Nels Wadycki

Nels W

Writes Code, Fiction

  • Well, that does it

    Nels W

    or: There’s a reason that Bruce Eckel is a good writer and speaker and stuff

    In case you somehow missed it, the biggest thing going around These Intertubes today is Bruce Eckel’s post on Flex and Flash as The development platform for RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).

    Constant Readers will know that I’ve been struggling with the question of Java vs. Flash pretty much since I started this blog. (Those same readers will also note that my style has changed from funny w/ pop-culture references to dull and straightforward).

    While my mind (and Apollo) have been steering me in the direction of Flex/Flash, Eckel’s post/essay has solidified in my mind the right way to go (at least for now). I know that I’m going to be doing a lot more Java stuff at work, but my time will be devoted to the learning of Flex and everything that is required to implement it in the most optimal/excellent manner.

    Final Note: I’ve added a Flash category to this blog now… Couldn’t help but wonder what kind of posts show up in the Technorati category for flash…

  • I’m old, but at least I’m not the only one

    Nels W

    So, I went to see Califone (and Roommate) with some friends at The Hideout. Show started at 10 pm (according to the schedule). We just barely got in (doors were at 9 and the place is small). Roommate came on at probably 10:15 or so (pretty close to on time for a rock and/or roll show) and played until about 11. Califone started playing at about 11:30. I made it through about 2 songs before I had to strain to keep my eyes open. That’s not a review of the band, and this post is not to provide any sort of review. This post is about staying up late.

    I mean, I felt better that my wife and one of my friends were having trouble staying awake. So, like I said, I’m not the only one. But it wasn’t like this was some guy playing an acoustic guitar and singing softly. There were loud guitars and pounding drums. Oh, and a keytar!




    KEYTAR FTW!

    Originally uploaded by cgansen.

  • Day Break Cancelled

    Nels W

    Okay, it’s totally random since this is usually a tech-focused blog, but it’s my blog, so I’ll post whatever I want (and there’ll be some tech stuff in here a little).

    Day Break has been canceled by ABC. Yes, that was enough to drive me to my blog to post about it. I’m pissed. Well, not really angry as much as disappointed. I figured the show wouldn’t get that many viewers, so I did my best to visit the site at least once a week, and I played the game they had, and I watched episodes online (sometimes even when I’d watched them on TV). I figured someone at ABC would be looking at the web numbers.

    Now there’s speculation that ABC might put the remaining episodes online, but today is Thursday, and there is not a new episode there (which would have aired last night).

    I understand that it’s probably a more difficult show to get into, but people watch 24 like crazy, right? I mean Day Break has what looks like close to 4.5 stars on Yahoo TV (as of the time of this writing) and none of the episodes have lower than an 86% rating. My wife almost punched me when I told her I like Day Break more than America’s Next Top Model. I said it was my favorite show on TV right now.

    And in case anyone out there with any kind of influence or decision making power reads this, I am in the ever-so-special 18-49 demographic, and am usually at the high end of “household income” on surveys. Also, I don’t watch anything else that’s on ABC except for some episodes of the Bachelor if Heroes isn’t on, and sometimes Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (but not much recently). I tried to get into The Nine, but I was hoping it would actually be something more exciting like Day Break. So pretty much, I won’t be watching ABC at all, and it might become an actual boycott if the remaining episodes aren’t made available online.

    (Here’s comes a somewhat techie part)

    While I’d prefer that the last 7 episodes be made available for free on ABC.com, I am definitely willing to pay for the remaining episodes via iTunes (or some other means). Doing so, however, would cement my boycott of ABC. I understand that downloading video and/or watching video on the web is going to become the de facto standard soon enough (once Wyoming actually gets broadband internet), and I’m an early-enough adopter that I am happy watching shows on my computer. Everyone in charge needs to keep in mind, though, that watching TV (or even movies) on a computer makes it much harder to share said show (or movie) with anyone else. For example, I know that my wife is not going to want to watch Day Break with me if it’s max 640×480 (or whatever ABC’s “big” size screen is online). Even shows (and movies) on DVD look bad when you try to watch them full screen on your laptop.

