innerPlace

Try something new, or don’t RunOnRails

The coffee machine at work has 15 different variants of coffee-chocolate-milk. I always select cappuccino. I have only tried 4 variants (black coffee, chocolate cream, cappuccino and cafe o’lait). Why? I don’t know, I always drink this and it taste rather good - wait a minute, what if Wiener coffee is great? And I have never tried it?

In fact I drive the same way to work every day, eat the same breakfast, check the same websites for news, eat lunch - at the same time - at a five different places. I can go on but it gets to depressing. It feels like my life runs on rails (sorry for the resemblance to a popular web framework, I could not help it ).

One great way to be creative is to try new things, I once read about a guy who always drove a different way to work each morning, after a while he had to drive back ways on one-way streets. That is creative.

The power of external motivation

I think I’ve always had a problem with discipline; I stick to the comfort zone if I can. In the same time I have high goals and expectations. Obviously this leads to conflicts, and I’ve come to realize that unless I have an external factor I will never fall though and get things done.

My car has had an electric problem all summer, when I press the left turn signal the brake light and the fog light also flashes. Next week is the annual check up so unless I fix the problem the car will fail the test. It turned out to be a grounding problem in a connector; I found the fault after 30 minutes. Point is that unless the car was scheduled for inspection I wouldn’t have fixed it.

The house needs new paint (now!) but it is so boring. But winter is coming so unless I get started I will not make it. Finally I got the front side painted, thanks to the approaching winter.

I have wanted to start writing and be more creative for a long time. I’ve read lots of books about the subject, but never actually got started. The fix was to start a blog because a blog needs to be updated regularly otherwise there is no point. So now I must write something several times per week - a huge step forward. If I stop writing the blog dies and the whole effort was for nothing - and that would be a painful failure.

So, I have come to believe that with lots of external motivation my getting-things-done-factor will greatly improve. Now I just need to find ways to apply this to more occasions…

Ipod Touch - now we’re talking…

The new Ipod Touch look very nice. Ipod with touch screen and wi-fi, it can’t go wrong. The storage, 8 or 16Gb, is not overwhelming but I guess they what to use flash memory to make it thinner and increase battery life. The 3.5″ screen looks very nice, if resolution is at least VGA (640×480) I will buy it right away! Nokia N800 apears to a similar device with wi-fi and 800×480 screen, but not as cool as the Ipod.

Is C programming on the point of extinction?

According to Computer World knowledge in C programming is less relevant as “the Web takes over” and C programmers are likely to be unemployed soon.

Ehh, my main knowledge is C-programming, I have minor skills in C++ and know close to nothing about Java. Do I feel afraid of being out of work? No way, its years since I had so much to do. Recently, my manager tried to get an extra consultant to ease the pressure but got no replies from the consultant companies - no trained C programmers were free at the moment…

Fact is that software engieers specialised in C development for embedded devices are more needed than ever and in my opinion that is not going to change for the next 5 to 10 years.

We recently tried to introduce C++ in small scale but it was met by solid resistance. The automotive industry is extremly conservative and for a good reason. Even when using the latest Freescale automotive PowerPC’s clock cycle is limited to 132 MHz and RAM is usually less than 256 kBytes including external chip since larger external SRAM is to expensive and difficult to find in automotive spec.

So there is no way Java or something similar comes over the bridge…

How hard can it be to make an electric car?

I have 36 kilometers to my work (=22miles), that means that I normally drives 72 kilometers every day. If I feel wild n’ crazy I drive to a restaurang at lunch, but thats it. Where I work, none have a longer way to work than me - and almost everyone drive their own car. So?

My point is that for a large population of comuters a car that can drive 100 km (62 miles) on one charge is enough. Place for one passenger is a must, but most people drive alone anyway.

I used to belive that this was not possible because of weak battery life but after watching the documentary about General Motors EV1 I now know that is not the case. It is possible to make such a car but the car companies don’t want that.

Why? Because:

1. Oil companies make money selling oil - electric cars don’t use oil
2. Car makers earn (lots of) money on spare parts - electric cars don’t need oil changes

Instead of making electric cars the car companies invest heavily in hydrogene power - a technology that are years into the future before realisation. So what shall I do to get an electric car - I guess the easiest way is to buy a suitable (old) car, throw out the engine and install bateries and an electric motor. How hard can it be?

InstantPhp

As InstantRails runs both Apache and MySql, and have setup php for the phpMyAdmin interface, it is a very easy way to test run php-projects. E.g. to test WordPress or Serendipity only download and unpack in the www-directory. Then you get InstantPhp without having to install anything…

Early riser - at the weekends

One good thing with dogs is that they need to go out in the morning - even if it is Saturday. So today I got up and out in the cold at 7.15. After walking the dogs my mind is enough up in revs to realise that going back to bed is not a good idea.

So if you have problems with getting up from bed at weekends go and get a dog! Small children also work!

Faster than RubyOnRails

After watching the now famous video by the creator of RubyOnRails, David Heinemeier Hansson, I started using Ruby. Since then Ruby has become as my prefered scripting language because of its intutive sematics (but still use Python a lot).

RubyOnRails is very fast to setup - escpecially using InstantRails - and generating a skeleton to a blog is also quick, but to write a complete blog software will take me several weeks. Instead I downloaded Wordpress and got a blog running instantly. That is fast…

Note: My other non-blog projects still use RubyOnRails because I like the model-viewer-controller concept, but it’s more difficult to find a good and cheap web-host. When using ‘localhost’ is not enough for my test-projects I want a small cheap account to see if the project works.

Early riser…

I’m using the method suggested by Steve Pavlina to get out of bed in the morning, it works great on me. I sleep very light in the morning so I easily wake up. But the main thing that gets me going is my wife - she gets really mad unless I turn of the alarm real quick.

Now the only problem is that going to bed is not as easy… I want to sleep a minimum of 6 hours so if I don’t go to bed before midnight, then I don’t set the alarm until 6 am anyway - and I want to be at work at 6.30. The solution is to set the alarm at 5.30 and not to change it - no matter what…

How I went to buy a pda and ended up with a notebook

Last week I got desparate at having all todo things on tiny Post-It notes and went to buy a pda/phoone. I was looking at Sony Ericsson P1i with its nice pda capabillites and WLAN. But the screen resolution was not as good as some larger pda’s and I already have a Sony-Ericsson mobile phone. Then I thought there must be reason why market for pda’s are gooing down all the time. Sure, Blackberries and phones like Sony-Ericsson P1 has taken some potential customers, and also gps enabled devices like a Garmin iQue. But I think a part of the real reason is that it feels better to write on paper.

Later on that day a went to a bookstore and bought a nice calender with a rubber band to hold it together. It is not high-tech but the paper feeling spells q-u-a-l-i-t-y. When I came home I did a google search for my calender mark ‘Moleskine‘ to see what else they produce and to my surprise found lots of pages with ‘Moleskine hacks’, i.e. how to find the optimal way to write stuff into your notebook. A new world opened in front of me (okey, that was an exagoration). It’s kind of nerdish, but it’s fun.

Next day I went back to the bookstore and bought small notebook (Moleskine Small Plain Notebook) to hack and second larger notebook (Moleskine Reporter) for drawings, mindmaps and stuff. Together with my black, blue and red Pilot G2 gel pens they make an exellent way to capture ideés. When they come that is. Which is another problem, I’ll come back to that.