A Site of Rich's random thoughts http://rich.wheadon.us 08/21/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/2010/08/21/Do-You-Still-Like-It%3F.html Rich Wheadon or... only time will tell. : When I pre-ordered my iPad 3G in April I had a lot of people say they were going to wait for the prices to drop since the tablet probably wasn't going to take off like Apple was saying it would. Then my iPad arrived in May and people looked at it and said they would rather have a smartphone. As I began to use the iPad and enjoy it as a casual computing device people began complaining that the iPad (which they didn't own yet) couldn't print, it couldn't upload files to websites, it couldn't save things from websites, it can't play flash games and movies, and blah blah blah. 08/11/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/Software/Technology/2010/08/11/Finally-success-with-multiple-Tomcat-services.html Rich Wheadon Getting multiple Tomcat servers (standalone) running as services in Windows : Getting three tomcat services running independently on our Windows 2003 has been problematic for quite some time. I've gone through the process several times and always ended up doing something wrong that forced me to start over. 08/09/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/Digital Photography/Software/2010/08/09/Best-of-WHAT-breed.html Rich Wheadon OR Best of Breed my eye! : When software marketers and evangelists go to work and win your heart there's no escape. Little do they know that eventually their following will become dis-enamored and leave. 07/30/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/2010/07/30/it%27s-all-in-perspective.html Rich Wheadon putting a little piece of Life in Perspective : Sometimes it helps to take a little perspective on things but usually a lot more perspective is better. From a chuckle during that explosive tantrum to the tempered silence when a running bull squashes your toes; perspective counts a lot. 07/30/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/Hardware/Musing/Software/2010/07/30/I-hate-apple.html R1ch Wh34d0n ...but hate is so shallow : I hate l33t speak. Coldstone Ice cream makes me want to hurl. I think Acura makes the junkiest cars on earth. GigaPixel is not cool. 07/29/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/Musing/2010/07/29/bitter-taste-of-failure.html Rich Wheadon My tears taste so sweet : The bitter taste of failure doesn't necessarily result in your own shortcomings. Tasting someone elses failure can be really gruesome especially if you expected more from them. No one is immune to failure but everyone can take measures to prevent a repeat performance. 07/21/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/2010/07/21/Writing-in-Isolation.html Rich Wheadon Fall into a writing trance : Ommwriter is an immersive and simple writing tool that gives it\'s best experience with headphones on. 07/15/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/Deployment/Programming/Software/2010/07/15/jruby-and-rails-gets-warbled.html Rich Wheadon Deploying your jruby on rails app to tomcat using warbler. : I just went through migration of a little concept app on my local machine that has become a piece of our helpdesk business process. The app is a jruby on rails venture that uses ExtJS for the front end. 07/14/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/Programming/Software/2010/07/14/Laughably-Wrong.html Rich Wheadon New meaning to "running on magic" : Sometimes we stumble onto something so insanely wrong that it deserves a chuckle. Enter the Referral Class in a rails app. 07/01/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/Musing/Technology/2010/07/01/My-most-enjoyable-year-in-computing.html Rich Wheadon (so far) : My last year using Apple products has been my best year in computing ever. Although I love my ThinkPad running linux in all of it's painful freedom, the Macs are hands down the winner for me as a developer. 03/27/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/2010/03/27/An-unwanted-visitor.html Rich Wheadon Something not-so-new... but completely NEW. : Lately I've pretty much hit the point of maximum saturation. It seems every turn brings something new and somewhat unchartered for me. I welcome the challenges and am thankful to be able to grow through them all. I'm pretty much on a daily adventure, a "walk in the wilderness" of sorts. 