I really should check my hotmail account every once in a while (hint: use this domain instead).

Don’t forget to head to your local 7-11 and pick up a free slurpie! Because it’s 7/11 you know. Though I did hear you only get a dixie cup’s worth (or about 7.11 oz, I think they’re trying to be funny). Anyway it’s still a good excuse to go get a slurpie and get 10% more for your money.

I just returned from a business trip to Montana, I’ll be posting pictures and stuff soon. I’ve got a lot to catch up on…

It’s not hard to realize that starting a company is hard work—it just is. And I’m doin it. It’s incorporated, a real corporation, with prototypes and models and a business plan, and it’s going somewhere. Probably somewhere you’ll never see, but somewhere none the less—it’s software for a specific industry where good interface design is a nonexistent far-off dream, so it’s a good niche to be in. I’ll update as I can.

Unfortunately all this hard work means that trisweb.com has been on the back burner. It’s always sort of been that way, if you haven’t noticed, and it probably always will, but just thought you’d like to know that posts may be fewer. However, I did just upgrade to Wordpress 2.2, so maybe that’ll be some incentive.

I’ll try to keep on working on Zenphoto, and I expect complaints to abound, but I just don’t have the time to give to it right now. Starting a company, you know. But I’ll try to set aside some time. The sub-albums management interface is a needed addition for a 1.1 release, following which it should remain stably usable for a while. We’ve got EXIF in SVN and I just saw a Google-maps geospatial view addition posted to Trac (thanks for that) which I’ll try to add. Point: I’ll keep making progress, but slowly, sorry as usual for the delay.

If you want to help out, keep submitting patches and improvements on Trac, and if you get involved enough I’ll then give SVN commit privileges so the project can stay active even when I can’t give it time. Thanks to everyone who supports it, it’s been a real pleasure working with all of you so far, and I hope it will continue into the future in some manner.

Until next time, enjoy life