    I do have a desktop computer with a TV tuner and recording software hooked up to my TV in the basement, but it doesn’t have a wireless network card (which was fine when it was right next to the modem) so I can’t download anything to that to watch on my TV. I’m sure there’s many others like me who are tech savvy, but don’t quite have the funds to upgrade every computer in the house so they can display to every TV in the house. I do have an Xbox 360 with wireless adapter, though, so if Day Break was on the Xbox Live Marketplace, I could buy it there and watch it from the 360.

    Anyone else have feelings on bridging the cap between computers and downloading and the TV? Or more importantly, does anyone else have feelings on the demise of Day Break???

  • Someone forgot to tell Gmail

    Nels W

    … that Google Spreadsheets is now called Google Docs & Spreadsheets:

    gmail_bar.jpg

    google_docs_spreadsheets_bar.jpg

    And Picasa is online now as well under Photos.

    Of course, this will all be old news as soon as I hit the publish button. Actually considering it’s 9:34 am and I haven’t opened my RSS Reader (aka Google Reader), it probably already is old news. Mmmmmmm! Stale!

  • Code Monkey Like You

    Nels W

    An amazing Viral Video (via crazybob.org), made possible YouTube, a Google company.

    Update: Evidently, WordPress.com won’t let me put YouTube videos in my posts. So you’ll have to click over to crazybob to see it.

    Another thought… I wonder if Blogger will have tighter integration with YouTube now that they’re both owned by the same company. Of course, from what I hear, Blogger isn’t worth using right now anyway.

  • The RSS Reader Wars are Back

    Nels W

    At least for a second… Google launched a new version of Reader today, fueling speculation that it can’t be long before they integrate RSS into Gmail. In the post about the update, you’ll find a video by one of the Google Reader engineers. The best part of the video is not that Google Reader is an inbox for the web, but rather the UPS guy who leaves the building in back of Chris Wetherell. Can’t you see him going “Dammit! The one take we finally get and there’s a UPS guy back there.” Maybe other people aren’t as easily distracted as I am.

    Just to play around a little, I did some tests on Google’s feed discovery service (I’ve done similar searches with Yahoo’s RSS feed search). I choose to be amused rather than disheartened by the results. A search for Fantasy Basketball turns up none of the fantasy basketball blogs I read (nor write). Just stuff from the “major” news sources and media. A search for Give Me The Rock (no quotes) comes up with the BlogShares feed for GMTR and a posting on the KFBA message board with a link to the site. A search for “Give Me The Rock” (with quotes this time) actually manages to grab a bunch of sites that link to GMTR, but not GMTR itself. Finally, a search for Nels Wadycki comes up with the Give Me The Rock feed as the 6th hit. At least this blog was the first result for Nels Wadycki. I would have been a little worried if that wasn’t the case.

    I added GMTR, this blog, and another fantasy basketblog that I read to test things out…

    And the verdict is, it’s pretty nice. If you go through thing in the expanded view, it will automatically mark them as read, which is something that I’m a big fan of. The keyboard shortcuts make that pretty easy, too. I will say that the shortcuts took me a little while to figure out, but I think if I were to use Reader consistenly, I’d get used to them pretty quick. Hard to say if it works well for a power reader like myself with only 3 feeds in there, but it is an obvious improvement over the previous version.

    As for the integration into Gmail. I’m not keen on that as yet. It would probably require some reworking of the keyboard shortcuts, and it seems like there would have to some sort of separation between the two since they are actually more disparate applications than Gmail and Gtalk were/are. I would like to see them do it if for no other reason than to expand the side bar a little. I’ve always thought it was too narrow to accomodate longer, more wordy labels, and it would help a little with people’s personalized statuses in the Gtalk box.

