Raible Designs

August Status after two weeks

It's been almost 2 weeks since I set out to make this a month to remember. My progress so far? I'm behind. I put in 60 hours in front of the computer last week and 70 this week. Here's the break down of where I spent my time:

• Current Client: 80 hours
• Raible Designs: 27 hours
• AppFuse: 7 hours
• Spring Live: 16 hours

You can see where the problem lies - in the time spent on Raible Designs stuff. This time was mostly due to fiddling with the new monitor and 17 hours on Monday trying to get Radeon DVI cards working on Linux. I guess I like thumping my head against the wall. The time I spent on Spring Live was doing editing for Chapter 6 and coding for Chapter 7. I was hoping to have Chapter 7 done by today, but that's not gonna happen - so I'll be working tomorrow and taking off Monday to try and it finish up.

My original goals for this month were to finish Spring Live and release AppFuse 1.6. For Spring Live, I still have to write 2 more Chapters after Chapter 7. That's 1 chapter next week and 1 chapter the week after. Yeah right. Chapter 6 took me the entire month of July and Chapter 7 has already taken me 2 weeks. I'm still hopeful I can come close to pulling it off. The problem is that I never account for editing - and that seems to take a few hours per week once I've turned a chapter in. Worst case, Spring Live 1.0 will be released in late September. This might happen anyways since the editing for the ERP took 3 weeks and I'd like to fix all the issues found in the first 5 chapters. Fixing issues will probably take a day since I need to setup JIRA, enter all the issues, and then proceed to make sure they're fixed.

As for AppFuse 1.6, I think the WebWork integration should only take a couple of days. But that's 2 solid days. The other big issues involve a lot of XDoclet hacking and modifying, so that's probably another day there. Give it another day for various other bugs and one more for documentation updates/tutorial writing - and I'm up to 5 days. Yet this is still possible too. My current contract is scheduled to end when the baby is born, but I think I'm going to end it on Friday, August 27th. This gives me the next week to work on AppFuse - if the baby doesn't come. The baby is due on Friday, September 3rd.

The interesting thing about this week over the last was it was a coding week for Spring Live. When I write code, I prefer to have no deadlines - so I do it at night. If I did it in the morning, I'd have to quit coding around 8 and start my day job. By doing it at night, I'm pretty much giving myself the whole night to get stuff done. I've gone to bed b/w 3 and 4 every night this week. My problem is that I then sleep in until 9 or so. When I write, I find it's easier to get up in the morning, with a clear head and go to it. It's going to be tough making the transition from going to bed at 4 to getting up at 4. The good news is that I'm not just letting my body go to shit like like last time, I've actually been exercising. I feel great, but my fingers are starting to cramp from typing so much.

NOTE: If Julie goes into labor anytime in the next 3 weeks, all bets are off.

This site crashes a lot

It's plagued me before, and now it's back again. When I go to sleep at night, this site crashes. I've been up until 4 lately and it still seems to wait until I fall asleep. In fact, my 500 page is my top referrer this month. That's not good. The problem is probably not Roller - since JRoller seems to stay up and humming. Although it does die, I do have somewhere around 30 open database connections.

The truth is I need to run a profiler and figure out what's wrong. Unfortunately, I don't have the time and it doesn't really bother me that much. I just end up with a whole bunch of "your site is down" e-mails every morning when I wake up. Hopefully I can fix it soon. I've been telling people I'll have more time when the baby comes. They think I'm kidding - but I think it's true. My job will be handling Abbie while Julie nurtures the new baby. Abbie sleeps 12 hours at night, and 2-3 hours in the afternoon. I sleep 4-5 hours a night. That's a lot of time to get stuff done.

Quote of the Day

Julie: I wish I'd go into labor today so I'd quit having to deal with this house crap.
Me: Yeah, that would work out for me too, I could use a break.

In Training

Abbie will be fetching beers for Daddy before long!

A new experience with Word

I just opened up Microsoft Word for the first time on XP with the 23". It showes two pages side-by-side. Page size? 100% Now that's cool! This didn't happen on OS X. This will definitely make writing and reviewing a lot easier.

