Searching for a New Format

I have not posted in a while. I have been pretty busy in my work and personal life with little time left over to document and blog. Also, I have run into a bit of an issue. I am not sure the blog format really works for me any more. As I have been going back through my old posts trying to bring them over into this new blog I have found quite a few things that I would do differently or not at all. I need to decide whether I want to keep historical and potentially out-dated content around, or to bring it up to date and keep it fresh. I like the idea of having content that may span versions of a product/API, but not when it does not make sense to do so.

I have toyed with the idea of a monthly format or just a free always up-to-date ebook or a wiki, but I am not sure which way I want to go at this point. My goal is to have more time, and a new direction ready to go after the first of the year.

Enjoy the holidays!

Home Server v2

Since my last home server was fried by a lightning storm a few months back, I have been serverless, which is an uncomfortable position for a server software developer. I did some good research and decided to try and put together a new box from scratch. My previous server was just a converted "retired" desktop box I had so this would be a fun project.

Determining Overlap Across Multiple Variables

I have run into two cases now where I have needed to validate that no overlap exists for data across three axes of comparison, each with potentially large value-spaces containing single values and/or ranges of values. An example of such a comparison could be something like a filter rule used to find People based on demographic data.

I Want My GoogleTV...

...to be usable.

A few months ago my wife and I purchased a Logitech Revue (Google TV) mainly for my wife, since she has medical issues that make it difficult for her to use a desktop or laptop computer.

Overall, it's a great product. It provides a much better interface for watching web video content. You can surf the web with a full version of Chrome (with flash) and you can run various apps, which soon will be augmented by the Android Market (supposedly coming this year).

A Groovy Year

It's been just over a year now that I have been working full time with Groovy and Grails so I figured it was a good time for a retrospective. I will go over general thoughts and lessons learned here and then I plan on covering some of the topics in greater detail in separate postings.

In the company I work for we do all of our web application development work using Grails, which is all done using Groovy. We also have quite a few external projects that feed into our Grails applications; these are written mostly in Groovy and Java. Ask three different developers in the company how they feel about our technology choices and you will get three different answers. Personally, these technologies are perfectly suited for what we are doing, but there are always pros and cons with any environment and that's what I want to address here.

A New (Free) Home

If you are one of the few followers of CoffeaElectronica, you will be happy to know that I have found a new home for my blog. I had looked into Blogger years ago when I was first setting up the site, but it seemed very sketchy, like it might not be around much longer. But, it's still here and I think it will be here for a while to come.

I am still considering what to do about my older posts. You can find the raw source code for the posts at https://github.com/cjstehno/cjstehno.github.com, or you can view them (thought in a not so pretty format) at http://cjstehno.github.com. I am considering importing them into this blog, thought I am also thinking about taking a new approach and maybe rewriting/updating some of my older posts or providing them in a more updated format.

Time and level of interest will help decide.

From Junk Box to Jukebox in a Couple Hours

I finally got tired of griping about not having enough space on my phone to store all of my music, and not wanting to pay for one of the music cloud storage services... so I decided to bite the bullet and setup my own using Ubuntu Server, SubSonic Music Streamer and its Android app. It only took a couple hours, most of which was baby-sitting installations, and now I am able to listen to any/all of my music whenever and wherever I want; it's quite nice.