The short answer is Professor Xavier.

Ever since James McAvoy played the young Professor Xavier in X-Men: First Class, a link was created in my mind between him and Patrick Stewart, who played Xavier in the previous X-Men movies. Thus, Captain Picard and Mr. Tumnus are now linked in my mind.

But wait, it gets better :)

As I was grabbing the links for this post, I found out Patrick Stewart voiced the statue of William Shakespear in movie Gnomeo & Juliet, in which Gnomeo is voiced by James McAvoy. Conincidence, or conspiricy? Will Patrick Stewart be in the next Naria flick? Will James McAvoy star in a Macbeth remake? We shall have to wait and see.

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Tuaw's Chris Rawson wrote yesterday:

The announcement this morning that textbooks would be sold through the iBookstore wasn't especially surprising. But the price was; full-featured multimedia electronic textbooks being offered for no more than US$15 is exactly the kind of disruptive shakeup the industry needed.

...

[W]hy the lower prices? AllThingsD asked that question of McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw, and it turns out to have a simple answer. Schools will usually hold onto the paper versions of textbooks for about five years, meaning the publishers are only recouping about $15 per year anyway. Via the iBookstore, textbooks can be sold directly to students (who may or may not be offered payment vouchers from their schools), and from the publishers' perspective, the beauty of this arrangement is that those books can't be re-used or re-sold.

Full Article

That price drop is a big deal to me and my wife. This past summer, we decided to home school our eldest son*. Being the uber-geek that I am, I have been keeping a sharp eye out for how to leverage technology in order to give my son a great eduction. Apple's announcement is pretty huge for my wife and I as it hopefully means that we will be able to purchase quality textbooks for our son at prices that are easy on our budget.

The fact that all of this is happening on the iPad excites me as well. My wife and I are on the front end of being Digital Natives**. We grew up with computers and gained easy access to the internet in high school and college. However, the contrast we see between us and our kids, who learned to use iOS at 18 months and don't understand how limiting live TV is, is huge. They interface with the world is such a different way that we need to change the way we do education. I'm excited to see how Apple pushes forward innovation in that space.

* The reasons for our decision to home school are outside the scope of this post, but feel free to ask me about it if you are interested. Briefly, I can tell you it was a long, thorough and careful process where we considered not just our son's education, but his social development and our family circumstances as well. I know some people who were home schooled as kids and turned out strange. I know some who turned out just fine. We aren't crazed zealots about it, and we strongly believe it isn't for everyone. If you are considering it, I encourage you to read up on both sides of the argument and to talk to people who have gone through that process.

** If you want to read more about Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, in addition to Marc Prensky's original paper, I recommend googling for Seth Godin's thoughts on education, art and the Post-Industrial Revolution.

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While I was working on the lacunavinea.org web site (it's not linked as it isn't live yet), I ran into an issue with bundler on Heroku. Heroku Cedar has BUNDLE_WITHOUT hard-coded to exclude only development and test.

This is rather limiting if you want to have other groups in your Gemfile that don't get inlucded in the running app. Cucumber users will especially notice this, as the cucumber folks suggest you put the cucumber gems in the own group. I also like to put gems like heroku and ZenTest in their own group.

I went looking to see if anyone else had found a solution, and I came across this tweet by @grosser.

BUNDLE_WITHOUT on heroku cedar -> Gemfile: cucumber = (ENV['HOME'].gsub('/','') == 'app' ? 'test' : 'cucumber'); group cucumber do ... end

— Michael Grosser (@grosser) December 15, 2011

I thought I would give a more expanded example here, as it look me a moment to realize what he meant. Here's an example Gemfile that creates some groups. I also wrote a little helper function to make it a bit nicer looking.

