June 29, 2009 @ 1:09pm
Several months ago, I had a bit of an “aha!” moment. It was such a simple idea, but something that had never been done (AFAICT) the way I was thinking of doing it.
I’m not getting into pushing it out there too hard just yet. We want to get some feedback from our test customers before we get into that. For now, a short post on my seldom used blog will suffice.
PacsDrive is a simplified and cost effective way of archiving medical imaging. A comparable system that health care providers could setup locally would cost, at minimum, $25,000. PacsDrive starts at just $99/month.
January 7, 2009 @ 4:33pm
The Reader is a movie getting award hype. It’s about a relationship between a woman and a younger “kid” set in post-war Germany. I liked it, but avoid it if you aren’t into films with heavy dialog and slowly developing plot lines.
http://log.massplastic.com/tagged/movies
January 7, 2009 @ 4:28pm
At the core, Oldboy is a Korean movie about vengence. I must admit I nodded off 2 or 3 times before I finally finished it, but once I got about 45 minutes into it I was finally compelled to finish it. To most, it is probably a fairly disturbing movie and is filled with a few moderately surpising plot twists. That being said, I liked it.
January 1, 2009 @ 1:28pm
In some ways 2008 was a grand year. I got married, went on a some fun trips, and American suprised me by electing a black man. In other ways, I am happy to bid 2008 farewell. The economy seems to be effecting everyone’s moods, and social drama was rampant in the last quarter.
I look forward to the new year. It’s a fresh start, even if it’s only symbolic. I have resolved myself to read more, write more, and explore things like math and meditation. Happy 2009!
December 29, 2008 @ 4:00pm
Whenever possible I prefer to use open source software, but I don’t mind paying for software, either. Inspired by Alex Payne’s recent post, I’ve compiled a list of software I’ve bought over the years:
TextMate—By far the most used application I have ever owned. As a developer I spend countless hours inside text files, and TextMate helps make working with these files more pleasureable. It can extend to do pretty much whatever you want in that elegant sort of way. $55 for an application that I cannot live without seems like a steal. Absolutely no regrets.
Transmit—I don’t know anyone that uses plain old FTP much anymore, but Transmit is much more than just an FTP client. It has Amazon S3 integeration, which is a lifesaver for me, and works with other file transfer protocols (e.g. SFTP, WebDAV, etc.). I like Transmit over Cyberduck because of its S3 support and the elegance of its UI.
Things—Another life saving application. Between my personal and work life I have way too much going on to keep it stored in my brain. Things helps me organize tasks in a very GTD way, and helps me be a more efficient and effective person. The desktop version is free (for now), but the iPhone application is worth the $9.99. Although, I wish the iPhone version would sync over the cable or bluetooth.
Passenger/Ruby Enterprise Edition—Although these are technically free, I felt compelled to donate money because they are the lifeblood of many of my web applications. Even though Ruby isn’t always my language of choice, I wanted to do what I could to encourage further development.
Versions—A great Subversion UI for the Mac. Makes handling multiple SVN projects a breeze. Even though I use Git for version control these days, I still have a lot of projects on Subversion. As a terminal guy, it took me awhile for Versions to sell me on its utility, but now I can’t wait for a Git version.
Frenzic—An iPhone app by the folks at the IconFactory. A simple, addicting puzzle game that will help pass the time in those annoying queues.
GuitarToolkit—A Deck Ad sold this to me (I still can’t believe it). I play a little guitar and having a tuner and chord library in my pocket at all times is ultra-handy.
Decibel—A decibel meter for the iPhone. I’ve been to a lot of loud shows and consequently have some occational ringing in my ears. Having this handy utility helps me know what kind of noise my ears are being exposed to.
NewsFire—I have major regret that I bought this application. It did serve a purpose for a few months, but with NetNewsWire and Google Reader being free (better) alternatives I would not buy this again.
December 12, 2008 @ 6:40pm
I am a little schizophrenic when it comes to my personal websites. I have made changes more times than I can count, and rarely stick with a new format for very long. I took the chance to mess around with custom templates in Tumblr. I realized that I can really leverage the Tumblr engine and API to do pretty much whatever I want, as long as I have access to a “static” site I can run some of the custom functionality from.
I am hoping that this format will stay, at least for awhile. My blog and website used to be a creative outlet years ago, and I am hoping I will be able to return to that once again.
June 18, 2008 @ 12:41pm
Installed and messed around with sproutcore this weekend. But today when I went to use RubiGen (to generate a Rails controller) I found that it had broken it. So, to fix uninstall sproutcore. If you are getting the error “uninitialized constant RubiGen” this will likely fix it if you happend to have installed sproutcore recently.
June 11, 2008 @ 12:35pm
A project I have been associated with for the past 7 months had initially decided to use Engine Yard as our host. We felt that they had the expertise, clout, and infrastructure to be our eyes and ears when it came time to scale. We were building the app in ruby on rails, and Engine Yard’s employees are some of the biggest and brightest names in the ruby world, so the added expense of an EY deployment was thought to be well worth it.
In fact, it was my sole recommendation to go with them. I felt that it would be better to have the developers worry about development and EY to worry about sysadmin. Too often, especially in the rails world, developers must wear the sysadmin hat, and for this project I wanted to leave that up to the pros.
I’m not going to go into too much detail, but the problem for us came in communication. EY uses support tickets for everything, including changing basic info like your password and email address. For me, the time delay to get things like this done is frustrating. Once, our entire application was accidentally deleted from our staging slice by a tech. I often found our requests were only partially completed, and the last straw came when we ordered a production slice to finally launch our project and was having to make the same support requests I had made for the staging slice. I wasn’t about to go through all that again.
All in all, EY just wasn’t a good fit for our particular project. There have been repeated delays in our project, and our project didn’t fit the typical rails app mold. There is no doubt in my mind that once we got setup into production EY would have been a rock star for us. That’s were I think the real benefit would have kicked in.
Anyway, we moved to Slicehost, which I have used for several smaller projects, and I had all our slices and cap deployments setup within 2 hours. It’s cheaper and more hands on, but I think that is what I like about it.
June 10, 2008 @ 1:52pm
I hadn’t been to Disneyland since I was 9, but had a chance to go back this weekend nearly 20 years later. I was honestly surprised at how much fun I had. The production there is amazing. From all the perfectly trimmed hedges and landscape to the parades and fireworks. The rides were great, espeically the ones I had never been on. Disneyland is great, even for (or especially for) adults.
June 6, 2008 @ 1:57pm
When I was in college, I was always struggling to get the class I wanted, at the times I wanted, with the teachers I wanted. I solved a lot of that problem by building a little script for my personal use that would text-message me letting me know someone had dropped a course that was full and I was trying to add.
Anyway, it took me awhile to get the time, but I finally rolled it into a website that I hope other students find useful.
I’m calling it DropMessenger.
