Jason Wong

Got Dad an iPod Shuffle for his birthday. Dad is visually impaired, and the 5 button, 1 switch interface is perfect for his needs. I’ve loaded 60 hours worth of books, and another 8 hours of music, ranging from classical, to the Beatles. He won’t have a problem charging it, but because the iTunes software doesn’t seem to support visually impaired software, I’ll be responsible for putting new books and music on for him. No biggie.

First question out of his mouth, after getting the Shuffle – “Does it come with your headphones?” The curse of nice toys. On the other hand, I won’t have to think hard when Christmas comes around.

Spoke too soon. Mom stepped up, and since she hasn’t bought him a present yet, asked me to place an order for her. She wants a Shuffle now, as well. Apple needs to put me on a commission plan.

Saw Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Metreon. The trailer shows you exactly what to expect, other than the Oompa Loompas. Fantastic visual effects and color schemes, with enough oddball scripting and acting to give you a light, disturbed feeling. The Oompa Loompas, are the most entertaining piece(s) of the movie, and Tim Burton adds a few bits to the story – not enough to bastardize it, but enough to make you roll your eyes. It’s a movie that needs to be watched in a theatre, and as long as you don’t expect to be blown away, you’ll come away satisfied.

These are the pictures from my June 22nd Birthday Party at Poplar Beach. For those of you wondering, my birthday’s on May 7th. It was frigid as all hell, with the sun peeping out around 6pm. More importantly we had a blast, and I spent time with really, really great friends.

I am proud to announce the first Global 2000 Ruby on Rails website at www.epsondevelopers.com. Seiko EPSON chose RoR for its maintainability, speed, lower overall cost, and built-in framework components.

ionami has been working with EPSON for over 3 years. While we created the original site in Java, EPSON was surprisingly open to a switch. We took the opportunity to redesign the site, and move the original, public site to Rails for ease of management.

This project has two major systems, the public site, that supports software development for their products, and a second, private site, which includes a forum and FAQ site for partner developers. This is 100% Ruby on Rails, with a MySQL db backend. With RoR, we created an easily maintainable website, allowing administrators to manage files, categories and view reports. Really, although it was easy to build, and easy to make bug fixes, the importance of this site is not so much in what it does, or how easily we did it. When a skeptic asks, “Who do I know, that’s using Ruby on Rails today?” This is a showcase for large corporations using RoR. This open up doors for all of us.

Finally, with this launch, ionami is officially a Ruby on Rails shop. We’ll support our customers and other languages where appropriate, but our future is in Ruby on Rails, building RoR applications, and being the #1 development shop on the West Coast for Ruby on Rails.

Saw the 10:25 showing of the Fantastic Four tonight. If you’re looking for a piece of escapism that moves along at a decent pace, with a decent script, this is a decent movie to see. I’m absolutely amazed that this movie got a 26% at Rotten Tomatoes. As long as your expectations aren’t that high, it’s pretty well done (other than some bad acting, bad casting and CGI). Aren’t these the same guys that gave Revenge of the Sith 80%? There’s no justice in the world.

I was gently reminded that I haven’t written findings for Broadvoice. I have Broadvoice (9.99/month statewide calls plan) enabled as as a softphone over 802.11b and Vonage($24.99/month premium) as the primary office dial-in line. Vonage forwards simultaneously to a landline at the office, and my cell phone. Broadvoice, I’ve kept for outbound calling. We work in an older building, where the broadband access is sketchy, so I need to leave the Vonage phone adapter at home, and can’t use it for outbound dialing. Unless we move to a T1, or move out, we’re married to SBC. Whenever I’m telecommuting at home, it works great, and I’m happy as a clam. Eating ham. But not Spam.

For a regular casual landline user, I recommend switching to a VoIP line, if you can live with 95% reliability, and your broadband connection is reliable… and you have a cell phone as backup. The features you get free – state/US (and beyond depending on plan) calling, simultaneous call forwarding, voice mail, caller id, call waiting, etc., far outweigh the reliability.

As for Broadvoice vs. Vonage, it’s not fair to compare a softphone (on wireless) to a dedicated adapter with analog, so I’m wussing out, and letting you see what Slate and a News.com story have to say.

Just upgraded to typo-current with svn checkout svn://leetsoft.com/typo/trunk typo. On top of the new layout, MarsEdit allows me to make edits to posted articles now. Killer! Steps to upgrading:

• Copy all your old files to a temp directory for a backup.
• Copy all app/view files, config/database.yml, and old /public files you want over to the new site. If you don’t like the new style, take that over as well.
• Check permissions. Logs need to be chmod 666’d, and dispatch.fcgi needs to be executable by the web server.
• Making sure that public/dispatch.fcgi is looking for ruby (for me on Debian, it’s /usr/bin/ruby)in correct directory. If Tobias just developed this on Debian, I’d have one less step. This one took me 8 minutes to figure out. Sigh. Update: The subversion repository now points to /usr/bin/env ruby. That works perfectly.
• Set config/environment.rb to production

Now all I have to do is svn update, plus a little copy script to get my files back in order, and I’m good to go from here on out!