Raible Designs

The MacBook Pro's start arriving

David Heinemeier Hansson in MacBook Pro: So fast, oh, so fast:

The MacBook just feels freaking fast.
...
The MacBook Pro simply rocks.

Rob Williams in Eclipse on MacBook Pro:

First off, this machine is very fast. It is like having a G5 laptop. Apple says 4x over the G4. I was kind of skeptical about that. Not anymore.

Mine is due to arrive Friday morning at 10:30. Unlike everyone that compares their new MacBook to their old PowerBook - I'll be comparing mine to my dual core AMD 64 with 3GB of RAM. The MacBook is likely to lose, but it should put things in a more realistic perspective. Especially since I continue to use Windows and OS X an equal amount.

Thursday, 8:30 AM: From Fedex Tracking: 7:50 AM | On FedEx vehicle for delivery | LITTLETON, CO. Sweet! Looks like I'm going to have to ride into work a bit late.

Thursday, 9:30 AM: It's here! I'm heading into work with both machines to build it - so I probably won't have any benchmarks until this afternoon. I forget the initial steps to get the best battery life - anyone got those handy. As Julie said a few minutes ago, "No Wheelies!"

Rough week for Jack

Last week, I flew out to San Francisco on Monday evening to meet with a client. My meeting was on Tuesday, and I spoke with Julie shortly before flying home on Tuesday night. No, she wasn't mad I missed Valentine's Day - we're both aware it's a Hallmark Holiday. She said that Jack had a rough day - going through something like 20 diapers. When I arrived home at midnight, he still wasn't feeling very well.

The next morning, he threw up on me after drinking a bunch of milk. The vomiting continued for 2 more days and got really bad on Thursday. He couldn't even hold down water. Thursday morning, Julie took him to the doctor, and they said it was probably Rotavirus. He'd lost 3 pounds, which is a lot for a guy his size. Thursday afternoon, we noticed he was turning white and was very lethargic.

Julie and her sister (who is a nurse) took Jack to the emergency room Thursday evening. They were planning on waiting a few hours for anyone to see him. Instead, they took him right away and hooked him up to an IV. His glucose level was at 36, which is way below "very bad". He recovered nicely after getting some fluids and was back home by 9:00 p.m.

Today, he's back to his normal self - laughing, crying and bugging his big sister. I heard Rotavirus lasted 7 days, and it appears to be true. Here's a picture we took of Abbie and Jack yesterday - you can tell he's not 100%, eh? ;-)

3 Peat?

It's been great watching DU Hockey that past couple of years. Ever since we moved back to the "ol' neighborhood", we've had season tickets. They've won the last NCAA Title the last two seasons, and they're making a comeback this year.

Abbie and I went to the game tonight, along with a number of other friends (Julie and Jack stayed home - Jack has a respiratory infection). They're definitely looking good. Let's hope they can keep it together through the playoffs. It looks like I'll be watching a lot of hockey next weekend.

With 32 points, the Pioneers are one point ahead of No. 1 Minnesota for first place in the WCHA. Those two teams will face each other in Minneapolis next weekend for a two-game series with puck drop for both Friday and Saturday's games scheduled for 6:07 p.m. MST. [Read more...]

Back from Cancun

We arrived back in Denver after an awesome week in Cancun. There's no real good stories to tell, just lots of fun, laughter and relaxation with family. Below are some pictures from our trip, as well as many others on Flickr.

Right before I left last Saturday, I released AppFuse 1.9, then went to watch the Broncos vs. Patriots at Invesco Field. Today, it's the Steelers. It's pretty cool to come home to a town this excited. Go Broncos!!

Media Center and Skype 2.0

Ever since we got our new HP Pavilion, I've been improving it and my "home office" setup as well. First off, I bought 2GB of RAM to boost it up to 3GB. Then I got a DVI KVM Switch, so I could plug Windows and Linux into the same KVM setup. Installing OpenSuse wasn't too hard, but configuring CUPS and Samba and adding a 2nd drive took a bit of wrestling. The best part, however, has been yesterday and today.

