Sarah Left for Holland

The most life changing news is that my fiancée has left for her year long fieldwork in the Netherlands. She will be staying in Enschede, which technically isn’t part of Holland, but saying “The Netherlands” sounds weird. Not having someone sentient around the house on a day-to-day basis is hard, and I think will only get harder as the months go by…

I Moved to San Francisco

Part of the agreement that lead to me relocating to Santa Cruz after law school was that once Sarah finished her course work and no longer needed to be on campus every day, we would get out of dodge! Well, three years have come and gone, and I’m officially out. I now reside in the Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. The weather her is not at all like Santa Cruz, a lot more fog, a lot more cold, and even a lot more rain. It’s very much like Seattle… and while I love Seattle weather, it’s going to take some time to reacclimatizes myself. The apartment was knick-named “Mountain Top” as it rests up a big hill and so I have a great view of the neighborhood.

View from Mountain Top

Getting Involved in the Community

Now that I live alone in this great city, I’m trying to get more involved with the communities that are around me. The first step was to eat everything I could get my hands on and write a review about it so I would remember. It was an expensive hobby there for a while, as Sarah and I ate out nearly every night before her departure, but now I’m down to a much more manageable frequency. I’m also getting to know my neighbors, who all seem like really great people. It’s always nice to know some people in your building.

Next on the list is joining the local technology interest groups. I’ve joined the SF-LUG and the Ruby Meetup Group… we shall see what other organizations present themselves. I also plan to drop in on the local game shop’s board game night… because one can never play too many board games. The final piece is to find some volunteer/political activities in which to get involved. Still need to investigate what’s out there, but my guess is one need simply express some interest.

LegSim Resurgence

This past summer I’ve been working on a new version of LegSim written on Rails. We have a beta class running right now at the University of Washington and it seems to be going pretty well. The trick is that a lot of the features aren’t done yet, so it’s sort of a constant race against the clock to get a feature deployed before the students need it to complete an assignment. But that’s the sort of pressure I need to get me really motivated, so it’s all for the good. There’s some other really exciting things going on with LegSim right now that I hope to post about in the coming weeks.

Changes in the Workplace

Leaving Santa Cruz meant leaving my cool downtown office… which was sad, as I really liked the ladies who worked there and the space was great. Now I am once again confined to my apartment and the local coffee shops, but I’m not too worried. The much bigger change is that our company’s Lead Developer decided to peruse other opportunities earlier this month. What that means for me is I am now listed as the “Project Manager” of our big new Content Management System. I actually hope to blog a little about that in the coming weeks as well, as there are some really cool technical problems to overcome with that project and I hope to share some earned wisdom.

I think that about covers the main highlights. With luck there will be more regular — and shorter — posts in the future.

I am presently in the think of redeveloping LegSim, but in a way I would never have contemplated even six months ago. The current version of LegSim (v4.1) is what’s known as a CGI application, which means each and every time you ask LegSim to do something, it loads the whole program, executes, and then unloads. Sort of like if you had fire up your email client every time you wanted to send a single email. This is silly and making it better is, as David would say, “a solved problem.” And indeed, there are all manner of pre-existing web development frameworks that could be made to do what I want to do (Ruby On Rails, CakePHP, Zope… just to one from each of the big languages). Thing is, I like Perl… and at the risk of sounding like a language snob (not the Sarah kind of language snob mind you), I would like to stick with Perl, the original Perl language.

Of course, there are frameworks in Perl… like Catalyst, which actually got it start at the University of Washington back when I was an undergraduate. But, bottom line, I don’t want to have to learn someone else system and I don’t want to have to fight when it tries to tell me how things ought to be done. I would just use Rails if I wanted that experience. So, I’m writing my own. Which is exciting, I’ve enjoyed it so far. Done right, I can use the framework not just for LegSim, but for other projects I might want to take on. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Faithful readers, I turn to you to ask a simple question… what should I call this thing? My first thought was to name it after the first Speaker of the House of Representatives… but that turned out to be Frederick Muhlenber, and I’m not naming my framework after no Muhlenber. We are working on a CMS system built on top of Rails at work, which is codenamed Pericles (a name my boss will likely change). I like Pericles, having come up with it myself, but I’m not sure if I want to reuse the name.

The current leader in this contest is Astraea, the daughter of Zeus and Themis who would eventually ascend into the heavens and become Virgo. She’s also the Goddess of Justice, with the scales and stuff. While I like the sound, I’m not thrilled with the mythos. I’m looking for something more “governmenty” than justice (hence my initial interest in Pericles). Anyone have suggestions… needs to be a cool sounding word, cannot be in common use (to avoid confusion), and has some sort of tie in with government.

Drop me a line via email or a comment if you have any good ideas.

p.s. If anyone recommends Perl on Rails, I will ban you forever.

Updated – 6/11/2008

A friend wrote to suggest Solon, one of the fathers of Athenian democracy. The wikipedia page makes him sound like a pretty cool guy. But while reviewing the background I learned Solon eventually became an Archon of Athens, which was a sort of executive position within the Greek governmental system, both during it’s tyrannical and democratic days. But here’s the really cool part… the years in which no Archon was appointed where known as anarchy, meaning, literally, “no Archon.” How cool is that?!

So, bonus points for Solon, but at the moment, the top choice is Archon.

It’s true, sending passwords over the public lines in clear text is asking for trouble. But that doesn’t mean that the little lock is the only way to do it. In fact, that little lock costs a lot of money for websites to purchase (and repurchase, on an annual basis). But there are alternatives that are just as good. LegSim uses such a system, relying on basic cryptography and some intelligence. Just because a site doesn’t chose to buy into the SSL certificate racket doesn’t mean it can’t be trusted.

Essentially, the system ranks each member of the House and Senate using objective factors to determine power within their respective chamber. Once you know each score you can do all sorts of cool things… like find out who is most/least powerful within a particular state delegation. Check your your elected representative and see just how powerful you are in Congress.