02/18/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/2010/02/17/Say-What%3F.html Rich Wheadon Benefit of the bridled tongue. : There might be nothing that can get you in trouble quicker than your mouth. The unbridled tongue can end up doing irreparable damage, plant seeds that lead to certain downfall, and in general make you out to be a fool. From biblical inspiration to common professional knowledge there is a general necessity to share \(or disclose\) less than we often do. 02/09/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/2010/02/09/woot%21-the-payload.html Rich Wheadon Persistence pays off sometimes : With mixed feelings of joy and despair I gazed at the flashing lights on Woot\! The flashing lights indicate a Woot-off has begun and the great calling to prepare for 24 - 72 hours of constant polling dredges a squeamish feeling in the pit of my stomach. You can only hope that the \"Boggy old creature\" and screaming monkeys appear in the sale bin soon. 02/02/2010 http://rich.wheadon.us/2010/02/02/Apple-and-a-new-slice-of-the-pie.html Rich Wheadon Apples next great thing : January 27th Apple introduced it's new creation, the iPad. I met the announcement with low expectations since the tablet market isn't one I've had a lot of interest in, but by the end of the presentation I was totally on board. A big, powerful iPod is what I keep seeing people describe the new Apple baby as... and that is a half-right assessment. 12/10/2009 http://rich.wheadon.us/2009/12/10/I-Just-Forgot.html Rich Wheadon My thing with the stuff locked up : After banging away in Lotus Notes and the Domino Designer for a migration project we were doing at work I returned to the Ruby world I have been warming up to for most of this year. I had no longer opened my terminal window when someone came to me requesting a special xml feed for our marketing department to provide a career site vendor. Although there was a legacy app in Lotus Notes that *could* be set up to do the task, I had no heart to go back into Notes. I decided to use some ruby career site code that sat in our development environment, but I couldn't seem to get any traction. 12/09/2009 http://rich.wheadon.us/2009/12/09/Expect-More.html Rich Wheadon Set expectations and stick to them : I was running late for work the other day and ended up behind a moving wall. As traffic moved slowly along I had lots of time to *smell the roses* so to speak. I found myself reading the advertising information on a trailer in front of me when I noticed a fairly blatant spelling error in the text. I found myself wondering how the guy owning that landscaping business could have possibly missed the error. I toyed with the temptation of calling the number on the back of his trailer and asking if he knew the word was spelled incorrectly, but decided I didn't care enough to take it any further than a quick snapshot of the text. 12/01/2009 http://rich.wheadon.us/2009/12/01/My-First-RubyGem.html Rich Wheadon Forks and Branches and Commits and stuff... : Today I finished making a fork of jekyll that allows me to generate my static sites with a context of my choosing from the command line. This became really important to me when starting to generate RSS feeds for my blog. If you haven't used jekyll then you might check out the wiki and see if it is useful to you. I like Jekyll because it allows me to focus on blogging into a really simple interface... a text editor!!! Additionally it's really easy to host since there's no database or dynamic interface to host and worry about, everything is static. Jekyll regenerates the entire site every time you publish it. See the blog to read more... 11/29/2009 http://rich.wheadon.us/2009/11/29/Falling-Down.html Rich Wheadon Return of the Neanderthal : I get a real kick out of the bickering in evolutionary circles concerning the Neanderthal man. I hear that race of humanoids actually digressed in knowledge and skill. Whether it's all true or not about them actually getting dumber as time went on, I can only imagine what it might have been like getting DUMBER. How sad it is to realize that I see the challenge of lost brain cells occurring in the code I review on a daily level. Sometimes I just daydream about a whole generation developers that rises to the global epiphany of their lost stage. I chuckle as in my little dream they all speak in unison and say "You know, I'm so bad at coding I'm going to just quit and go into janitorial work as an upgrade." I could only hope that these cut-and-paste cowboys would realize it's a miracle their systems actually run. The sad part is that we're talking pure attitude here, these folks could surge forward helping to create a better world for us all if they would just be a little humble and accept the criticisms that drive us all toward betterment. See the blog to read more... 11/10/2009 http://rich.wheadon.us/2009/11/10/Just-Stuff.html Rich Wheadon When stuff gets in the way : I like stuff. The stuff I surround myself with doesn't have to be techie or new, it doesn't even have to be cool. Things that are going to be in my possesion are just things I like, things I use, or