Adjusting to a 40 hour workweek is taking some time. Part of what is challenging is the work is really interesting, so much so that by the time I get home my brain is kind of tired. This means my own code projects are taking a while to make headway on. The good news is with this job I can really leave it at the office. This means, for the first time in over two years really, I can game! PC or console; it’s all good once again.

I’ve been playing a LOT of Age of Wonders lately. It has captured the heart of my beloved Tara and we play for several hours at a time.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/07/closing-the-digital-frontier/8131/

I think the blame, if we want to find someone to blame, (sure!) would rest with designers, and flash ads making pages difficult to navigate. Why did I say designers? Because they want to make pages slicker, cooler, a near artistic experience. We should be focused on what users want, which is content. Right?

People like app-based web experiences because it is laid out in an easy to navigate manner, and low barriers to the information they find relevant. Web sites can and still are, sometimes, designed in a similar manner.

I am going to start designing everything with the expectation that people are reading this with a display less than 320-400 pixels wide. I’m talking single-column design with menu sitting on top and bottom, or menu on the side that goes to the bottom if display isn’t very wide.. I want things to look good primarily on mobile devices, because that is where I feel things are moving. But still doing it from a browser, not an app that only works on specific hardware.

While we’re on the subject, I have this weird idea I want to share. I feel like part of the problem, one reason for moving things to more app-based experiences is because we’re trying to all make web pages that work like applications. But not everything on the web needs to be like applications. Maybe we should separate this into two things. Maybe we should have a Web Browser, and a Web Applicator. Let the browser focus on doing browser things, and the applicator focus on handling all the application-style web experiences.

Maybe I just like the name “Web Applicator”, or maybe I’m just getting weirder.

It is called “Future Terminal”.

What is left to accomplish is widgetization, allowing for images and lists, and then I’ll be showing it to several people I trust to give me some feedback.

Installing Ubuntu 9.10 Server on a virtual machine now, going to get that all configured properly.

I will be training both my design and programming skills. My design project is to design a theme for this blog, in a more serious interpretation of the ‘log entries’ idea. Think Alien(s) (the movies) style of interface. The programming projects are numerous, and I will go into more detail later. The basics are: Drupal extravaganza, some Ruby on Rails or a PHP-based framework, Open-Sourcing Nickelpinch, and a linear calendar app.

This was my thinking, so I set about to use VirtualBox to create a virtual machine, and use that virtual machine as my web development server. It doesn’t take long to figure out on your own, but to save anyone the time, I thought I’d log my findings in the form of a tutorial.

First, you want to make your virtual machine in VirtualBox. I used Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition as my OS. Once it is installed and configured, we can start making the changes to access what your virtual machines apache is hosting.

When you install VirtualBox to your computer, it has a home directory somewhere. In a linux environment, that resides at:

~/.VirtualBox/

The file we need to configure is an xml file with the same name as the virtual machine you created:

~/.VirtualBox/Machines/<vmname>/<vmname>.xml

In the <ExtraData>, we need to add the port forwarding. By this I mean, when you go to localhost:8080 on your browser, it will connect to what your virtual machine is hosting. The commands are very simple.

<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/web/HostPort" value="8080"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/web/GuestPort" value="80"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/web/Protocol" value="TCP"/>

In English, this is saying, “When the host machine looks at port 8080, send it to the virtual machines port 80, and this is using the TCP protocol.” When you point your browser to localhost:8080, it should now show you what your virtual machine is hosting.

I also wanted to easily access the virtual machine, so I added the ability to ssh to it.

<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" value="2222"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" value="22"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" value="TCP"/>

So, when at my console I enter: ssh -l -p 2222 localhost it will ssh to the virtual machine. (A word of caution, be sure to actually install openssh on your virtual machine. Otherwise you will spend dozens of minutes trying to figure out why it isn’t working. At least, I’m sure that could happen to someone.)

And that is it!

Anyway the post is about being Self-Employed or Unemployed, and how to make it.
http://www.kellbot.com/2010/03/staying-awesome-while-youre-unemployed/

You should read it yourself, but one point that really hit me like a meaty punch in the gut was this:

“Either way, you should have something to show for the time you haven’t been rotting away in a cubicle. Make other people jealous of you rather than pity you.”

Holy wow. I always feel like I can be doing more, and some of my projects are taking much longer than I planned. And a lot of that has to do with me, and letting other things get in the way of my goals.

I should get “Make other people jealous of you rather than pity you” on a banner for my office/workspace.

Engaged and living with my wonderful fiance now, still in Berkeley. Our company, cog motive, is very much alive and is now the primary source of my income. Have a meeting tomorrow with Brian Tanaka about collaborating on some, hopefully many projects of a web application nature. As this is my primary passion, I have high hopes.

Nickelpinch is undergoing another database redesign. I learned about many SQL based things over the last several days that renders my current structure woefully at fault. The problem with self teaching yourself things is that some times important elements can be overlooked. In my case it was with unique keys and indexes.

What I didn’t realize is you can set up relational tables in a way that makes certain things automated. When an entry in a parent table is deleted, it can also delete any related entries in ‘child’ tables as well. (Utilizing the ‘ON DELETE CASCADE’ option during child table creation) This ability eliminates almost a 1/4th of my code for Nickelpinch.

So, work on this is going well. I’ve remade many of these functions several times over by now, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get everything up to date with the new structure soon. Also I’m making some minor UI adjustments, to make more sense to the user. Not looking at things for almost a month gave me fresh eyes for this.

Otherwise, working on a new mobile application for Energy Operations Management; an entirely new interface and login system for their realtime SCADA information. It is really exciting to see it come together, and the graphing option really sets it apart in the field.

Well I don’t want to burn out by making a crazy long entry, so this’ll do for now.

As to timland, things are going mostly well. I’m really enjoying living in Berkeley, with my awesome house mates. I’m a big fan of the area as well. I like having part of my day being a walk to the Monterey Market to pick up fresh fruit.

Work wise, cog motive is steadily rising to meet new challenges. We’re getting a real portfolio of work done now. We just need time to put our site together, heh. We are also learning a lot about how long things really take to complete, and getting a feel for appropriate billing. Which is good.

Financially, things are interesting. I’m learning a lot about how I deal with a slightly negative income, which is to say, I don’t deal well with it. Lots of preoccupation. I have planned for this possibility, and savings is a good thing, but obviously the less time this goes on the better. I have a second job thing I’m working on, and I’m pretty confident this will bring me back to a more comfortable, some might even say positive, financial position.

One thing that is not so well is my current reading status. I’ve only read two books in the last three months, which as we all know is highly anomalous. I’m making more of an effort lately. I have two books from the library I plan on reading quickly. I need to at least get to one book a week. Otherwise things just aren’t right.

I’ve been working on nickelpinch.lite, and I like how it is looking. It’s so easy to use and simple now! Almost all the mockups are done, then I can start making the scripts to generate the pages. I used to do it the other way around, and boy was that time consuming.

Okay, not wanting to jinx things but I would like to try to update this once a week. We’ll see..

What the blogging? I know.

In other news, had a big breakthrough on Nickelpinch. Instead of focusing on this mythical interface that I want, and as a result is keeping me from working on it, instead why not make the mobile version first? I’m calling it the lite version, a simple version with the same functionality that I want in the finished product, just not so ‘shiny’. It will work on mobile devices as well as comps identically.

Really though, that’s sort of my calling card. Very simple interfaces for helpful web apps.