Last Day of July

Too busy lately. Kids about to start college. Have we started summer yet? It's been a strange month. But oddly enough, we've been relaxed and happy despite the busy-ness. And there's time to squeeze in a few rounds of golf now and again.

But, hey: we finally got iPhones. And all my music and pictures fit in 20G. I am carrying them all in my pocket, at least for now. :-)

Toll Free Bridging

http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2006/09/09/bridge/ -- way cool article about "toll free bridging" -- the mechanism used to make CFString look like NSString on Mac OSX.... -- thanks to Rob Fahrni for the pointer

Reading List

Also on the must read list: anything by Seth Godin. Purple Cow. Permission Marketing. Not that I've read them yet, but they are on the must read list. So someday.

iPhone App Contest

Contest to develop an iPhone/iPod app for middle school math learning:

http://www.lwbva.org/applications.cfm

Enter by June 19th...

Vacation Photos

Last September, we took an awesome vacation in the beautiful land of Scotland. Then, later on, I finally went through all the photos and uploaded the best of them to a web album... For those of you we've talked to recently and promised to send you a link to them, here they are:

http://picasaweb.google.com/dlrdave/BestOfScotland

Enjoy!

Frackle: It's Here!

It's here!

Frackle: The simplest fractal explorer on the planet. Now available as Frackle, in the iTunes app store. (Click this link directly, which launches iTunes, or search for Frackle by DLR softWare LLC in the app store...)

Frackle documentation online here:
http://www.dlrsoftware.com/Frackle/iPhone

Check it out. Buy it. Put it on your iPhone or your iPod Touch.

Let me know how you like it. Or if you have a brilliant idea to improve Frackle.

I'm thinking maybe a blog entry a week featuring a cool fractal image straight from Frackle would be a neat way to show it off... Maybe I'll do that.


Take it easy,
David

Get a Job

So I read this book in the fall of 2008. "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss. You may want to read it, you may not. It'll only take a few hours at most. You might believe some of what he says, you might be skeptical. The concept is simple: stop spending so much time making a living and create something that produces income for you without as much effort as a "real job." If you could do that, you could spend your time pursuing what you want to pursue, and forget about going to work all the time. Stop making a living and make a life instead...

He recommends going on an information diet: consume less of the daily internet headlines, blogs, books, magazines, newspapers, tv, radio... And do stuff instead. Be more productive. Make more time for yourself by taking charge of your day each and every day. Ignore the unimportant.

But then he has four must read "other book" recommendations near the end of his book. Someday I'm going to read all of these, too:

• The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz


• How to Make Millions with Your Ideas by Dan S. Kennedy


• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber


• Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

(Big long subtitles of all five of these books omitted in all cases to save me time typing this...)

Maybe I'll come back later and put in links to these books on amazon. Or maybe I won't.


;-)
David

Mono .NET and Interop

Excellent article on interop and .NET libraries on the mono web site:

http://www.mono-project.com/Interop_with_Native_Libraries

Coming soon...

Frackle: The simplest fractal explorer on the planet. For iPhone.

Documentation is online now:


        http://www.dlrsoftware.com

        


(which, for now, immediately redirects to http://www.dlrsoftware.com/Frackle and then to http://www.dlrsoftware.com/Frackle/iPhone)

Deep in the text of this posting is how to find the file "com.apple.dock.iconcache" using Spotlight on a Mac:

http://weblog.commandlinejunkie.com/articles/2008/12/20/changing-os-x-finder-icon-in-the-dock

Whew! Not sure why that file has to be quite so hidden, but there you go.

To framework or not?

Good (but long) article from a guy who seems to know what he's talking about...
http://www.wilshipley.com/blog/2005/11/frameworks-are-teh-suck-err.html

So the weekend after my last post, Nate and I went to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

It's a very cool place... at least, Nate and I thought so. The Beatles, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Aerosmith, U2, The Police... and on and on. If you're a rock and roll fan, there is something here that will thrill you or inspire you.

Cleveland is actually a very clean city, and for some reason, much nicer than I expected. The cashier dude at the Rock Hall store recommended eating dinner at a place up the street called Fat Fish Blue, and boy was it good. All kinds of southern style stuff way up north here on the shore of Lake Erie.

Check 'em out next time you're in Cleveland...


View Larger Map

So... we quietly launched a new product yesterday from Kitware Headquarters in Clifton Park, NY. It's called "ActiViz .NET" and it lets C# and VB. NET developers simply *use* VTK, the Visualization Toolkit, without all the hassle of downloading it, building it, having to understand CMake and C++, figuring out how that .NET interop stuff works ... all just to get a simple 3D graphic of your complicated scientific data up on the screen.

Suddenly it's easy again.

Check it out:
http://www.kitware.com/ActiViz


Unleash the Power of VTK on the .NET Framework!
Limitless functionality. Infinite possibilities.


Build something cool with it and send me a screenshot.

Cheers!

All right, so maybe some of my family members do not see photos included in emails... May as well just write it / post photos here because it is simply more reliable. Freakin' computers! Who writes the software for this stuff anyhow? It goes something like this:

The Trim: Before & After (aka "I was an East Coast Fahrni up until last Saturday")

Perhaps you've heard the rumor, perhaps not. I've got the photos to verify it, though... :-)



Me and five other ponytail donators are making a wig for some woman who's lost her hair to cancer treatments... via the Pantene Beautiful Lengths program.