things I'd like to use. Sometimes my stuff is an old motor and transmission for my car. A whole bunch of my stuff is old computer parts and software, recently I went through a cabinet and found my Wizardry disk for the Apple. I look in my utility room and there's a bunch of lanyards from conventions and flash drives over time. I open my nightstand and there's a Sony AM/FM/Cassette Walkman. I can't forget the boxes. Keeping the boxes all this stuff comes in is very important, you just never know when you are going to be finished with something and want to be able to package it back up and give it to someone just like you got it (there's nothing more fun than opening a used product that has been properly put back in its original packaging). Good grief even the 320GB disk drive in my MacBook Pro is just about full (only 3.44GB free at the time of this writing) with home video, photos, music and 2 virtual machines full of the same sort of stuff. See the blog to read more... 11/06/2009 http://rich.wheadon.us/2009/11/06/Long-Time-No-See.html Rich Wheadon My head pokes out of the shell again... : All those glorious promises of posting more often, sharing more, and just generally keeping something fresh on the blog have been broken. It appears I was a little overzealous for my own good... or maybe I just let too much creep into life and stuff started slipping. See the blog to read more... 03/27/2009 http://rich.wheadon.us/2009/03/27/Balsamiq-ain%27t-a-Salad-Dressing.html Rich Wheadon Great things are the simple ones : I've recently been exposed to a mockup tool called Balsamiq. I'd recommend a visit to their site and a test drive of the tool. Balsamiq not only is endowed with a fairly endearing "sketchy" interface... but also touts virtually everything you need to create mockups that convey exact thoughts in minutes. (even seconds) The development team I work on recently created a very concise visual of where we would go with our application UI (with mockups) in 10 minutes or so of collaborative conversation during which one of the team members drew up a translation using Balsamiq's intuitive drag and drop paradigm. See the blog to read more... 01/21/2009 http://rich.wheadon.us/2009/01/21/Learning-To-Forget.html Rich Wheadon Erase/Rewind : I have always been annoyed at being locked into Windows for anything... perhaps my greatest disappointment in Lotus Notes arose when they trapped their entire development community into Windows since\(today\) the R5, R6, R7, and R8 Domino Designer client is only available in Windows. But enough of that nonsense. 01/20/2009 http://rich.wheadon.us/Musing/New/Random/2009/01/20/Fooling-around-with-Ruby.html Rich Wheadon Having a healthy relationship with the language : Firstly I must clarify that, though fun for me on this post, Ruby is not a woman. Ruby is a pretty nice language that I am coming into awareness on and this post covers a solution using Ruby. There are at least two things you might derive from this post. See blog to read more.... 01/19/2009 http://rich.wheadon.us/2009/01/19/I-wanna-be-a-good-cook.html Rich Wheadon Mixin' it up... : It was a rushed morning and as i attempted to fly out the front door to work I was hoping... praying that my lunch would be available via leftovers. As I opened the refrigerator door to see what might be available for lunch dining i found a container of beef stew. "Perfect!" I thought to myself. As I transferred the contents of a Serving Saver into the baggie that would become a disposable transport to work, I encountered my first setback. The volume of stew was not nearly enough to make a meaningful lunch fair. Again I opened the refrigerator to find something to add and found some spaghetti noodles. "Soup for lunch" I commented to myself and the noodles joined stew in the baggie. A handfull of smoked almonds in a baggie and a couple ginger snaps in another, I was ready. See the blog to read more... 08/13/2008 http://rich.wheadon.us/2008/08/13/RAD-Might-Be-Bad.html Rich Wheadon Collision of Speed, Need, and Greed : I've been an observer of discussions recently where the existence of RAD environments/tools are called into question. Discussions revolved around Lotus Notes, Rails, .Net and included some other random references to tools that put development power in the hands of people that really don't deeply understand technology. Talking through languages and frameworks that require more skill and planning revealed some startling facts surrounding RAD technologies and their tendency to maul developers into frustrated hackers. See the blog to read more... 08/05/2008 http://rich.wheadon.us/2008/08/05/Dishonor-And-Dishonesty.html Rich Wheadon Assault by lying : Today I had one of the most frustrating and troubling experiences of my life. I was