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gem 'rails'

# hack to make heroku cedar not install special groups
def hg(g)
  (ENV['HOME'].gsub('/','') == 'app' ? 'test' : g)
end

group hg(:cucumber) do
  gem 'cucumber-rails'
  gem 'capybara'
  gem 'database_cleaner'
end

# command line tools
group hg(:tools) do
  gem 'heroku'
  gem 'taps'
  gem 'ZenTest'
end

# mac os x specific
group hg(:darwin) do
  gem 'autotest-growl'
  gem 'autotest-fsevent'
end

Works like a charm! Thanks @grosser!

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Last week, my brother-in-law introduced me to Ticket to Ride by Days of Wonder. It is a regular board game played with little plastic trains, a deck of cards and a board. You can read about how to play elsewhere. The short on this one is that I was hooked instantly.

I love turn-based startegy games as they allow time to properly think, and Ticket to Ride fit the bill nicely. I also found out that you can get it for iPad (the iPhone version is a seperate download), which is great for online play (or local wifi/bluetooth), playing by yourself, and playing without having to set up the board or manually track your score. The game also supports the "pass and play" or hotseat model for multiple players, but that is ackward as you have a hand of cards that your opponents aren't supposed to see. My wife and I have been playing on local wifi with two iPads, and that has been great.

The iOS versions are also a lot cheaper (especially if you are interested in the expansions available via in-app purchase) than buying the actual printed board game, but you do give something up playing on the screen instead of at a table. If you want to play, I'm soup.matt on Game Center.

And while we are on turn-based strategy games, another one I have been enjoying on the iPad is Neuroshima Hex. This one is a more complex military strategy game that is pretty easy to learn, but has very deep strategy that can take a long time to master. It is a universal app, so one purchase runs on your iPhone/iPod Touch as well as your iPad. It lacks online support (a bummer if your gaming buddies aren't local), but the game is well suited to "pass and play" (no hiding cards to worry about).

The main advantage of the iPad version over the printed game is that battles can take a long time to run and require a lot of bookkeeping, something a computer is much better at than a human, which means you get to focus on the startegy and game play instead of filling sheet of notebook paper with calculations. Neuroshima Hex also has a lite version if you want to try before you buy.

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Peño began life as an Ardunio project we did on a weekend hack-a-thon. He was supposed to scare the pigeons off our office balcony with his moving head, light-up eyes and squirting water from his mouth. Our building installed some nets that keep the pigeons off the balcony, which put Peño out of a job. We didn't want to let Peño go, so we trained him to monitor our production systems, which he now happily does from the server room in our office.

Peño is an example of what our engineers do to get the creative juices flowing. We work hard, but we also have a lot of fun doing it. <shameless_plug>We are hiring</shamless_plug>

See the full gallery on Posterous

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I've been doing some following of the Java community even though I haven't been using Java much at work lately. Old habit's die hard. :)

Java in the Cloud

It seems that Java is gaining a lot of cloud momentum. Heroku's annoucement of support for Java puts them in company with Google App Engine, Cloud Foundry (from VMWare and SpringSource), AWS's Elastic Beanstalk, and OpenShift (Redhat). Four platforms for deploying java webapps (and by extension, just about any JVM language) to the cloud. That's pretty stinking good.

All of these are doing similar things. You build a java webapp, deploy it to the cloud, and much of the rest is managed for you. Herkou and OpenShift modify this model a bit. With both of these products, you push your source to the cloud as opposed to a deployable artifact of some kind. Additionally on heroku you follow their Procfile pattern, which means you would embedd jetty, or some other http server, instead of deploying a war that they drop into an existing servlet container. With OpenShift, you have access to a full blow JBoss AS 7, as opposed to just the Servlet API

Changes in the JCP

I have been following a little bit of the changes the JCP, and the main change I see here is that many of the members are pushing to make sure that the TCKs needed to certify implemention of JSRs being published under opensource friendly licenses. Movement in this direction will go along way in unencumbering the Java ecosystem from the baggage of the past.

