Updates on Travellerbook.com

I cracked open the code for travellerbook.com this summer, while I wasn't in school, and found out home much work there is to do there. It's pretty daunting, since above and beyond the technology upgrades I'd like to make, there's the issue of updating the look so it doesn't look like it's a 5 year old website.

Since I'm back in school and will likely be traveling during the winter break, I don't expect to be able to work on anything until next summer, and by then I'll probably have plenty of projects to work on that may have a higher priority than an old website that I'm pretty sure no one uses. I have some ideas to change that, but decisions on how far to take that will only be made when I'm not in school or in crunch time at work.

Thinking about version 3

I've been thinking recently about dusting off the TravellerBook.com code and updating it to the modern era. I haven't looked at either the code or the actual site in a while, but oh man, it's in need of some love. There are broken images everywhere, and let's face it, the site is ugly. It's in need of a new color scheme, and a new layout.

I switched my old subversion repositories over to git last night, and took a quick look at my TravellerBook.com history. The initial import was way back in 2006, and it's currently still running rails 2.2.2. It's definitely showing its age, and I've been thinking of using it as a practice app for upgrading to rails 3, since a lot of apps at work may need the treatment soon. It's also a good place to finally start using some the BDD tools and techniques I've been reading about, namely cucumber and RSpec.

The real reason I'd like to update though is because it's embarrassing to look at. I've used this site as a learning project all along, and I was clearly still learning the nuances of CSS and javascript. I've since learned CSS3, jQuery, and a number of other tools and frameworks. The original layout was inspired by friendster, and was started before I really learned how to design more usable websites. I'm still learning that part, but there's not better time than now to update the site and make it more functional. Adding in a BSS test suite will also help me sleep better knowing I'm not breaking everything all over the place as I do it. Well, that's the idea anyway.

Anyway, this being a busy time with work and school going at the same time, I don't expect to see much progress here, but I think this might be a good summer project (along with catching up on reading that I haven't had time to do with school and taking a vacation!)

A Brief Update

It's been a very busy couple of weeks, so I haven't been updating this blog as often as I'd like. I've been working on a few things since the last post. I've started the large task of transcribing my journal, starting at the beginning, which was written at the end of 2000. I've written names of people who were part of my life then, and I can't remember who they are at all now. It's interesting reading my own journal 8 years later. It's like I'm reading someone else's journal. The person who wrote those words no longer exists as he did when he wrote them, and I can see how much I had to learn about life back then. A lot has happened in the intervening 8 years. I wrote about the dread I felt about the incoming Bush presidency, and how I felt a shadow over my new year's eve celebrations just preceding his inauguration. I guess I was right, in a way, to dread the incoming administration, but I couldn't have known at the time how bad it would be. I wrote a lot about my daily activities, who I was with, and what was going through my head. I never realized how moody I was back then. I was pretty good about writing daily or almost daily, and the moods I write about swing wildly from day to day. Mostly, though, I feel like I'm reading a novel, and I'm just starting out. Since I can obviously identify with the main character, I am really interested in what happens day to day, and it's a real page turner. I'll be writing more about my journal once I've done a bit more work on it and find some good work to share. I've only gone through the first week or so of entries. This is going to be a big project. 

I've just about completed the upgrade of www.travellerbook.com to YUI CSS. I'm still using Prototype for Javascript, but the YUI Grids CSS cleans things up very nicely, and makes for bigger pages and as a result, larger maps on the page. Those changes will probably be rolled out this weekend. Some of the changes I've made make logging take an extra click though, so I want to roll out login cookies soon too, so I have to decide if I want to roll that out at the same time as the CSS changes. I've added a few Webkit specific CSS effects, which means the page will look best in Safari, Webkit, and Chrome (and any other Webkit based browser) so most people won't see the fanciest changes I've made. 

I've been doing a lot of rails programming this week (and last) at work. I've rolled out an entirely new web app in just two weeks, which will probably soon have thousands of (potential) users. I definitely feel like I've reached a level in my rails programming ability that I can roll out new web applications quickly without much effort. The hardest part for me now is the web design, which I'm getting much better at, and now having done some work with the YUI Grids layouts, I think that won't be so much of an impediment for me. Hopefully Alexandria Society (or whatever it ends up being called) will be much easier to set up with these frameworks. 