hit by another car in forward traffic this morning. This car, by the way had just dangerously cut me off during my morning commute. After slowing down and avoiding the accident I switched lanes to the left to get clear of the slowing traffic and was proceeding past the person with my front bumper about to where his front tire is and he swerved left into my lane. 07/31/2008 http://rich.wheadon.us/2008/07/31/The-Gentle-Sigh-of-Despair.html Rich Wheadon Sometimes things just get worse : The temperature outside was 93 degrees... but that was nothing compared to the heat coming off our internal customers. Someone had been overpaid by several thousand dollars recently and heads were going to roll if something like that EVER happened again. The group responsible for payment came to IS and shared this "new" problem with us. As observed system behavior was compared to code logic we began to realize that either the problem had been around for a long time... or someone had exploited a bug somewhere recently. A few moments in meeting with the user community revealed exactly what we had expected... the system was being used in a manner contrary to how it should have been used. Furthermore, the people using the system conceded that they knew what they were doing was wrong... but they had no choice and it was our job to figure out how to bail them out. See the blog to read more... 07/21/2008 http://rich.wheadon.us/2008/07/21/Things-That-Don%27t-Belong.html Rich Wheadon Somewhere, somehow I don't think it was thought through very well : Someone walked up to me giggling and showed me his brand new iPod... it took a couple seconds for me to recognize what was on his screen... a picture of an egg in a toaster oven. As I gazed at the picture and attempted to fathom the reasoning behind an egg in a toaster oven I was hit with a second wave of puzzlement. You see it wasn't just any toaster oven, but the one 50 feet away from me in the office kitchen, I gasped and mumbled "I don't think this is going to be good." 08/13/2008 http://rich.wheadon.us/2008/07/18/Too-many-parsing-styles.html Rich Wheadon Never knowing where to go : I recently worked a project where I wanted to import some externally maintained properties/configurations for my program. As I looked at the MANY different formats and parsing techniques we are using at work I realized that everyone who made a configurable piece of code would create a totally different format and parser. (*Sigh* I wrote three out of the dozen or so out in our main systems.) Since I was pretty much given all the rope I needed for the project to be a lasting success, I did some usability research at work for the programmers that would use any sort of framework I could create. Almost unanimously it was agreed that a configurable format similar to property files would work great. I was pleased. As an FYI I am using the parser to pull in various parameters based on FormName to marshall whether my agent does delete/move/copy functions along with varying stuff like dateFields used in criteria and whether it goes to DB2 and what tables in DB2. See the blog to read more... 06/20/2008 http://rich.wheadon.us/2008/06/20/Code-post-number-one.html Rich Wheadon Just a little bit of stuff to share : It seems there is a never ending batch of little tasks I need to do that I can't seem to find reusable code for. So I write it myself. Problem is that I don't seeing anyone else on my team using it or even interested in knowing what the stuff does... strange. So I'm gonna start putting it out here. Access the blog to read more... 03/09/2006 http://rich.wheadon.us/Random/2006/03/09/Oh-to-be-Dorothy.html Rich Wheadon life of a fish in a little tank : So, there she is just enjoying life. I sit here and watch Dorothy gliding up to each person walking by, begging for their attention. She has to keep moving, that's how she gets attention. And when she gets you hooked, boom, score, drop a little morsel for her to eat. 12/31/2005 http://rich.wheadon.us/Random/2005/12/31/Finishing-out-2005.html Rich Wheadon Closing out the year : Here we are shutting down 2005. Just look at the year with all its glory, dreams, disappointments, debt, and that snide grin that tells you time is really not on your side. 08/09/2005 http://rich.wheadon.us/2005/08/09/Fiend-or-Friend.html Rich Wheadon Pondering a cheap computer : I purchased my Sotec 820P nearly three years ago for 899.00 @ Sams Club. The notebook does not measure up to my Thinkpad or Toshiba \(Tecra/Sattellite Pro\) exposure. It was a gamble based on musings that the laptop playing field had pretty much leveled off. Pretty much I had been noticing IBM, HP, Toshiba and the others building machines with like components and configurations at prices within a few bills of one another.