bence writes here

Don’t let it show… I love the (sour) sough! Hey!

bnc119 — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:22:26 +0000

Christine and I baked this sour-dough bread. Making the starter dough was quite a process, but it came out pretty well.

2010: Year In Review

bnc119 — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 14:59:28 +0000

2010 was a sweet year in terms of technology and computing. Slate/tablet computers seem to be all the rage in consumer electronics, with Apple’s iPad leading the charge. Smart phones are everywhere. The netbook phenomenon, which was predicted to be a huge movement this time last year, ended up losing steam when folks realized it was hard to do actual work on a 10 inch screen and a 4″ keyboard. As a society we are generating an absolutely absurd amount of digital media everyday. Music, videos, “tweets”, photos, the list goes on and on. And that’s a great thing. Or is it? The concept of cloud computing has given us a platform for creating a vast amount of information. Likewise, the social platforms of Facebook, mySpace, Twitter, etc… have conveniently provided an infrastructure for disseminating, sharing, and virally spreading that media all over the world. While at first glance this might sound great, in five years we will look back on 2010 and remember it as the year of “diminishing returns” in the world of consumer technology and social media.

The terms “diminishing returns”, “over-done”, “over-cooked”, and “over-blown” perfectly describe our use of social media at present time. We live in a world where many of us are connected 24/7 to the internet, and an increasing proportion of our lives are now on display for all to see. At times it feels rather voyeuristic, kind of like “The Truman Show”. When I travel for business, I see folks updating their “status” upon landing at an airport. Sometimes, I wonder to myself – Ten years ago, how did folks ever manage to travel without having a “status” to constantly update? It boggles my mind! The point I’m trying to make is that social media, web 2.0, and the rise of mobile devices have created a “perfect storm” that has rudely ushered us into a realm where the utility and usefulness of all our aforementioned data is being drowned out by lots and lots of noise. And this is why social media cannot continue to grow at the organic and break-neck pace that we’ve seen over the past decade. We’re long over-due for some control, order, and perhaps some applications that go beyond the usual fun and games.

By the way, check out this self-driving car that Google has been developing. Not many folks have heard about the semi-secret “Google Chauffeur” project, but it’s a great example of disruptive technology that has a chance to make a huge impact on many different industries. Google outfitted a car with a bunch of different pieces of hardware – lasers, cameras, GPS receivers, even a radar, and they all work together to help the car drive itself around highways and city streets. The car has already driven more than 140,000 miles on California highways! If you’re a software engineer like I am, you can’t help but appreciate the complexity of the software required to make this project a reality.

That’s the kind of technology that gets my juices flowing, and that’s the kind of technology I hope we see more of in 2011.

Boston Globe: “In The US, Android outsells iPhone”

bnc119 — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 14:49:04 +0000

The Boston Globe ran an article today entitled “In The US, Android outsells iPhone“.

First, the headline (“Android outsells iPhone”) is misleading and doesn’t compare apples to apples. “Android” is a software operating system. The iPhone is a piece of hardware. Given this distinction, why is this surprising? iOS is only available on one smartphone platform. Android is available on many phones across several wireless carriers. It’s amazing how the so-called experts don’t seem to understand the subtle details.

This is like declaring that Windows 7 outsells OS-X. Well, that’s quite obvious!

Living Abroad?

bnc119 — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 23:27:28 +0000

I want to pump myself up for the possibility of living aboard at some point in my life. Specifically, I would love to find some good novels out there about people who walked away from perfectly good careers to go on an adventure in a foreign country. Not that I would do anything stupid or reckless, but it’s interesting to see what kind of frame of mind some people are in when they make decisions like this. This is a topic that Christine and I have been talking about for a long time. The conversation started last year, as I was finishing up B-School. Then our lives and jobs got really busy and things kind of fell by the wayside. The other day, we were in Barnes & Noble and I saw this book called “Living Abroad in Ireland“. It’s really more of a travel guide, but it’s written from the perspective of a Brit who realized that her her life was very mundane, and, once her husband got laid from his job, decided that it was high-time for a radical life shift. Interesting. On a side note, I’m running in the Manchester 5K Corporate Road Race tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Deep in the heart of Texas…

bnc119 — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 23:17:09 +0000

I’m on the road this week – down in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. Our software team is down here trying to get one of our sensors flying, and things have been pretty successful thus far. The first night I got here, I realized that Ubuntu’s network manager application really stinks. It had trouble finding and connecting to the Wifi network at Logan Airport, and it had similar problems in my hotel room. So I started googling around for work arounds. As always, there is a way to do any task with the command line:

iwlist [interface name] scan

Unfortunately, I had to kill network manager to get this to work right.