So now I'm the coolest I've ever been.

Hairless Summer, dead ahead!

Wow. Yet another chain of "accidental" connectedness. I read an article on video game complexity just now on a whim, enjoyed it, found it interesting and then followed a link to the author's blog, where the most recent two articles also turned out to be extremely interesting... If you're a geek like me, or are interested in why humans make the choices they make, or have any musical inklings at all, check these out:

The Science of Interrogation

Musicians suppress self-monitoring functions of the brain while improvising...

A little bit of improv might be just the thing each of us needs to reset for another round in the real world.

This one is just a draft of stuff to write about eventually:

- no fault job loss? big deal, just get a new job
- your fault? do something to change yourself, learn new behavior, and still: get a new job

- my experience when my company went out of business and got acquired...

Funny the way the universe is put together...

I have been thinking for weeks now that I have to go read what Mr. Fahrni's been up to lately. I don't think I've read his blog in a year. (Shame on me. He's far too prolific to ignore for that long...)

So I go to read his blog for the day, and it happens to be Thursday, a.k.a. "movie line of the week" day, and it's a really easy line. And I'm there like minutes after he's published it. So I send in my guess, and then I keep reading.

Lo and behold, he was actually writing about me (what!!??) and folks we worked with back in the Visio days. Thanks for the kudos, Rob -- same back atcha -- Visio would not be what it is today without the Fahrni influence. And then, to top it off, I actually won the movie line. It's been a while, but it's always cool to win it without having to google. :-)

On another note, I now have 100 connections via my presence on the LinkedIn website. Curiously, I do not seem to know anybody whose last name begins with any of the letters QUVXY. Send me a note if you're not already LinkedIn, especially if you are one of these QUVXY types: I'd be happy to invite you. It's a great way to stay in touch with folks from previous jobs, schools, lives.


Stay tuned!!

Dad's Advice

Back on April 17, my Dad's birthday, I sent email to my brother and sisters, asking them what was the best advice Dad ever gave them? I told them I would put it all together and post it on my blog as a sort of birthday present for Dad. Well, of course, it took a couple weeks to hear back from everybody..., then it was on the back burner for a bit..., then the timing didn't seem quite right when Grandma died in late May..., then I didn't have time to get it done by Father's day... on and on and here we are in late August and Dad's in the hospital from a heart attack and none of us quite knows what to expect.

We all love you, Dad and are rooting for you to pull through this and hang out with us a while longer. I want you to know that I love you and I appreciate your passion, your smile, your laughter, your music and your love. For me, the good outweighs the bad in the end, and I'm glad you are my Dad.

And now, here's what your kids have to say:

The best advice Dad ever gave me was...

When the side of the beer can says not to operate machinery, that includes snowblowers.

When it gets cold in the house, put a sweater on.

When there's not much to eat in the house, peanut butter and onion sandwiches taste like filet mignon.

Plaid flannel and wool socks are good any season.

It's always noon somewhere.

Unconditional love.

Leave the campsite (and the world) in better condition than you found it.

Don't pee into the wind.

Don't talk with your mouth full. (This story is famous, I think Dad tells and retells it...)

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose...

...and:

I know it's not advice, but teaching me to fish was probably the best thing that Dad has given me. (That, and a roof over my head for the first 22 years of my life!) Actually, almost anything outdoors that I like to do I can thank the old man for. I appreciate the fact he took the time to teach me to enjoy nature instead of plopping me in front of a television w/ an Atari joystick! Love ya pop!

We all love you, Dad. Get better, ok?

Word for the week: parhelion (also known as a sun dog). The photo on the left is not one, but it is a "sun pillar" or "sun column." Robin and I saw it this morning on our walk. I took the picture from our driveway. I don't remember ever even hearing of this phenomenon until this past year. And now this is the second one that I've seen in the last month in real life... Just one of those things.

Seeing that shaft of light reminded me of parhelion, which I looked up last year after getting the Rosanne Raneri CD of the same name. Rosanne is a friend of ours from high school and she's a fabulous musician who plays various gigs around the Albany area. In fact you can see her at Sage college this Thursday for a live lunch!

Speaking of live music, come out on Saturday night to Northern Lights in Clifton Park to hear HourGlass and the fretboard frenetics of another musician friend, Scott Cunningham. They're a local rock band just starting out and they play/sing some pretty cool original stuff. Check them out...

Tuesday seems to be the day of the week for blogging. Work through the weekend a few times... suddenly Tuesday is the new Saturday! Ack!

Take it easy...

Discipline. Definition #2, please... Word for the day. If I had as much of it as I wanted, I would have posted this on Saturday... :-)

I admire my sweetie, who is disciplined and faithful, exercising and walking the dogs before work every day. You go, girl! I'm trying to be disciplined enough myself to get to work early every day. Log those hours even when I have to leave early to help out at home.

The ice storm presented us with several power related challenges yesterday. We drove through the dark neighborhood to the lights on the other side of the hill and brought home some Chinese food to eat by candlelight... But as we were sitting down to dig in, the lights came back on! Fortune: "Choose vegetable delight and you will be rewarded."

Peace out, dogs.