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.

I started on several Pandora stations of artists I currently like, including Brooke Waggoner, The Weepies, and Sufjan Stevens. Most are in the folk/indie category like those, which just happens to be my current taste in tunes.

1. A Fine Frenzy – One Cell in the Sea

Alison Sudol (aka A Fine Frenzy), mostly known for her more popular song, “Almost Lover,” has a great variety of tracks on this album, 14 of them in fact, from energetic songs like “Come On, Come Out,” and a perfect joyous chorus in “You Picked Me”, to sweeping built-up melodies (reminiscent of Brooke Waggoner’s grand crescendos) in “The Minnow & the Trout.” She covers so many ranges of emotions and musical varieties within her style—this is not one of those albums where every song sounds the same, and it turns out to be one I’m listening to a lot. This is probably my favorite of this current batch.

2. Holly Brook – Like Blood Like Honey

I also found this album by Pandora, and kept listening mostly because there was a riff she sang on the track “Wanted” that I could not get out of my head. This is slightly more traditional and more poppy female vocalist and songwriter fare, but the whole album is better than I expected. There’s more piano and strings here, and some great musicality and catchy choruses. Very enjoyable to listen to, with a good variety of calmer and more energetic and catchy songs.

3. Kelli O’Hara – Wonder in the World

Kelli O’Hara is a broadway actress. She’s had a handful or so of Tony nominations, and been in such shows as South Pacific, The Pajama Game, and The Light in the Piazza. This is not how I discovered her (I’m not that into musicals) but rather again through Pandora. The gem on the album is the first track, “The Sun Went Out,” written by her husband. It’s a tender, sweet, slightly jazzy, unique little tune, but—this is the key—her voice is smooth like silk and makes the song. The rest of the album is worth it just for the pleasure of hearing her voice on a few old songs, “And So It Goes,” “Fire and Rain” and others, as well as a few of her own songs, and all in all it’s a good collection. Did I mention her voice is amazing?

4. Kate Klim – Up and Down and Up Again

Kate Klim is much more of a traditional female singer-songwriter, singing about relationships and life how she sees it, and the album ends up being fairly consistently good. Certainly some tracks are better than others – the first, “I Choose Me” is a good starter, and the rest of the album is simply easy to listen to and thoughtful. The stand-out track is “Gepetto,” with some real catchy melodies and a slightly deeper meaning than most of the others. All in all this is a very good album, and one I’ve been listening to a lot as well despite being somewhat formulaic.

Those are just four albums, there have been a few more as well which will perhaps make it to another post. Check my playlist for up-to-date stats on what I’m listening to (I have no musical privacy, haha). As always I recommend (and thank!) Pandora for being amazing. Enjoy the music, and feel free to comment with some of your own current favorites.

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!

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

It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted anything here, but I’ve been very busy with my startup and everything else. I’m currently in Boston with my business partner coding away, we’re making huge progress, and I’m more and more confident that it’s going to be the ‘next big thing’ for our market, and indeed maybe a paradigm shift for enterprise software in general. Time will tell, but it takes a lot for me to be confident in an implementation, and I’m finally seeing it come together.

Other things that have been going on… hmm. Zenphoto development is as hot as ever. If you haven’t checked out the latest versions or the new site, now’s the time to upgrade.

Speaking of Zenphoto and Wordpress, despite Wordpress’ having some decent new photo management features in 2.5, I think a Wordpress+Zenphoto plugin to integrate with the new “Add image” pane would be great. I’ll look into it and see if it’s plausible.

Well, this is my april fool’s post then I suppose. I’m not really posting, it’s just a joke. Happy Spring!

It took me a while, but after about a week of tweaking, recompiling the kernel, finding a stable driver for my 10MBps network card, and making X work with my video card, it finally was up and running. Just the installation taught me a ton about computers, hardware, Linux, and problem solving skills that would surely help me in the future.

But I couldn’t really use it after that. I spent maybe 6 months with it installed as a dual-boot with Windows 98, but there just weren’t good replacements for my daily desktop apps back then—no games, no web development software (I used Dreamweaver back then… shudder), none of those little tools I had come to rely on in Windows. Like writing a journal, my Linux use stagnated and I eventually deleted the partition to make room for more games.

I went through 5-10 distros in all after that, maybe once a year I’d give it another shot. I tried RedHat again, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo again, and then Ubuntu. I’ve installed or used Ubuntu exclusively for the last few years (I’ll explain my reasons later) and I’ve enjoyed it for the most part.

