I enjoy putting images up on my blog.. but it turns out that there is a much easier way. In the last couple years it has become so much easier to put pictures online. I used to have my personal Gallery that is actually still up, which required me to resize every image in GIMP and then upload them via a web interface one at a time. NOW there is a desktop application that I can just drag away and it will resize and upload them to my flick account. It also lets you go through and quickly add comments and titles to all of them which I will do in the near future. However for the mean time if anyone want's to see more fun pictures go ahead and check them out HERE. Anyways my birthday, and the super bowl are both this weekend, so it should be a good time. We are trying to get a testing RC of Cosmo 0.6.0 cut by the end of the week so probably friday I will have an overview of all the cool new features and how everyone can get their hands on it and become a user.

On another note, I am trying to promote my Lost Pet Finding Website. This site has been online for a really long time, and I do get good amounts of hits and users. It's hosted for free and I think its a really great thing to have online (in the open source spirit) as all the competitors either have a terrible interface, or they are trying to make money from the users. I'm not trying to do that, but if I could get the amount of users up high enough it would start making some money from the tiny ad bar at the bottom which would allow me to get some new features on there and do some other great open sourcey and ajaxy things with it. The main reason is that to do this I will need to get a new host that will allow me to do a python based web framework and some pretty heavy AJAX front end stuff. So if anyone can help or wants to trade links.. let me know. Cheers!

As I noted in my last entry, I have changed the way that I am managing and editing my photos and it has made a world of difference. First off Photoshop CS2 built for PPC but running in Rosetta on an Intel Mac is a terrible idea. I have a Macbook Pro recently upgraded to 2 gigs of RAM and even opening Photoshop CS2 slowed the machine to a crawl. Fortunately I recently got my hands on the CS3 beta with a native build for Intel. AMAZING difference, this is night and day and has allowed me to actually use Photoshop like an application instead of an overnight download. Secondly I have been beta testing Adobe Lightroom as a replacement for iPhoto. I don't really mind iPhoto, and I have heard amazing things about the enormous Aperature Suite.. but haven't had a chance to test drive it. I would also like to say that Lightroom has a fantastic UI, scrolling through my 10 megapixel 25 meg pictures is seemless and it allows me to grab just select photos off the camera instead of downloading the whole sd card as I was doing with iphoto. It also has the ability for you to directly export and edit images to different file formats and applications by just cmd clicking on the images. So the future is looking for Adobe on MacOSX, keep it up guys.

Additionally I have spent the last week intensely working on Windmill (which again I will reiterate is a web UI testing framework we have been building at OSAF to automate the testing of Cosmo. We spent a lot of time working on Selenium but didn't get the feed back or involvement in its development that we would have liked so we started from scratch and have I have been borrowing any javascript from their api that I can to speed up the time it takes me to get to a fully usable release for Cosmo, because we badly need it before 0.6.1 enters the release testing cycle. As of this second the docs are really not worth your time but I am going to devote the second half of the day tomorrow to updating the api docs and outlining examples. Anyways, the belated point is that in writing javascript code you have to make sure that it works in multiple browsers so I first started working with the VMware Fusion Beta. I have to be honest, and I really wanted to like it.. but they are really falling behind in terms of performance and features. After the unbearable waits to launch the virtual machines and accomplish any kind of task in the operating systems I had to move to Parallels.. and of course they have a Beta. I had to use the beta becase it includes a feature called Cohesion which allows you to break windows applications out of the vm window and use them as if they were native OSX applications. You can minimize them to your dock cmd tab beteen OSX and open VM applications. You can also setup dock icons, desktop icons and various other shortcuts to launch the vm and open a specific application in cohesion mode making it feel like its completely native to OSX barring the fact that the applications do run much slower than anything native. ESPECIALLY if you are running 2 vm's and doing anything intense along side. To conclude my ranting on VM for OSX, I would highly recommend Parallels, but be careful.. the beta is BETA and I have made it execute some pretty amazing crashes. I actually got a black screen of death of some kind freezing OSX and doing some serious memory dumpage. ENJOY!

There has been some blogging this week about the inadequacy of javascript as a language. I would first like to give a response to this statement as a guy who has spent the last six months learning it from the ground up.. and now I am realtively comfortable doing most web front end development and have experienced many design decisions and frameworks etc. Javascript can do some very cool things, it is obviously changing how we use the internet. I can't imagine the world without it and in some strange way I have really enjoyed some of the rediculous short commings of the language because I love a good challenge and you can do things with it that no other language can. Having said that, the fact that you have to write specific conditionals for each browser, each version of each browser and each of each on each operating system can be extremely frustrating. Fortunately a lot of frameworks and libraries these days are trying to make up for that by doing this behind the scenes. It has also lead to some of the most amazing programming hacks of all time. I have been using the light weight Fleegix library in Windmill for doing XHR and it has worked very well on every browser/os combo I have tested with. I will be looking into Mochi kit in the coming weeks as I have heard good things about it including, the idea that it tries to make javascript feel a little more like python, its small and make efficiency a top priority. OSAF has been using pieces of dojo for the Cosmo project and recently it was announced that they will be going from 0.4.2 I believe to 0.4.9 and completely removing any backwards compatibility, which naturally can be a very serious set back for anyone who really wanted to keep up with a project and relied heavily on the framework.