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This is pretty stinking awesome! With this move, the guys at heroku are proving that they mean it when they say they want to be a polygot platform. I love how the blog post does a good job of seperating the good parts of Java, the JVM and the Java ecosystem from the bad parts (namely JEE and the baggage from a corporate dominated JCP). See heroku's announcement:

http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/8/25/java/

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Google, a services company, buys a struggling hardware manufacturer with an insanely different corportate culture? I get Google wanting to get closer to the metal with Android, which is arguably their biggest challenge in competeing with Apple, but I'm not sure buying motorola is the answer.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/supercharging-android-google-to-acquir...

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"There are secrets in the silence"

Silence your body to listen to your words
Silence your tongue to listen to your thoughts
Silence your thoughts to listen to your heart beating
Silence your heart to listen to your spirit
Silence your spirit to listen to His Spirit

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Quotes

"[Entrepreneurship] is a discipline like any other. It can be learned and practiced."
-Peter Drucker via Leonard Schlesinger

"If you can't predict the future, create it"
- Leonard Schlesinger

"Stop worrying about what you want to do and start worrying about what you are going to do next"
- Leonard Schlesinger quoting a colleagues Mom.

"Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear a word you say."
- Cory Booker on the need to first live out the change we want to see our world in ourselves.

"Competence is no longer a scarce commodity."
- Seth Godin

"We teach you to wait to be picked. Give me a break! Pick yourself and do what you want."
- Seth Godin

"If its worth doing, then what are you waiting for?"
- Seth Godin

Thoughts

Bill Hybels gave a great talk where he asked some thought provoking questions about hard situations you encounter in leadership. It got me thinking a lot about adjustments I can make to lead my team better. I want us to have fun building great software, be challenged to grow, and do it without letting the parts we have to do get in the way.

Leonard Schlesinger's talk showed me that being an entrepreneur isn't about being a crazy man like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. It about going after something you want and taking action with the resources you have. It was another kick in the pants to me to actually code some of the ideas I have, because they are things I want.

Seth Godin's talk was way cool. He talked about how computers and the Internet are making it so just being competent at something isn't valuable anymore. If you can reproduce something, you can find a way to do it cheaper. The value, and the power, we now have is that we can bring art to our work. I have been thinking about code as art more and more recently. Right now my team is wrapping up a proof-of-concept app to support a pilot program for one of our clients at Vibes. I'm feeling pretty damn proud of how we did it. I think that it is elegant code.bIt is a work of art. I want to bring more of my art to my code, both at work and in my spare time, and I want to inspire my team to do so as well.

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http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/8/3/polyglot_platform/

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http://blog.roku.com/blog/2011/06/01/roku-bringing-angry-birds-to-the-tv/

It does look pretty cool. I wish Apple would come up with a cool way to let me do this with my Apple TV 2.

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I've been doing some research to find out what apps I use everyday are ready for OSX Lion. Here's the list I've verified so far. No guarantees on the accuracy here. It's just good enough for me to check it off my list before upgrading my work machine.

• Dropbox – needs version 1.2.16, which can be download from their forums
• 1Password
• Chrome
• MySQL – dmg installs seem to survive the upgrade just fine
• Rvm rubies and gemsets - (I believe these may need to be rebuilt (props to @billgloff), I'll probably write a script to do it)
• POW
• MacVim
• Homebrew
• Eclipse – Looks like Ingido based releases should be fine
• MS Office for Mac 2011
• Skype – Don't see anything on the webz suggesting it doesn't work
• Firefox – Requires Firefox 5.0.1
• Versions - versionsapp.com - this is a great OSX svn client.

Here's the lone package I don't have an answer on yet:

• HTTPScoop - www.tuffcode.com - think wireshark/tcpdump, but for HTTP and serveral orders of magnitude easier to use. I use it mostly for REST/SOAP/AJAX debugging.

Let me know if you find anything out and I'll update this post.

Update: Moved Versions into the verified list

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I finally got my own domain, which means you can find me at http://soupmatt.com, and I am also on twitter at @soupmatt.

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