DevelopingStorm

Sorry for the abrupt change but I've been having problems keeping up with changes to Rails that kept breaking blogging tool so I decided to go back and revive my original Blogger blog. As you well know, I don't post much anyway, so maintaining my own blog software was not something I really wanted to spend time on.

This is a test. This is only a test

Fenway's diamond wrapped in green. The sleeping jewel of Boston, the long-ago home of the Babe and the Splendid Splinter, Yaz and Fisk, born again on an April day. All around, the Nation's red flowed like blood down Beacon, Boylston and Brookline, B's capping wide smiles, to fill the tiny seats made for kinsmen from a different era. Under the shadow of the The Green Monster, Lansdowne street is littered with the jetsam of camped fans. The hardy faithful who waited through the morning chill for a ticket have drifted into the park like the steam from the griddle of a sausage vendors. The smell of onions and peppers is as pervasive as the calls for, "Get your hot sausage here". We enter the park under bleachers to the swarm of grown adults feeling the inspiration of Spring, and long lines for beer and franks. The fans posing with the statue of Wally act like the children they are again. We fought the throng through the park's dark belly, going against the flow, ...

The first trap held a leg. The flesh gnawed at the knee And pulled out at the hip. The denuded femur A translucent white, Needle thin bone, so frail Compared to the steel Will displayed. The second held a corpse. A delicate, large eyed Flyer, broken by the Copper snap. The blood stained fur And missing leg told The story well enough. I removed the tiny body Held it in my palm And weighed its fate. A ladle of pig iron on the foundry trunnion could not tip the scale.

In the next few days I will be discontinuing this feed and moving all my new posting to my new Rails based blog. The new RSS feed is: http://www.developingstorm.com/pete/blog/rss If you're just interested in bookmarking the new blog, the URL is: http://www.developingstorm.com/pete/blog

I was trying to figure out how I should point out my friend Dave's mention in the Guardian Initially I planned to point the link and congratulate him, but that seemed rather pointless. I considered elaborating on our parallel careers; we've worked together at 3 companies and he was the person who brought me into Iris but 90% of my readers already know that so that's not very interesting. Then I considered writing an essay comparing Lotus Notes to the works of Thomas Pynchon - difficult to handle for the average person but beautiful to those who have persisted. As much as that sounds fun I have no time so you're stuck with this ramble instead. Congrats Dave! (via Bob ).

I've seen fish jump before but nothing like this. You have to see this movie to believe it.

I was watching the old movie Tombstone last weekend and noticed something I hadn't before. Buried down among some secondary characters there are pretty explicit hints of a homosexual relationship. Jason Priestley's character Deputy Breckinridge becomes smitten with traveling actor Mr. Fabian as portrayed by Billy Zane. We get this view just from looks and smiles but it's clear this isn't simple brotherly love. The point it brought home near the end of the film when Breckenridge breaks down upon seeing the dead body of Fabien. It's not the same kissing and hugging that has people all uncomfortable about Brokeback Mountain but it's gay cowboys western characters, nonetheless.

Nice post by Andrew Johnson relating some old Chinese quotes and a fable relevant to the art of writing software.

This is my first offical post created with my new blogging tool I've been calling Dog. It's still a bit rough, so I will be dual posting on Dog and Blogger for a while until I work out the kinks. If you want to switch your RSS feed to the new system, subscribe to http://www.developingstorm.com/pete/blog/rss . You can find the regular html blog at http://www.developingstorm.com/pete/blog

Read More Companies Phasing Out Retirement Option . From the Onion .

I've been reading the book Agile Web Development with Rails and building some Rails applications over the past few days. I like the book a lot. Previously, I had played around with Rails and read a few of the web tutorials but they all left me a bit underwhelmed. The tutorials all showed how you can get a lot done with just a few lines of code but none of them really teach you about Rails and how to use it. This book really filled in the gaps. The book follows the standard format of starting out with a tutorial and then diving into a deeper analysis of the technology. The tutorial in Agile Web Development with Rails is more in-depth but still left me a bit cold. Where the book really started to shine is when it went deep on the underlying technologies. I've not finished the book yet, but the section on Active Record, the object relational mapping service used in Rails, alone was worth the price of the book. With the help of the book I'm building a new blogging syste...