I ran into a pretty interesting bug this week with an object in javascript who had a member function named this.continue. The function just told our main execution loop to continue making XHR calls and grabbing the next instruction.. because the loop was stopped each time a new page was loaded into the iframe to keep from trying access elements in the web UI before they were fully loaded. Anywhoo, I spend a few hours finishing the pieces I was working on and they all worked great on the linux and mac versions of firefox however when I went to do my testing in Parallels in ie6 and ie7 I was getting errors in the script debugger pointing to object declarations that had nothing to do with what I was working on, so using alerts and commenting out everything I had just done I finally narrowed it down to a name conflict on the member name continue in IE. I did some searching and never came up with any explanation or documentation of what this was used for in the language etc. I am building a list of these little quirks that I battle and will dispense them to you as I vent my frustrations.

The new version of Cosmo has some super cool features, and we are constantly doing QA on it, so please go check it out: Cosmo QA Test Instance. Until next time..

I have picked out a few photos to visually represent my activities of the last month. I already described my great trip up to Washington, but today I finally got some images downloaded and resized to put online. This used to be an excruciating process, however now it is faster and easier than ever and you will learn why in my next blog entry (which will be mostly technical.. software reviews, javascript rants and updates on Windmill.)

Starting at the beginning:


What a view huh? I recommend it to everyone.. at least for a refreshing lung of mountain air. The second of my two days at Baker.


We decided to get in this one as proof :)

Finally we fast forward to New Years, don't we look like we had a good time?



I spent the evening with Mr. Chris Canavan, a childhood friend of mine that I hadn't seen in a couple years. It's always fun to catch up with friends of old.


As thrilling as all those images are, I have an awefully lit one of Marty and I before the housewarming party last weekend.. but it will have to do until some images from other people show up.

Woah! Been a while since I have had a chance to BLOG. Many things have happened since my last entry including a wonderful holiday season. I had the opportunity to spend some time with my family and friends in Bellingham Washington and make it upto Baker a few times to enjoy the massive amounts of snow. I have some great photos that I will post this weekend.

This week is a "Sprint" week at OSAF which means that many of our remote people are in town in the hopes to iron out any isses before we start doing our massive QA session for the Cosmo 0.6.0 release. Many cool new features on the way including full timezone support, many fixed recurrence bugs and sharing features. The future vision looks very cool as a dashboard is slated to be included in the 0.7 preview release for the end of April. Cosmo is planning to incorporate many of the great PIM (Personal Information Manager) features that Chandler has but from the web, pretty exciting stuff. Another piece of inside info is that a book has just been published called "Dreaming in Code", which is a book about the OSAF story from the very beginning. If anyone is interested in what is REALLY going on down here, it would be a great read. Especially since the book is not a technical book, and makes many of the intricate technical details much easier to understand. This hasn't yet been publically announced, and all the famous bloggers at OSAF are waiting to announce this until our preview release so we can maximize our publicity etc. So don't forget where you heard it first!

At Moscone West, two blocks from where my desk is - Steve Jobs kicked off Mac World last week. Of course everyone was going crazy as macrumors let us in on every detail of the keynote. The iPhone was released as well as the iTV, which I had been counting on for months. Since I had a free pass to Mac World Expo we wondered over to go see this iPhone in person as its on display in glass cases in the exhibition hall. Mikeal and I were standing there admiring its amazing visual appeal and size when I heard a farmilliar voice say, "We will all be downloading each other! TEXT ME DAMNIT!" and I turned to see Robin Williams decked out in a funny fishing hat, big black sun glasses and a hawaiin shirt. Just like the rest of the world - he couldn't wait to get his hands on the iPhone. Ironically Mikeal and I were still too anamoured with the phone to pay much attention to the rogue comedian on the lose so we turned back to the phone. Finally after a few more momemnts of staring a man ran up and started filming Robin instead of the phone, and after a snappy "DONT FILM ME" he dissapeared back off into the hordes of crazed mac fanatics.

My response to the iPhone -- It is the most advanced mobile device out there. Its features are all first rate and will dominate the market when its finally released in June. However, it is far from the perfect mobile device. It lacks the suspected GPS functionality, you cannot sync wirelessly with itunes etc. and most recently and MOST disappointing as a geek is the lack of an open development API. We had huge plans of all the cool apps we could write for a device like this and now they are telling us that they are closing it off and will only allow you to use their features. This doesn't mean that the geeks out there won't hack it like crazy and put new software on it. The disappointing part is that there are so many cool open source things that can happen when you open a piece of hardware such as this up to the development community and let the world work on it. This same issue was what turned me away from the sidekicks, the fact that danger wanted to dominate and make money off of the applications for the device. I see this problem most likely stemming from Cingular. However the mobile world is pretty undeveloped, so you never know what might happen in the coming months.

