Let's get our act together...

So, since I have been sucking at writing regular posts, I’m going to try to start writing weekly (on Saturday mornings), blabbering about what I’ve done/experienced/thought about during the week. Maybe this will hold my interest enough that I can keep this site fresh.

Monday marked my move to “cube-ville” at work, from a 2 person office. This move had been talked about since I started there as a contractor three years ago (“Don’t bother unpacking, we’ll be out by winter” was the line in July 2006.). The building is fairly nice (but that might just be contrast shock since our old building hadn’t been updated in the 30 years my department occupied it). My big projects are in an actual data center now, instead of an old computer room with a leaky air conditioner. The renewable engineering groups are in this building with us, so there are two sets of solar arrays in the back (one “fixed”, and one “tracking”), and I actually have a view of something besides a brick wall.

In an effort to expand my Java knowledge, I’m trying to implement a Java library to access the new Linode API, with the end goal of making an Android application for it. I’m going to let it mature a bit, then I’ll push it to Github.

On the subject of Android, I love it. I want it. I normally am against government involvement in corporate affairs, but I’m selfishly hoping the FCC rules that the carrier exclusive agreements are a BadThing, and that an Android phone comes to Verizon Wireless (since I also love Verizon (I’m a B2B customer, so in my opinion the customer service is a bit better) and their coverage). This is a phone I could actually develop for (I’ve had too many dead ends with PalmOS, and now that Palm has killed it, my desire to do anything is very limited).

A few more projects I have queued up:

• ZXing based Google Books interface (allowing you to take a folder of images, extract the ISBNs from them, and format them in a way that pastes into the bulk upload box for your Google Books Library easily.

• A sms/email based service, also based on ZXing, to do what some iPhone and Android applications do: Return pricing information based on a submitted bar code. I’m not sure what the success rate of this is going to be, since camera phones in my experience generally do not have good macro qualities.

• I found an Asterisk library called Asterisk-Java that has both FastAGI and Manager interfaces, so I’m going to look into using this instead of the hacked up version of HooDaHek I was using.

• And last, but probably not least: A way to post to my blog from the command line. Since I implemented Markdown format for posting, I’ve taken to writing my posts in Vim (spell checking, syntax highlighting as I type, and so on), then cut and pasting them into the posting form. If I am going to be doing this weekly, I need to have an easier work flow for this. I don’t know yet if this is going to be a Django view, or if I’m just going to import the post model and add a new one. (The second way seems easier… This might get done this afternoon)

So that’s all for now, hopefully you’ll see something again next week.

Posted 18 Jul 2009