Time is a precious commodity and I never have enough of it. As I've complained before, my stack of unread books keeps growing, my list of pet projects I would like to work on is never ending and my thirst for knowledge (and beer) of all sorts is unquenchable. I'm sure this is a truism of life but I've reached a point now where I need to reset some priorities. As much as I enjoy reading articles like The 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005 (on Redit), Company bets on woman to die quickly. Woman lives, company sues (on Metafilter) and the wealth of other interesting but frivolous tidbits that cross my path thanks to the likes of Digg, Slashdot, Kuro5hin and Memepool, I feel the need to make a late new year resolution. I'm going to unsubscribe all those feeds and try and forget all the URLs and live without those sources of trivia. I don't know if I'll use the extra time wisely, but It's worth a shot.

This afternoon I put on my headphones, dialed my iPod to play Neil Young's After the Goldrush (It was on my mind from my previous post), and sat down to do some coding. After 15 minutes or so of work I needed to do a full build, so I kicked that off, and opened a browser to do some reading. I quickly found this great Zeldman article titled Web 3.0 on A List Apart, and started to read. The weird coincidence is that as I reached the last paragraph of the piece - called "It's only castles burning" - Neil Young was singing the last verse from "Don't Let It Bring You Down" . Don't let it bring you down It's only castles burning, Just find someone who's turning And you will come around. This wasn't a loose overlap either. As my eyes parsed the sentence, Neil sang the exact words. Very, very cool.

This list of the Q magazine reader's top 100 albums of all times is annoyingly safe. There are quite a few artists on this list that I don't know, but among those that I do, the album choices are bland. Are there really any Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin fans out there who thinks Dark Side of the Moon and Led Zeppelin IV are their best albums. And don't get me started on the choice of Neil Young's After the Goldrush as a top pick, either. I found the whole list very uninspired.

I don't know what to make of EgoSurf.org . The site supposedly ranks your presence on the web based on some Google based metric. When I first tried the site, I received a rating of 1950. After playing around for a few minutes I had a rating in the three thousands. Today, for some reason, I'm down in the three hundreds, and dropping fast. I have no idea what this is telling me, but I feel the need to make it better. via Ben Poole

There's been a lot of talk about Constitutional freedoms lately in the wake of the domestic wire tapping report and the Alito hearings with its impact on Roe vs. Wade. I know this is important stuff, but I have to say the whole debate confuses me. I'm not confused about the details of these issues; while I'm certainly not an expert they've been covered in enough detail by the press, that I get the jist of both sides of the argument. What confuses me is why we fight so hard for these when we gladly give up other freedoms. When I was a child, I can recall a time when people had responsibility for the safety of their children and their own personal conduct. Back in the late 60s and early 70s, my family took a lot of weekend skiing and hiking trips. On almost every trip my father kept a couple of beers in the car for the ride home. Even now, 40 years later, I can still see the beer can sitting on the dashboard, with my father smoking his pipe, as we ride down Rt. 16 ...

I found Bode Miller's 60 minute appearance refreshingly candid. Apparently, however, I'm in the minority. During the interview Bode admitted to skiing wasted the day after he clinched the world championship. Seems he was out late that night and still had a buzz-on from the celebrating when he hit the course the next morning. He admitted it wasn't the smartest thing he ever did, but he wasn't apologetic either. Of course, it didn't take long for the nanny patrol to come down pretty hard on him for this. It seems people would rather he pretend he's not a partier. It's OK that he hurtles himself down mountain sides in reckless abandon, that's all fine and dandy, but admit to enjoying a deserved celebration and you're a horrible role model. Personally, I like someone who says what they mean and lives life on their own terms. In fact, I think that's a perfect role model.

There's an old saying that when you study literature you're really studying death. Here's a couple of paragraphs I wrote that certainly fits that motif. I'm still thinking of how to incorporate this into some bigger context, but for now I think it stands alone pretty well. The Whale I've been swallowed by a whale. It's not like the stories of Jonah or Pinocchio would lead you to believe; to begin with, a whale's throat is much smaller than you would think. Second, while the gapping baleen mouth quickly engulfs you, the actual swallowing process is a lot more violent. At first you're all cold and wet, with salt stinging your nostrils and the stench of krill filling the air, but then as the water drains from the baleen and the big warm tongue pushes you back into it'’s mouth, the esophagus starts to squeeze you in crushing rhythmic pulses. When what little air you've managed to hold in is finally squeezed from your lungs and the panic rea...

I've been reading the Constitution this morning and I noticed something I hadn't before, namely that the pohibition was the 18th amendment and that its repeal was the 21st. The numbers 18 and 21, the same numbers of the old drinking age and the new one. Coincidence or supernatural drinking numerology? OK, maybe it's just a handy trick for remembering them. On a related topic, have any of you living or working in Massachusetts noticed this odd numeric coincidence? Route 62 intersects both Rt. 495 and Rt. 3 at an exit numbered 26. What's the chances of that happening?