Frustrating day with Linux

I can tell I've been getting a little burned out the last few days. I think it had a lot to do with our builder's death last week. I came to realize that working my ass off just doesn't have that many rewards. For most of the weekends this summer, I've been getting up at 4 and working for a few hours until Julie and Abbie get up. Then I do it again on Monday morning. This weekend I didn't get up before 9. And today I slept until 8 - even though I had planned to get up at 4. To make matters worse, rather than putting in hours for my client today, I spent the entire day wrestling with Linux.

I really wanted to get my new Cinema Display working with Suse and Fedora. I'm almost to the conclusion that it "ain't gonna happen". This sucks b/c now I have to leave one of my huge-n-heavy CRT monitors on my desk. Days like today, where I banged my head against the wall all day, are quite discouraging. My office is in turmoil - with open boxes all over the floor, monitors strewn about and video cards piling up on my desk. Some days are better than others. Hopefully my frustrations from today will turn into some type of writing zone later this week.

Update: I finally gave up and hooked my two Linux boxes up to my old KVM switch and a crappy ol' keyboard/mouse that I had lying around. Then I was planning on hooking my PowerBook and XP box up to my new DVI KVM switch. Wouldn't you know it - it doesn't fricken work. The connector on the cinema display is too fat to even plug into the KVM switch. My guess is that no one is using these displays with a KVM or maybe there's a special switch I have to get. Oh well, I guess I can manually switch the monitor b/w OS X and XP if I really need to.

RE: Friday People

Russ makes a good point. I used to be the kind of guy that would wake up on Friday's and love it. Friday was a great day to go to work. I rode my bike in, coded for a couple of hours, and then the whole team went out to "Friday Lunch" - where lots of laughs were shared and good beer was consumed. Now, I wake up and think, "Shit, it's Friday - I'm gonna have to work this weekend to get XXX done." Sometimes I wish I was a 9-5er again...

Rock Bottom Brewery

This evening, I met up with Dion, Christian and Bruce at the Rock Bottom Brewery. Topics discussed: OSCON, JavaOne, WebSphere, AOP, JBoss, Geronimo, Spring, Struts, SourceBeat, OpenLogic, TSS, ThoughtWorks, Ant, Maven, Digital Globe (of course), staying up late, getting up early and writing. Good stuff - thanks gents.

Gloomy Denver Morning

Today was a morning like most. I got up early and was working away. I had to watch Abbie for a couple hours while Julie took her Mom to the airport - but other than that, it was pretty normal. Then it all changed.

At about 10:20 this morning (under an hour ago), Julie rushed into my office to tell me that Bob the Builder had a stroke next door. I ran over there to see if I could help - and there he was - sitting in his Bobcat, unconscious. One of his workers was giving him CPR, but he apparently hadn't been breathing for a few minutes. The ambulance showed up a few minutes after and hauled him away about 10 minutes later. He still wasn't breathing and had no pulse. I hope he's OK.

Update: Bob passed away this morning at Porter Hospital. He will be missed.

August is gonna be a rough one

I've got a lot on my plate for August. Probably too much, but I'm going to make a run at it anyway. In addition to my 40-hour per-week contract, I'm going to try and finish off 1.0 of Spring Live and release the next version of AppFuse. Julie and I were talking last week and I estimated that I'd need about 100 hours outside of "work" to accomplish both of these tasks. That's 65 hour weeks, or 12.5 hour days. Yech...

I'm off to a bad start today since I was twidding with my monitor most of the day and only billed 4 hours to my client. Tonight I got a couple hours in on AppFuse, but only minor bug fixes - no major features. It's gonna be rough - if I seem short or don't post much you'll know why. If I did it right, I'd get up at 4 every day and be I'd have my time in + exercise by 6 p.m. every night.

We'll see how it goes - the baby is due September 3rd (a.k.a. Labor Day Weekend) and I'd like to be done with Spring Live 1.0 and AppFuse 1.6 before the little guy/girl comes out. I told Julie if she had it two weeks late it would work out awful nice for me!