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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.

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

After a long time “waiting” (I really didn’t care that much) Wordpress 2.5 is out and trisweb.com is running it. The upgrade went as smooth as any previous one and it’s been very nice to use so far. The admin redesign is beautiful (surprised me, even) and all is working well.

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!

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.
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Every good programmer probably has to write about their opinion on this subject once in their lifetime, so here’s my take

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.