Blizzo :: The Morgan Blog

I spoke today at RailsConf regarding the REST related stuff I have been doing at Vonage. RubyForge seemed to have blocked traffic coming from the convention center, so unfortunately I didn’t have everything in shape to share during the presentation. For those of you who are interested, you can find ActiveREST here:

ActiveREST web site (just a placeholder for now)
ActiveREST project page on RubyForge

When I get home I will tweak my presentation a little and post it here, so look for that soon. Thanks to everyone who attended.

So after the morning sessions were finished at RailsConf, there was suddenly a burst of noise from the lobby outside the presentation hall. It… it was a marching band. I couldn’t see them, so I went outside and down to a lower door, but I admit I was not prepared for what I saw. The Extra-Action Marching Band is like an erotic, punk rock marching band. They must have been crashing, because the convention people seemed pretty annoyed with them. There’s really nothing quite like a marching band, especially one that comes with extra action.

Check out the Extra-Action Marching Band website. They are playing at a club tonight, maybe we will go check it out!

The RailsConf 2007 website recently posted the schedule for sessions (My session is at 4:25pm on Saturday). As the RailsConf-bound people at Vonage started talking about what they wanted to see, I thought it would be nice if they had a scheduler application so that you could make your selections. Even more, it would be nice if you had a way to compare those schedules once they are created. Well, why would I wait for them to do it when I can do it myself? Without further ado, I present to you:

RailsConf 2007 Scheduling Application

It was a bit of work getting it going, mostly because I had trouble getting a Rails application running on Dreamhost, and configuring ActionMailer. It seems to be working pretty well now. One thing to note is that I got the data for sessions by scraping the RailsConf scheduling page (liked above). If that page changes, then my application will be out of date. Please contact me if you notice that particular event occurring. Once you create a schedule you will get a key, and then you can compare schedules by entering someone else’s key. It is pretty self explanatory. Take a look and let me know what you think!

Before you read this, I want to toss in a disclaimer that this is only my opinion, not the opinion of Vonage or anyone affiliated, blah blah blah…

Most of you know that I work for Vonage as a web developer. With the amount of attention that Vonage has gotten in the news lately, I thought I would take a moment to clarify a few things. Most of the mainstream media outlets have already pronounced us as dead and moved on. The problem is they don’t really understand the intricacies of patent litigation, and they are too lazy to keep track of what was going on. The Vonage website has a page devoted to explaining how the lawsuits will impact existing customers.

Here is the real deal.
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So yesterday I worked from home because I was feeling icky. I had a very sore throat, ached all over, etc. Today I came into work, even then when I woke up I wasn’t really feeling all that much better. Once I got some food up ins and the ibuprofen kicked in I started to feel better physically but I was still grumpy. Of course the only sane thing to do in that situation is to put on my favorite funk album “Play with Bootsy” by Bootsy Collins. Awwww yeah.

Anyway, all of that isn’t especially noteworthy, but as my mood improved I realized something. Funk is an extremely positive form of expression. Funk doesn’t contain large amounts of profanity or racial slurs, it doesn’t glorify violence, it doesn’t do any of the negative things that so many other genres do. In fact, if anything funk actively promotes love and understanding. They should be blaring Bootsy over loudspeakers in Iraq. Who could possibly want to fight while listening to “Love Gangsta”?

I have been struggling for some time with using a Windows PC for work. While I have no problems with my usual tasks (writing code, graphics stuff, etc) I have had problems running code that assumes a linux environment. I tried switching to Linux a few times (redhat, fedora, ubuntu, gentoo) but it never quite worked. I couldn’t get dual-head monitors working or I couldn’t get Photoshop to run (sorry Gimp, you just don’t cut it for me). Anyway, I managed to get a MacBook Pro (not the new core duo, one generation back) and a copy of Parallels for windows tasks I cant find a way to manage with this machine. I feel better about this attempt than I have my others, a while back I tried to switch to a mac at work but it was too slow, being an older machine. Let’s hope it works this time, and maybe I will be able to switch up my home computer eventually as well!

My friend Becker is working on some code to make commenting available on code documentation where it doesn’t exist presently (I wont ruin the surprise, when it goes live I will update you here). I came up with the name Rocket Doc-it for his application, and designed a logo to go along with it, which you get to see now. This is the benefit of being a Blizzo reader, red-carpet backstage all access passes to obscurity.

So I broke down and bought a tablet. I ended up going with the Wacom Intuos3 4×6. I could have gotten a 6×8 Graphire (the model below) for the same price, but I decided I wanted the higher quality one instead. This is a picture from their website, but its not totally accurate. My draw area is smaller, and mine only has the left set of buttons and controls.

My first test for the tablet was another coloring attempt of an illustration by Owen Giene. This time he dressed up Cecania as Ghostrider, after seeing and enjoying the recent film. Here is the before and after, but this time you can click on my color version for full size. The thumbnail looks pretty bad, so I wanted people to be able to see the full size.

It was a ton of fun to use, and the next day Mason wanted me to draw something from scratch, so I tried my hand at a fish. The sketch is *very* rough, and it will likely take me quite a while to get to a point where anything I draw will be of decent quality, but here he is in all his glory:

When Mason was little he used to beatbox with me all the time, but he grew out of it. I am happy to say that Madeleine has reintroduced the trend!

Lately I have been playing around with colorizing black and white sketches in Photoshop. I don’t have a tablet, yet, which I am told makes a huge difference with this sort of thing, but I have some stuff I think turned out pretty well anyway. Owen Giene, the artist who illustrates the web comic Sore Thumbs, recently did a nice sketch of his Cecania character as Alice of Alice and Wonderland fame on his pay site, Cecania’s Private Party. As this is his work, I will only post thumbnails. If you want to see it in full glory you can pay the measly $2/month to join and help a talented artist pay some bills. Here are the black and white, and colorized versions side by side:

At work today I was doing a mock up for an internal application and I decided it needed some sort of theme/title/etc to use as a reference. I came up with the idea of using a cartoon mole mascot because digging was a good metaphor for the site. I sketched him out using a regular pencil on a piece of printer paper and scanned him in. Once I had him in Photoshop I cleaned the sketch up a bit and colorized him. He isn’t as detailed or as high quality as the Cecania-Alice, but I did it quickly. All in all I think it turned out pretty well. It is the first piece of art I have created with these methods from beginning to end. Anyway, here is the mole, enjoy: