I’ve wanted a way to record cell phone conversations for *years*.  With the proliferation of smart phones, you’d think we’d have this by now, but it’s still not a feature widely available (and, reportedly, blocked by some device manufacturers).  So, to scratch my own initial itch, I’ve put together a service to allow me to [...]

Posted in Business, Development, Ideas, Software, Testing, Tools, Web 2 Comments »

I’ve been hearding a lot about the upcoming Palm Pre smartphone.  I’m so on the fence about getting one.  I almost got an iPhone two years ago as well (stood in line on the first day but chickened out).  I *hate* dealing with cell phone companies - making switches, signing ridiculously one-sided contracts to get [...]

Posted in Development 6 Comments »

Productivity has been one of those issues for me over the years that always seemed elusive.  This isn’t to say I never get anything done, but I always feel I could be doing better.  As some of my elementary school teachers used to write on my report card “Could do better”.   That always stung, because [...]

Posted in Business, Development, Personal 7 Comments »

I had no idea how to describe Twilio, so “phone app proxy service” was the best I could come up with. It’s probably nowhere close, so let me explain what Twilio does.
Register for a Twilio account, and you’ll get a phone number. People calling in to your phone number will trigger Twilio’s server [...]

Posted in Development, Software, Speech, Web 4 Comments »

Talking with my friend Shawn Hartsock the other day, and we got to talking about the state of software, and some of the history of software development.  He’s a big nerd on this subject, and considers ‘computing’ to go back hundreds (or thousands!) of years.  Yes, one can make that argument, but I when I [...]

Posted in Development, PHP, Society, Software, Web No Comments »

So having recently launched a magazine on the Groovy language, I decided to check out the TIOBE index and see where Groovy sits.  Not terribly high (#41) but not too bad for a relatively new language.  Certainly higher than many others with much longer pedigrees.  The TIOBE index also has a couple other interesting notes:

The [...]

Posted in Development, Grails, Groovy, Java, Software 3 Comments »

I’ve putzed around with it before, went through some example code, etc., but yesterday picked up the “Programming Erlang” book from Pragmatic Programmers.  Might still return it if its too dense, but doesn’t seem to be so far.
The biggest takeaway I have is that Erlang is good for concurrent programming because of it’s ’shared nothing’ [...]

Posted in Development, PHP 7 Comments »

I was looking at hosting provider mosso.com this morning.  No particular reason - just saw an ad and clicked on it to poke around.  The pricing seemed reasonable, but because mosso is a ‘cloud computing’ sort of provider, I dug a bit further.  You’re charge $100/month for “10,000 compute cycles”.  Seemed a bit nebulous, so [...]

Posted in Development, PHP, Software, Web 4 Comments »

What?  Another URL redirection service?  What’s the point?  Well, there’s a couple of points.
1) I hadn’t done one yet, and it looked like a simple yet difficult enough challenge to get me thinking about coding again.
2) I didn’t see anything that offered usage statistics.  I tried one that claimed to offer them, but it appeared [...]

Posted in Development, PHP, Software, Web 11 Comments »

I have to admit, I’ve never been in to ColdFusion.  I used it on a couple small projects back in the early 2000s (was just brought in to finish/fix existing code), but never really dug it.  Not that it was *bad*, but the early versions really smacked of watered-down development.  Everything’s a “tag”, so it’s [...]

Posted in Development, Java, Software, Web 2 Comments »