Julie got everyone in our families new webcams for Christmas. For the past week or so, we've been trying to get them to work. I've had an iSight for almost a year, and I've never been able to get it to work when talking with my parents. This time was no different, but we did get the Mac working with Yahoo Messenger. This led to getting Yahoo working on my Windows box, but the sound sucked and the video wasn't that good. I couldn't get any other IM clients to work either. Then I remembered Skype and thought "they must have video by now". Sure 'nuff, when I checked a few days ago, they had Skype 2.0 with video support. It worked great right away and I had a great "talk" with my parents last night.

Tonight, I got my sister hooked up on Skype and we talked for a bit. She's currently having lots of computer issues and Skype crashes (and quits working altogether) after working fine for about a minute. My dad had a few issues with his machine too - mainly due to Skype tacking out his 1GHz/1GB machine. Bottom line: Skype with Video works great if you have a new machine with plenty o' memory.

Lastly, I received a TV Tuner tonight from Amazon - thanks to a JavaLobby gift certificate (thanks guys!) Note that you need a card with "MCE" in the model name if you want it to work with Media Center. I plugged it in, configured it, and now I'm watching Law & Order while typing this. I setup Conan to record every night and life is good. It's a pretty cool setup - now I just need a new dual-core Intel-based PowerBook to get the best of everything.

2005 - A Year in Review

2005 was quite a year for me. I found my dream job, after contemplating what's next in my career only a few months earlier. I attended TheServerSide Symposium in March and created some great memories with James Goodwill. There's nothing like losing all your money and then winning it all back at 6 in the mornin'.

Other March highlights include:

• Geert Bevin saying Laszlo is a waste of time, then rescinded his statement two weeks later.
• Heading to Microsoft for the Competitive Influentials Summit.
• Getting my nuts cut off.

April was a fun month, and started off with a me heading to work for Microsoft. The joke worked so well it was picked up by news.com. DU repeated as NCAA Champions (again). The MySQL Conference and wine-tasting with Julie (for our 5th anniversary) rounded out the month.

May was a whirlwind month, where I headed to Norway after barely renewing my expired passport on time. My PowerBook died on the way over, but I still had a great time. I was featured on TheServerSide and started planning AppFuse 2.0.

The summer flew by: I got biled by Hani, toured with the "Bomb Squad" at JavaOne, drove through Yellowstone, bought a new bike, learned more about Ruby and Rails at OSCON (and learned how much fun a smackdown can be), and watched Jack turn 1.

Then things got busy: I had a great time at Java in Action, started The Bus Project, and enjoyed the beauty of Keystone with Bender and Snyder at the Colorado Software Summit.

To round out the year, I traveled and attended conferences like I was possessed (New Jersey, NFJS, San Francisco and Florida). Abbie turned 3, Roller 2.0 was released and the WebWork joined Struts after a multi-year rivalry.

Phew, it's been quite a year folks. Here's to 2006 being even better! My goals for the year? Happiness, health and more car bombs with family and friends.

Christmas Break

The past week has been great. Not only did I stay off the computer for most of the week, but I had a ton of fun with my Mom, Dad, sister, Julie and the kids. My parents flew in last Tuesday, and that marked the beginning of my Christmas Break. On Wednesday and Thursday, my dad and I pulled the engine on the Bus. Ironically, the first day we couldn't figure out how to get it out, but w/in 5 minutes of consulting How To Keep your Volkswagen Alive, we had the solution. The bus is a bit different from a bug - there's only 3 bolts (instead of 4) and one of them is on the inside of the engine compartment. Daddy's Bus should be ready for the shop sometime in January.

The weekend was awesome - complete with mimosas on Christmas morning while unwrapping presents. Abbie and Jack are at a terribly cute age - and it was a blast to see their eyes light up when opening presents. It was tough to get them to open the next present b/c they were so enthralled with the one they just opened. After all was said and done, Abbie is now riding a "big girl" bike and we have a trampoline in our back yard. That should work out nicely when we get our first surprise snow storm. Fortunately, the weather has been gorgeous (almost 70!) for the past week.