Event-a-licious is up and running – locally

bnc119 — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:03:00 +0000

Well, after fiddling around with a bunch of configuration files, I’ve got something up and running that is – on the surface – starting to resemble a web app. The tutorial I’m using is actually pretty good – the only issue is that the book was written for rails 1.2.3, and I’m using 2.3.5 – which normally wouldn’t be too huge of an issue except for the fact that the core rails framework is moving at breakneck speed. What this means is that I’ve definitely been tripped up in several different areas because I’ve been using a newer version of rails. I really wish there were some good rails 2.0 books out there. It just seems that the publishing world can’t keep up. Anyway, on with the post.

You can get a lot of mileage out of using the different generators that come with rails. Starting a project is easy enough. Just type


rails events -d mysql

to set up a skeleton project that is configured to use mysql. Likewise, models can be created using


./script/generate model Event

This little command, while seemingly pretty simple, gets you a lot – an Event model ruby class, migration files, and a bunch of test fixtures for good measure. Running


./script/generate scaffolding Event

automatically sets up what rails calls “scaffolding” – the wiring between the controller, the model, and the view. It’s all pretty automatic, and after generating a scaffolding you have something that you can actually run and play with. Executing


./script/server

launches the webBrick webserver on localhost:3000, and browsing over to that address gives you something resembling the screen shot above. My current issue is that “signing-in” doesn’t work at the moment. Stay tuned.

Beginning Rails – From Novice to Professional

bnc119 — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:58:46 +0000

The secret to learning something new is that you have to commit yourself to it. I received a beautiful acoustic guitar as a graduation gift last spring. I’m not a gifted guitar player (I played a little bit in high school), so I enrolled into a regular guitar lesson that I attend once a week. The same goes for learning rails. If you’re a hobbyist or a hacker, its tempting to just figure stuff out on your own by scanning online articles and tutorials. Unfortunately, those methods have never worked well for me. It just represents too much of a half-hearted approach, and I usually end up with more questions than answers. That being said, I’ve gone out and purchased “Beginning Rails – From Novice to Professional” by Jeffrey Allan Hardy and Cloves Carneiro Jr. I’m about halfway though the book now and plan to get some links up to the application I’m currently building. The the first five chapters (about 200 pages) consist of the following topics:

1. Introduction to Rails – Getting started, installing ruby, rails, and the gem package manager
2. Active Record – An abstraction library for ruby-to-database model binding.
3. Enhancing Models (the “M” in Model-View-Controller architecture)
4. Action Pack: Working with the routes, views, and controllers.
5. AJAX – Asynchronous Java and XML.

Welcome!

bnc119 — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:17:56 +0000

Welcome to my new blog! One of my goals for this year is to take the initiative in learning some new programming technologies. This is the perfect time for me – I wrapped up my MBA last spring and I’ve gotten to the point in my career where I simply want to start learning new things. With any luck, this blog will turn into a pretty good medium for me to document what I’m learning and to share progress on my (hopefully several) ongoing projects. I’ll probably end up writing about things going on in my life too, but my intent is to keep this blog focused on computing and technology.

So here goes. I’ve decided to teach myself the ruby programming language along with the rails web application framework. I had a pretty solid background in HTML coding back when I was in high school, before the concept of a web application existed. In fact, I remember the day Netscape Navigator Gold 2.0 was released. Navigator 2.0 was sweet because it actually had a built-in HTML editor, which to me was awesome at the time. At some point towards the end of high school however, I lost touch with creating HTML content for the web. The five year period between 1999-2004 featured so many web programming technologies that it was literally impossible to stay on top of it all. It seemed like every six months, some new language or technology would appear and be billed as the next “big thing”. Javascript, Struts, Websphere, ASP, PHP, Rails, – what did all of these technologies do and how was anyone supposed to stay on top of them all? I sure couldn’t. Now that we’re firmly entrenched in our web 2.0 world, however, it seems like the dust is finally starting to settle and several languages/frameworks are emerging as the technologies of “choice”. Ruby on Rails (or “Rails”, for short) seems to be one of those technologies. Over the past 12-15 months, I’ve read a lot of positive press regarding rails – it’s MVC architecture, ease of use, and solid documentation and user community. I’m looking forward to getting started.