Last week, I installed Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon. I also had an epiphany that the names of Ubuntu releases are in alphabetical order (Dapper, Edgy, Feisty, Gutsy) and I was no longer confused. Hooray.

The verdict: We’ve come a long way. Installation not only took minutes, but found all of my hardware without trouble, including enabling all 3D functions of my graphics card and detecting an obscure USB WiFi adapter. I am impressed thus far.

I experienced some instability after that, mainly when rotating the 3D desktop cube (amazing) and watching 6 movies at once (six times more amazing) in Mplayer. OK, maybe I went a little overboard, but a crash is a crash nonetheless. Turned out that updating the nVidia drivers (to version 169.09, if anyone’s searching for a solution) fixed that completely, as I verified by running 12 movies while rotating them on a 12-sided 3D surface (twelve times more amazing!). No crashes, no slowdowns. Things are smooth now.

I like Ubuntu because they seem to get at least part of the “big picture”—see, most Linux developers and hardcore users will point out feature-by-feature that Linux is better than or equal to Windows, MacOS X, and all other operating systems in existence. What they don’t get is that individual features don’t mean jack, it’s how they fit together that matters. If you’re missing one part of the puzzle, then people won’t care what other parts you got right. I think it’s important to understand that when making any software, but especially an operating system, whose job is by definition to integrate all the other parts.

Ubuntu at least begins to get this. They’re starting to bring things together through consistent visual design, consistent interface design, a complete suite of default applications, useful menus and preferences and utilities. They’ve also got some awesome 3D effects, but that wouldn’t matter much if there wasn’t any reason to use them.

So, in general, it’s finally a Linux I can imagine using every day. When I’m done with my work that requires Windows (what can I do, it’s corporate enterprise software…) I reboot and get into Ubuntu and for the first time in the history of my use of Linux, I don’t miss anything.

I think that’s a big deal. We’ve now got a community-built free OS that’s a real competitor to Windows and even OSX in some ways, and that’s a big accomplishment. More choices are always good for the user, and I’m finally a happy user with a great alternative to Windows.

As part of my consulting gig I work on “Enterprise Java” code. I just had to write this line after receiving two separate exceptions on the matter (types obfuscated to protect the guilty (and they are oh so guilty… I won’t get into that)):

String somenumber = (String) ((TypeAttribute) TypeCache.getTypeFromCache("Thingie") .getAttribute("someNumber")).getValue((Thingie) object);

You’re a freaking computer! Figure it out for me!

Also, xkcd, as always, says it the best.

It’s revealing to be a Java programmer every 2 weeks, and a Ruby and Flex developer the next 2 weeks, with PHP and JavaScript by night. I understand everything about why static typing is good and proper, but today, when computers (and compilers especially) are powerful and intelligent, I think the computer should do what a computer is great for, namely figuring out extremely complex yet orderly relationships between types of things, leaving the programmer to focus on much more important stuff.

When I’m coding in Java, it takes me 50 lines of rudimentary logic and typecasting muck in a new inline comparator class to do something as simple as sorting custom objects.

In Ruby it’s a one-liner. I don’t care how much less efficient that is for the computer (and it’s not), that is worth its weight in gold in programmer time and code elegance.

I enjoy dynamically typed languages, and any good programmer knows that it’s programmers having fun that makes good software, not programmers spending 50% of their time dealing with code that gets in their way. What kills me most is that computers are really good at automatically doing the stuff that’s not fun—that is in fact what they’re designed to do—and there are people who have fun making that stuff fast, so why don’t we just let them?

Most artists or bands today barely manage three or four good songs on an album, so it’s quite a feat when a musician puts out a full EP of six songs that are each as good as the next and impossible to stop listening to. Especially when that musician is someone who has a degree in composition and orchestration, and lists Chopin as one of her influences.

I haven’t had a favorite album in a few months, but I like this one a lot. If you’re into good music you should definitely give Brooke Waggoner a listen. The EP “Fresh Pair of Eyes” is 100% free as a download from her web site right now, so you have no excuse not to. Her style is sort of piano folk/singer-songwriter with classical influences and an incredible skill and sense of music and sonority. She can go from some slow quiet notes and speed up and build to an expansive full-orchestra climax in the span of a single song, and her lyrics are intelligent and interesting to match. The music feels extremely natural and easy to listen to and matches so well with what she’s trying to convey, like she was somehow able to pull the emotions out of her heart and place them straight into your ears.