Writing goals

Shortly after the tech bubble burst in 2001, I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I had taken a summer internship teaching math to middle school kids when I was in college (I was a math major) and I thought maybe that would be my future. I went so far as to take the CBEST, which would qualify me to be a substitute teacher and then I could go on to get my teaching certification. My girlfriend at the time had decided to join the Peace Corps, and I mulled over that as well. I found out about something called the Peace Corps Masters International program, which is a partnership between the Peace Corps and several universities to have a combined Peace Corps + Masters program that included a year or more of studies followed by two years of Peace Corps service. I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I looked through the catalogue of possible degrees and colleges and didn't find anything related to math. One program that did catch my eye though was the UNLV English and writing program. 

The idea was that I would take two years of writing classes at UNLV, then go into the Peace Corps. At the end of my two years of Peace Corps service, I would have two years worth of experience in another country, and I would come back and write about it. I forget how much I was supposed to write, but it was basically a book length project, and I would get an MFA in creative writing from it all, plus an amazing experience. I had started writing just after I graduated from high school. I had a little yellow legal pad I would write little poems or stories in, usually no more than a page or two. In college, I would write in the back of my class notebooks when I was bored. Shortly after graduating, I decided to start writing regularly, and started keeping a journal I would write in almost every night. I also had a Microsoft Word file that I would write little thoughts and poems in when I was working at Ericsson when I had a few free moments at work. All together I had a decent amount of writing to dig through to come up with a writing portfolio to apply to UNLV and the Peace Corps. 

The problem was, I had never taken a real creating writing class, and I hadn't expanded my reading past a few well known authors and poets. I had a favorite poem at the time, "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" by Dylan Thomas, and a few obscure things I'd read in a poetry collection I had. I was currently reading Jack Kerouac and Earnest Hemingway books. My friend Jaime got my into F. Scott Fitzgerald and besides what I'd been made to read in school, I didn't have much else to influence me. When I compiled everything I'd written in my journal and various notebooks, I had a pretty pitiful and weak poetry portfolio (poetry was really the only thing I had any experience writing.) Needless to say, I was not accepted into the writing program, and thus I decided not to do the Peace Corps. 

As I had lost my job in the tech bubble collapse and was not going to be moving to another college, I ended up moving home to my parents' house, where I decided to go back to school and play soccer for Santa Rosa Junior College. I took English and writing classes and kept up writing in my journal. At the end of a year living at home, I had a much stronger portfolio and a journal think with writing. I had visited a friend who had been living in Shanghai teaching English, and he helped me get a job offer at the school he was working at. It seemed likely that my next step was to move to China, teach English and see where that took me. The way I thought of it, it would have taken me out of the US for many years, as I had no concrete plans to come back any time soon. 

Those plans were changed when I met my future wife, Kat, at a friend's party a few months before I was to leave for China. I decided to stay and find out how things would turn out (so far, so good...) and I'm still here in the US. Eventually, Kat and I moved in together and I stopped writing. I don't know why I stopped, but somehow I didn't miss it as much as I thought I would. I guess there was just too much other stuff to worry about than why I wasn't writing before going to bed. I decided this year that I'd like to start writing again, since I realized that writing was important to me, despite the few years I've stopped. I decided that the way I want to get back into is to transcribe my old bedside journal into a computer document. I'm sure many old memories from my past will be dug up. I used to write ideas for stories I wanted to write in the journal, possibly anticipating that I would do this one day. I also think just getting into the physical act of typing will get me back into being able to do it creatively. I'll post some of my favorite entries in the blog, as I come across them.

First some stats. The first entry in the journal is a (pretty bad) poem dated May 25, 2000. The last entry is dated March 16, 2007.  The journal was kept in a 3 ring binder of paper taken from the backs of my college notebooks (there's always so much unused paper in the backs of my notebooks.) It's about 2 inches think of college ruled binder paper. Most of it is written in cursive (I thought it might be nice to have good cursive handwriting back then, and then it was just a habit. My cursive handwriting isn't all that great even after all this time.) Now I've got some work to do...