Go COUGS! It's fantastic to see the WSU Mens Basketball squad breaking all the barriers and getting themselves to a 15-2 ranked team for the first time since I've been a Coug. The most amazing part about this whole thing is that they were slated to be last in the PAC 10 in the preseason and now they are shaping the opportunity to win the whole shooting match. This will be fun to follow when we get to the PAC 10 tournament, because you never know who's going to show up ready to play.

Last night also kicked off the SF Sketchfest, with an improv. session at the Mezzanine by Stella. This trio was very entertaining and recommend anyone interested in improv. comedy to go check out a couple of the shows, as they are basically every day from now until the end of the month.

Tonight is the OSAF holiday party, which I am excited to attend. I have heard great things about the OSAF parties of the past and have high expectations. The bay area is freezing cold this week, its snowing in Seattle and this year has been predicted to be the hottest EVER. This weekend I will be catching up on some phone calls (I apologize for all of you that I haven't had a chance to talk to this week as a result of all the craziness.) The majority of the week I have spent banging away at the Windmill Project as it is becoming more and more important that we have a solid automation framework for testing the Cosmo Web UI. This has turned out to be a serious learning experience, especially making my code work correctly in all 3 browsers we support: IE 6, Firefox and Safari.. and un officially IE 7. However there has been some significant progress and once I have a few more functions finished I will be doing a demo, some screen shots and a faq for our wiki. So CHECK IT OUT, and if your interested and want to do any WEB UI testing, please contribute as we need all the momentum we can get.

It appears that the Holiday Season is now officially upon us. I have my radio turned to KOIT 96.5 FM for my continuous stream of cheer. This has prompted me to take a look around, firm up my Christmas list and just wish instead of presents.. I could convince everyone to meet up in Hawaii on the beach to spend Christmas morning toasting to the waves with a rum mojito. However, I am extremely excited to visit Washington to see my friends and family. Hopefully I can avoid any of those power outages and 100 MPH winds I have been hearing about.

ALSO, a special shout to my little sister who will be celebrating her 20th Birthday the 17th and apparently survived her finals down at USC.

It doesn't look like I will be mailing out any kind of Christmas card this year, things have just been too hectic for me to pay attention to that kind of detail but I sincerely appreciate all of you who had that kind of dedication. JUST KNOW -- I wish you all a wonderful Holiday and anything else that I would have put in a Christmas card to update you.. is thoroughly explained in the past few blog entries!

I would like to take this moment to reflect a bit upon graduating, moving, getting job, blah blah to think about the great time I had at WSU. As I finally received a big compressed package of images from Mr. Kevin I found a few cool ones of the dudes, Miss you both!







These pictures remind me of Kevin's wedding day. We went with him to Pasco to pick up black socks for everyone who had forgotten to bring their own.. and white socks with a tux and black shoes looks really silly. But before we went Jeff and I decided to call around and find an old school barber shop to get professional straight razor shaves. We stood in line, and took turns getting layers of hot towels on our faces etc. Finally when Kevin was up we realized that we had less than 20 minutes to goto an ATM (they were cash only) and then get Kevin home to get ready to get married. Of course the timing didn't quite work out and we made the poor guy late to his own pre-wedding show. When we rolled in everyone was already dressed and ready to goto the wedding place so the three of us ran down stairs and threw our tuxes on as fast as humanly possible. Jeff and Kevin were kind of bleeding from the super close shave on their faces and we were worried it would show in the wedding pictures, but apparently it worked out!

Anywhoo, I have been thinking lately about this touted iPhone that apple is rumored to be releasing. At first I was really into the idea but now that I think about it, I really don't use my iPod all that much. If this phone is simply based on the idea of a really cool combination between phone and ipod I will be disappointed. I will only be satisfied when full on mobile video conferencing, internet browsing and maybe even mini OSX so I can write code on the device. Please Apple, I beg you - blow all of our minds with this iPhone creature.

This week I spent more time watching Professor Crockford clear up the fog of my brain that is JavaScript/DOM.. want to watch?. Going through my AOP/Meta Programming learning curve I finally had a serious "AHA!" moment while talking to Matthew Eernisse about this concept of dynamically re-arranging your javascript objects, methods and variables and its power as a programming tool. It came when I saw the ability to execute a function from within the scope of an object that you are specifying. This is all going to come in very handy when I implement the performance testing code in Cosmo. I will simply prepend a method to call the performance start timer where I want. All who are interested will be able to see it in action ASAP.


I watched this the other day: ALIENS FOR SURE and I cannot wait to meet them, imagine the kind of hardware they probably have - lookout Apple.

If anyone wants to see more of my apartment and pictures of OSAF, feel free to check them out HERE.

Much more to say, but it will have to wait, 3 AM is starting to feel like 100 lbs of books on my eye lids.

SEE: