A Person, Artist, Software Engineer, Geologist.

I've been going thought a learning phase this year.  There have been so many new (at least to me) tools and products that finding time to research them and deciding if should spend my precious time on using them is a challenge. What I'm looking at now.... iBook Author.  I'm currently (slowly) working on an eBook project and I'm using Pages as my writing tool because 1) I already have it and know it and 2) it can export directly to the ePub format. Now Apple comes along and creates their TextBook format along with the iBook Author tool which uses their own extensions.  The draw for me is the media inclusion in the book of dynamic content.  The map images, photos and videos are simple and know content types.  What caught my eye was the HTML content is in the form of DashCode apps / widgets.  This had led me down a different trail of finding out more about DashCode as it's dual use for iBook 2 and Safari mobile apps.  I always like it when I can double my use for

Happiness comes from within.  When creating software for a living there are many times that I would rather be coding in a different language, designing a different app or at home with my slippers on an a Hot cocoa when working on my computer.  But most of the time I'm not.  I get paid for creating programs that others need, in the language that the project requires and in a place that is not my home. So how can I stay happy?  Well, first I get paid, but more than that, they appreciate what I can provide for them and this provides me with much happiness.  This takes me a long way, but not all the way all of the time. I need variety, new knowledge and something I can call my own.  For software developers, our applications, our code has a limited lifespan.  Sometimes we will work on a project and it's never used.  We will have worked on a project for months or even a year and it's thrown away.   Other times our code lives for a few years, to be replaced when needs change o

Just got back from a trip to the northern California Coast area, Guerneville to be exact, and ran into some folk art (on purpose) by the artist of Partick Amiot in Sebastopal.  This is one of his pieces on the right.  Very cool to see out in a yard.  I then ran into another piece of somewhat practical (unintentional) folk art on a walk (see below).  What a hoot to see something that was created for a practical purpose (lighting and holding up the mail box), but could also be placed as folk art.  This made my day.  I was just imagining what the owner was thinking when they put this together. Seeing this I of course got thinking if this somehow equates to software and it's development. OK, lets compare the creation of folk art and software. If you have two different software groups create an application with only vague design or requirements, how different would the resulting applications be? How much of of the developers personality and perceptions be projected into the code,