Work Surfing

Work seems to come in waves. I've had relatively little time to work on any of the to do list items listed in the last post. The nice thing about my work projects is that often the things I need to learn to do will be useful for the personal projects as well. 

So far the only thing I've been doing regularly is putting in a little bit of time each day to do some workouts on the Wii Fit. The strength workouts are actually pretty good (the squats left my legs sore all day on Monday, although today it wasn't so bad.) I'm only finding about 15 minutes of free time in the morning to do a workout, which is better than nothing, but it would be nice to have about twice as much time. That would of course eat into my sleep time though, which I don't like to give up.

I've been working on two large Ruby on Rails projects at work - one is a new project I'm starting up this week, and one is an older project that has been around for a long time and I'm adding features to it. The main problem I've had with the latter is trying to send out images embedded in emails. There's a nice gem called InlineAttachment that takes any "image_tag" tags in an email template and encodes the image inline with a content identifier, and replaces the URL given to the image tag with the content identifier. In a regular email, the image_tag would link to a web page that hosts the image, and an attachment would have to be downloaded to be viewed. With inline attachments, your mail reader treats the attachment content id as the URL, so you can refer to the image in HTML via the content id. Normally, linking to an image isn't a big deal, but if your email recipient loses internet connectivity or the image is located on a private server behind a firewall (as is the case in my Rails project,) then having the image inline allows the email to be read with images any time. I was wrestling today with getting email encoding correct, but I've as yet been unable to successfully render an image inline. I'm running out of ideas, but the next step is to change my PNG images to JPEG. After that, I'm not sure why the image wouldn't display properly. 

My To Do List

So I'm starting this blog to (hopefully) help me stay on top of the many projects I have planned for the upcoming year. Last year was pretty productive, and I'm hoping to get more big projects off the ground this year, and this blog, along with being one of the projects, is meant to help me keep track of what I'm planning to do and also to document the work I will have done. 

Before I present my list of project plans for this year, here is the list of projects I completed (more or less) last year:

• Got married. This was the biggest project I had last year, and honestly, most of the hard work was done by Kat, but I did handle a lot of things. 
• Brought www.travellerbook.com online. This has been in the work for a couple of years, and it was good to get things out onto the Internet. 
• Gave out the first Traveller books. This is really the best way for people to find out about Travellerbook.com, so I started giving out books. I'll need to give out many more though, so that's on this year's list.

So as you can see, it's a pretty short list. I've left out a lot of the little things that were important at the time but were small compared to the rest. Now on for this year's plans.