    Here’s the only picture I’m going to post… because if you really want to see what it looks like, you can just go over and check it out.

    google_reader_screen.jpg

  • Full RSS Feeds

    Nels W

    The topic of Full RSS feeds is something that comes up every once in a while… Usually I have to bug sports blogs about it since they’re not always the most techno-savvy.

    I am definitely in agreement with Fred over at WeBreakStuff that every blog should have a full post RSS feed. If you’re really desperate enough for ad revenue that you resort to a summary feed to drive traffic to your site, you need to figure out a way to get the ads into your feed. It’s that simple. As Fred says, if it’s not all there, well, it’s not going to happen.

  • The great thing about Pandora FM

    Nels W

    is finding artists that play music similar to arists that play music you already like. It works great until you really like an artist (and a local one at that) that decided to call it quits before you ever learned you liked them.

  • As though Bill Gates retiring is unfathomable

    Nels W

    Bill Gates on Information Week

    OMG! After 30 years as the face of Microsoft, why on Earth would Bill Gates want to retire?

    What the H E double hockey sticks? Don’t most people want to retire after working for 30 years? Isn’t that the reason people put money into retirement accounts? There’s a lot of personal finance bloggers out there “socking away” (that’s a PF term) as much money as possible in the hopes of retiring early. Considering Gates could have retired 10 years ago and been fine, why is it such a surprise and/or shock that he’d want to retire now?

    This cover borders on being the People or OK! magazine for computer geeks. I hope there’s some real news in the magazine, but the pharmaceutical RFID and outsourcing articles aren’t really luring me in.

  • Life is an SOA, I wanna ride it, all night long

    Nels W

    soa.jpg

    There are a few, shall we say, paradigms that have taken hold at different times of my life and completely taken over the way I think about the world. The biggest to date was Pipelining – that which a processor does to make it most efficient, and make computer users think that they are actually running all their programs simultaneously. Pipelining and the Critical Path dominated much of my task-oriented way of thinking in college and for a short time thereafter. This was of thinking has recently experienced a resurgence due to a new house requiring new processes to be established (yeah, I’m a frickin’ robot; the scary part is when I actually do think like this when I’m not just thinking about how I think about it; you follow? Good).

    Pipeline.jpg

    The paradigm this time, is the Serice Oriented Architecture. It’s the idea that you can send an input into a service and know the format of the result that will be sent back without worrying about the internals of the service itself. The analogy that was used to make it easy to understand was the basis for my whole line of thinking (and hence, the post you are currently reading): You can walk into a Starbucks, order a Tall Mocha (to keep it simple), and you know what you’re going to get. You don’t have to worry about where the cup is coming from, or where the beans were harvested, or even how to operate the machine that spits out the beverage. You just send the input, and back comes the result.

    Service a: a facility supplying some public demand <telephone service> <bus service> b : a facility providing maintenance and repair <television service>

    So, my train rolls, if Starbucks is a service… then, what isn’t? Great (you’re saying), you deserve a patent and a Nobel Prize for that right there, you revolutionary. I feel your sarcasm. I’m new at this philosophizing thing.

    But here’s where the SOA comes in. There are further ideas behind SOA besides just being able to make and/or use little black boxes. Yes, you can put the little black boxes together to create larger processes that require only minimal input. WordPress is a Service. I haven’t studied all the code behind it, but it’s there and I can type in my words and it produces blog posts. In a more physical sense, and somewhat more fitting for the highway theme, public transportation is a Service. I can get on the Blue Line at Addison and know where I’ll end up if I get off at Monroe. The guys who put together my pool table were essentially a Service. I gave them the parts (after providing the Disassembly Service myself), and they gave me a pool table.

    The best part about The Real World is that UDDI the Yellow Pages works at run time in real life.

    soa_unisys.jpg

    In another bonus, I found out how to use the HTML editor in WordPress 2 (as opposed to the rich text editor). I like to have strong control over what is shown on the page… and it’s nice to not have paragraphs reformatted after I’ve written them. Thank you for that option, WordPress.

    01-StarBucks.jpg