Yesterday was an epic powder-day at Copper Mountain. My sister and I headed up in the morning and skied (she snowboarded) all day in 10" of fresh powder. We're heading up again this weekend for the New Year (Breckenridge this time) and it's supposed to snow in the hills for the next 3 days. Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaa hhhhhhhhhaaaaaaawwww!! Two days at my client this week and then back up to the wonderful pow-pow. Next week, the contract with my client finishes up and I get to return to our office in downtown Denver. I'm pumped because that means I get to start riding my bike to work again. I took it in for a tuneup today and should get it back in a couple days.

2006 is going to be a good year. I get about 2-3 e-mails a week about mentoring and consulting and it looks like I'll be quite busy. I hope to squeeze in some time for Spring Live and AppFuse in January and hope to have AppFuse 1.9 released in the next few weeks. My Dad's 60th birthday is in mid-January, so my family is heading to Cancun for a week. Should be a good time for sure.

Awesome weekend

On Friday night, I skipped out on The Spring Experience's activities and headed out for a night on the town with Julie's Aunt and Uncle, who live in Miami. "Uncle Tim" married us and we had a great time - I even talked him into doing his first Irish Car Bomb. The cab dropped me off at my hotel room at 3:20 a.m.

I slept for 2 hours before getting up at 6:00 a.m. to catch my flight back to Denver. I arrived home safely, played with the kids for a few hours, and then headed to Castle Rock for the Virtuas Christmas Party. They had a "murder mystery" show during the party, and it was very entertaining. We left early (8:30) because our babysitter couldn't stay late.

Sunday: woke up, family breakfast at UPC and picked up a Christmas tree at the local Nursery. We decided to wait a few hours before decorating the tree, so I headed to the garage to work on the Bus. Within 5 minutes, I got a call from a good friend asking if I wanted to join them for the Broncos game. "Hell yes!" I said and 30 minutes later I was sitting in the South Stands. The game kinda sucked, but the Broncos won, and the tickets were free. All in all, quite a weekend.

New Computer - should I keep it?

When I arrived here in Florida on Wednesday, I got a call from Julie saying my Windows Desktop was hosed. When she started it up, she just got a black screen. This is the problem with having a 23" Cinema Display hooked up to a Windows box - you can never see if anything went wrong on startup. I told her she needed to hook up one of my humongous 19" CRT monitors from the basement, and plug it in to see what was wrong. 10 minutes later, she calls me back and tells me the problem: it can't find the hard drive. I walk her though putting in the XP CD and trying to repair the drive, but it doesn't work. I tried to convince her to live w/o e-mail and the internet until I got home, but that didn't fly either.

I got a call from her yesterday afternoon telling me that she'd just bought a computer from Best Buy. I cringed. "Best Buy?", I thought. Knowing my penny-pinching wife, I figured the machine would be a $300 eMachine. However, she sent me a link and I was pleasantly surprised. She bought a HP Pavilion a1250n, which seems to be a dual AMD 64. After further reading, it seems it's a dual-core and not a dual processor. Regardless, I was quite proud that she bought something that I've been thinking of getting. I've used AMD-based machines in the past and they've always seemed much faster than an equivalent Pentium box.

This machine does seem to be a "media center" PC, which is expected when you buy it from Best Buy. But what exactly does that mean? Does it mean it won't make a good development box? We have 14 days to return it, so I'm wondering if I should. I don't really want to buy a new desktop (unless it's a G5), but my 2.6 GHz Dimension 8300 has thrown up quite a few times in the last few months - so I'm probably due. I tried to talk Julie into a G5, but a lot of the software she's using for her new business is Windows-only ... and VirtualPC sucks.

Update: I've decided to keep the box, mainly because my Dell Dimension 8300 is getting old and this one seems much faster. It's unlikely I'll ever have a Mac desktop because we still need and enjoy using Windows for a lot of things. I'd love to, but it just won't fly with the wife - as well as many software vendors out there. To make things a bit speedier, I did buy 4 GB of RAM for the HP today. I'll likely turn my Dell into a Suse box for Subversion, CUPS and Samba.

Sunrise at Bal Harbour

I could get used to starting my day with this view. Don't tell Julie, she's ready to move back here.