Give it a listen at her myspace page or go to her site to grab the totally free download.

1. Automatic Sinks – Marginal Usefulness. People touch the sink fixtures before and after hand washing. Before doesn’t matter, because you wash your hands just after turning on the sink, but generally having to turn off the water means there’s risk of post-washing contamination. There are ways to turn off most normal sinks after hands-washing by means of arms, elbows, or feet, so this isn’t a complete necessity, but is still very useful. Also, these save water by only being on when used. Kudos.

2. Automatic Soap Dispenser – DUMB. What do you do after touching a soap dispenser? You wash your hands with the freshly-dispensed soap. Whatever it is you touch on the soap dispenser is pre-wash, and therefore irrelevant, just like turning on the sink. Do you touch a soap dispenser after washing your hands? No, because then you’d have to wash them again, and also you’d have to go back to kindergarten and learn how to wash your hands, because that is dumb. Automatic soap dispensers may save soap because they dispense in pre-determined amounts, but most that I’ve seen dispense too much. Also, since the hand-wavey thing doesn’t always work the way you expect, you generally waste water while waiting for the soap to come out, or look really stupid trying to push something on the dispenser to make it work. For these reasons, the automatic soap dispenser is basically completely useless and stupid.

3. Automatic Paper-towel Dispenser – OK. Though it is in a public restroom, and everything in a public restroom is probably nasty, we can safely assume that everyone who touches a paper-towel dispenser has very recently washed their hands. Therefore, it is relatively clean. Plus, a manual paper-towel dispenser allows more control over the size of the towel, allowing people with particularly large hands to easily get enough towel to dry them thoroughly. However, anything you touch in a restroom post-wash is probably a bad idea, so this still makes good sense.

4. Automatic Toilet Flusher – Good, but alternatives exist. This one’s pretty clear cut, especially for the men’s bathroom urinals (I am convinced I am the only person in the world who manually flushes urinals). This isn’t a big deal, since everything on or near the toilet is pre-wash, but anything on or near the toilet is also nasty-ass gross, and should avoid being touched at all costs. I say there are alternatives because the lever-type flushers can easily be activated by foot, and there are also floor-based flushers that are designed exactly for that, and your shoes are pretty much dirty the moment you set foot in the restroom. However, the simple fact that these devices force everyone to flush whether they like it or not make the case.

5. Automatic Door Opener – Maybe sweet? (But these don’t exist, or if they do I haven’t seen one). This leaves us with the final post-wash activity – opening the door. Personally, I think all restrooms should be push-to-exit with a metal foot panel, but since that’s not how rooms are designed (for good reason) you usually have to pull. If you’re smart and obsessed with cleanliness (and the bathroom isn’t one of those without paper-towel dryers) you can use the paper towel as a hand-guard on the bathroom door, open it, catch it with your foot, roll up the paper towel into a little ball, go for the two (or possibly three) pointer off the wall into the trash can in the corner, open the door the rest of the way with your foot, and continue on your way. Don’t forget the rebound if you miss the trash can shot—leaving it on the ground just isn’t cool in any bathroom, and if you miss that shot, you give up your rights to cleanliness anyway. For shame, for shame. But how cool would it be if the door were Star Trek style and just slid open when you approached it (complete with accompanying woosh sound)? Of course, this doesn’t apply for single-accoutrement bathrooms—you don’t want the door opening randomly while you’re on the can. This one will have to be thought through by someone with much more bathroom-fixture-design experience than I, and hopefully not by the guy who invented the automatic soap dispenser.

• The Cal Bears won the Armed Forces bowl in Texas, after putting “2nd string” quarterback Kevin Riley in the game in the 2nd quarter. He did an amazing job with a very consistent two touchdowns per quarter thereafter, and the team came back from a 21-nothing start to win the game 42-36. Go Bears!


• I got back from a great winter vacation in Tahoe, which involved my first day cross-country skiing ever, and two good days of regular skiing at Sugar Bowl and Alpine Meadows. Also, lots of scrabble, a puzzle, and yummy food. Sweet!


• Great homemade Thai food and good company!

That’s pretty much it. Just a good day and a nice evening. Here’s wishing everyone a happy new year, and best of luck and skill in 2008. I think it’s going to be a good year!