• Start a blog. Really I have a blog already, but I never post to it and it doesn't have any focus. This blog will serve as my main blog for now. We'll see how things work out if I keep up with the writing.
• Transcribe my journal. I started keeping a journal sometime in 2000, and I wrote in it almost every night for at least 3 years. There are several hundred pages at least in it, and I'm sure there are some interesting tidbits I wouldn't mind reading again, and maybe expanding on. 
• Fix up www.travellerbook.com. Getting the site up and running was a big project, and this year I want to get the site looking better and running faster. To do this I'll be adding several features and enhancements: OpenID logins, YUI CSS layouts, better authentication and email, along with other enhancements. I'm sure I'll be keeping track of the changes here.
• Give out more traveller books. This should be easy. I just need to buy books, tag them and give them away. Email me if you'd like one. 
• Bring www.alexandriasociety.com online. This is my next big web project. It's still in the early stages, but the idea is to be a social networking site that uses your existing social networks and data. There will definitely be more about this later in the year as this project gets more complete. 
• Write an iPhone/iPod touch app for TravellerBook.com and AlexandriaSociety.com. This obviously needs to be done after the web sites are finished or at least more finished.
• Write a desktop app for AlexandriaSociety.com. I'm still deciding how important this should be to the site, and the more I think about the site, the less important the desktop app seems to be. There will probably still need to be at least a sync client or something. 
• Organize my digital media. This has been on my to do list for 3 years running, so we'll see how far I get with this this year. I want to get my iTunes music, digital photos and videos into some kind of useful state that is accessible from all of the computers in my house as well as from the Internet. 
• Learn a new language. Spoken language for sure, maybe a programming language too, you never know. I've got a good amount of commute time on a bus that I can use to listen to language podcasts and recordings, so I should try to be as productive with that time as possible. 
• Increase my productivity. I read Getting Things Done a couple of years ago, but am easily distracted. I read recently that having more projects can allow oneself to be distracted by other projects rather than trivialities, so I'm hoping by writing all of these down, I can have a go to list of things to do when I get bored of working on one thing for a long time. At the very least it will help me not feel guilty about not working on what I should (or feel I should be) working on at the time, since I'll be doing something on my To Do list.
• Get a remote backup system working. Currently I just have a RAID-1 setup on my home server, but no real backups. I have a script using Duplicity that sends encrypted backups to an Amazon S3 bucket, but it's causing kernel panics on my server for some reason, so I will need to track that down or find an alternate solution.
• Export my Mac OS X address book to LDAP. Because I have so many contact sync and management programs/sites in use, it causes frequent problems. I currently use Plaxo, MobileMe and Zimbra (via Vorari.com) and when they all get going, it causes problems from time to time. An LDAP address book would help keep data loss to a minimum. I have one set up currently using eGroupware, I just need to get my contacts imported into it.
• Gain some weight. Muscle weight, not fat. Kat has talked about joining a climbing gym, and we have friends that have been trying to get us to go, so we might do that. I also have been paying for the gym at work and not going, so it's time to start going or cut costs. We also got a Wii Fit for Christmas, so that should help too. So there are no excuses this year.
• Set up load balancing on my server's internet connection. 
• Write more. This blog counts toward that, but I've also been meaning to restart my journaling and eventually to publish something. I used to write ideas for stories in my journal, so I'm hoping that by transcribing it I'll rediscover those ideas and decide if I want to try fleshing out those stories. 

I think that's a pretty good start. There are plenty of other little projects I want to get done, especially revolving around my home server and Alexandria Society. Not to mention the projects I will be working on at Apple. Looking at this list, I keeping thinking I need more hours in the day. Hopefully keeping this blog up to date will keep me on track and on task so we'll see how things go as the year progresses. 

Of course, there will be distractions this year. Kat's friend Joe is getting married in the summer in Italy (which will be a great opportunity to get more Traveller books out into the wild.) Also scheduled for this year is the release of Guitar Rising (http://www.guitarrising.com) and of course, Snow Leopard. (http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/) I also try to read a lot of blogs dealing with computer programming, personal finance and economics, and of course, lifehacker. So navigating these releases and distractions, we'll see how far I get on checking things off from this list. There's probably more than a full year's work here, so I'm not expecting to get it all done. Time to get to work!

Starting a Blog

As part of my new years resolutions (not that I really make resolutions, but now is as good a time as any to start new projects) I've decided to start (another) blog, which will hopefully give some focus to things. I told my wife Kat that I'd help her mom set up a blog when we went to visit her in Colorado, and I spent all of my time trying to get her Windows XP installations running fast enough to do anything, and didn't get around to starting the blog. For the record, all I had to do was add more RAM. Dell sold her a computer with 2.5 GHz processor and only 256MB of RAM. That's ridiculous, if you ask me. We added an extra gigabyte of RAM and it's like a new computer. That, along with Adaware and CCleaner should keep things running well for at least a little while.

So this post will explain how to set up a blog using Blogger. I just did it 5 minutes ago, so I'm going to write this post while it's still fresh in my memory. It's really easy if you have a Gmail.com account, and even if you don't, signing up only take a few minutes. So here are the step by step instructions for starting your own blog.

1. Go to http://www.blogger.com
2. Log in using your existing gmail.com email account, or set up a new account by clicking the "Create a blog" button. 
3. Pick a name for your blog. You can always change it later. You also choose a domain name for your blog and you have to fill in an CAPTCHA to prove you're a human. You don't need to change any of the advanced options.
4. Once your account it set up, click the button to create a new blog. You pick a style template and that's it! Type up your blog title and entry and click publish and you'll have a blog entry for the world to see.

You can change things like your style template, blog title and domain in your account settings. I'll cover that more when I get around to renaming things. For now, enjoy blogging!