Cafe Bucky

I’m in a bit of a Quandry.

I’m in all out job search mode, and I get a fair number of inquiries from recruiters each day.  They seem to like my resume.

So far, so good.

The thing is, I do know a wide range of tech, and much of what I see fits me well, but there is often some skill that I dont have, such as some language or some bit of technology.   Either I dont know RoR well, or .Net, or am rusty on Java, etc.

There is so much that I could learn, but there is only so much time.

So that is the fun part.. I am a great generalist, and am interested in a lot of facets of Tech.  So what to focus on?  It’s no good changing gears every day.

My idea at the moment is:  I’ll jot down the things I am very interested in learning. and hopefully a couple of folks will write me and say “well hell, Daniel, just dont sleep — you mean to say you dont know all of this already!?”

Languages and Frameworks

• PHP – I know 5.x, and a bit of CakePHP.  So, Zend Framework?  Symfony?  CodeIgniter? Others?
• Python / Django? – I’ve gone into python and have made minor changes.  I like Python from what I know of it.
• Ruby / RoR – I’ve done some Ruby on Rails tutorials, and dug it.  I have not had a project to really get my feet wet with it.
• Perl – actually, I am pretty good wth Perl.  I  just have not touched it much since 2006 at Friendster.  I actually wrote a perl shell back in 1992.  Catalyst Framework?  Mason?
• C# / .Net / Mono – this may come as a surprise to anyone who knows my leanings to all things Mac and Linux.  My interest comes from wanting to do more with two key projects:
  • OpenSim – yep, OpenSim is written in C#, and runs on .Net or Mono
  • Unity – the scripting languages for Unity (JavaScript, C#, and Boo) run on top of Mono, and access underlying .Net libraries.  I also love the idea of Embedding Mono for other projects.

In the category of “well, if I need to go back to…”:

• Java -  I have not done new java code since 1996!  I would not want to work on client side java at this point (who is doing applets at this point?)  — I would be into the whole Eclipse + server side angle (I’ve worked a bit with Weblogic and Presto)   Java has so many technologies associated with it at this point, that it is hard to know where to jump in.
• Flash / AS3 -  I have not touched flash much since 2005.  I think HTML5 + JS + CS3 is the way forward.  I do like ActionScript, which is a close cousin of JavaScript.  When I dealt with AS2, I had one entry point on the first frame and used a lot of classes.  I didnt do the snippets attached to the timeline deal.  My leaning is that I could back into flash again for a specific project, but there are many other things I’d like to learn first
• C / C++ – It’s been forever ;)

Content Management Systems

Ok, which to learn?  Drupal?  Joomla?  Wordpress?

NoSQL / SMAQ

I’ve been reading a lot about NoSQL, and just came across this article about SMAQ (Storage, MapReduce and Query)

What to learn?  Hadoop?  CouchDB?  Cassandra?  Voldemort?   etc…

Besides Programming

It’s obvious I am interested in a wide swath of the programming side.

Now, if someone were to ask me what I would do besides programming, I would say photography, writing, or possibly speaking / demoing.

The other big interest of mine is multimedia.  I know a bit, but wish I could just dive into
it for a year and learn a lot more.  Some apps I would like to know would be:

Logic Studio
Final Cut Studio
PhotoShop CS5
Maya / 3DS Max /  Blender

A lot of the output of this would be directed towards work in Virtual Worlds (assets in
a Unity project, as one example)

(in other words, I know a bit of the creative side, and wish I had the time/money/chance to
really learn a lot more of it)

Anyways, to sum up, I’m interested in a lot, but every situation wants different skill sets.  Hard to know where to focus!

For many years, I didn’t believe in doing New Years Resolutions. I figured that it was a good idea to just resolve to change things as one went along. That’s still a good idea, but I do see the symbolism of the clean slate of a New Year.  Doubly so for a new decade.

And I also say Good Riddance to the decade of 2000-2009. There were lots of ups to it (I love you Kimmy, and you have filled our time together with so much love, energy, and grace — I want you in all of our decades to come :). There have also been way too many downs, and I’ve learned and just want to move on.

I’m blogging some of my resolutions, so that I put a little pressure on myself to get them done … I’m only listing things that I think I can really control. Stuff that involves other people or that gets a bit personal doesn’t get penned here.

Ze Resolutions

• Wake Up when the alarm goes off
  (hitting the snooze button on my iPod is way too convenient — I’m going to move it so that I have to get out of bed)
• Lose 20 pounds by June 1st
  (I refuse to go any bigger than 34×30 Levis 550’s — I am drawing my line in the sand!  task #1: buy a scale)
• Throw stuff out so that I dont need a storage area any longer

Tech & Creative Stuff

• Average one creative output per day (such as a picture, video, blog post, tweet)
• Make a list of all of the web sites I am registered with
  (and get rid of ones I am not likely to ever use again)
• Get daniel.org redone as a proper personal domain by February 1st (themed, pages for software and writings)
• actively use my lynda.com and safarionline.com accounts to keep learning (complete at least one video course per month, and read at least one tech book per month)
• Get slide scanner working and scan at least 50 slides per month
• learn final cut express and photoshop
• learn Ruby on Rails
• resurrect FlexiPhoto and implement ThereThen addresses so that photos can be aliased by time and location  — do this by March 1st.
• No more SL scripting unless there is a financial reason to do so
  (I feel like SL has been a huge detour — I am glad that I am very good LSL scripter and have done some innovative work, but I could have been using that time to do things that would have done more to pay the bills)

There are a ton of other things I could write as Resolutions, such as Get A Job or Travel To Europe, but anything that involves other people isn’t something I can completely control.   (I do think I will be working and traveling, but it’s not like 2000, where I had the resources to just grab tickets and friends and take off)

[update -- January 14, 2010]

So far, I am paying attention to some resolutions pretty well …

Kimmy – We’re not together any more.  I do wish her the best.

Waking up – Am doing much better at this!

Weight – have ordered a scale so that I know where I am at.  Lots of little tweaks, such as making 2 scrambled eggs instead of 3.

Creative output – yep!  Doing it.

Lynda.com and Safarionline – yep! Doing it.

Second Life – yep!  I have really pulled back and I dont script there any more.

The thought that sums up my mood lately is:

“I cant get the last few years back, but I can sure make the next few count.”

[update -- January 29, 2010]

Got a scale – doing daily weigh-ins, not gaining :)

Got a VPS (Virtual Private Server) via Slicehost.com and am configuring it

[update - June 1, 2010]

Averaging a creative output a day?  Close to it, if I count mix sessions I put up on Dropbox.

Slicehost working out well.  It hosts javajoint.com and my therethen* domains.

[this is a sketch about how I see a couple of trends merging to the point where something very new is created]

We are going to hit a point of blurring.  It’ll be great …

I’ve paid attention to Virtual Reality (mostly in the form of SecondLife, but a little exposure to X3D as well) for a few years now, and am about to jump into Augmented Reality …

But I can look ahead and see what’s really going to happen in a few years.  We’re going to get a lot of mixed scenarios where it’s not so clear how to classify what happens on screen:

• Virtual Reality is about synthetic worlds, where content from the real world is brought in.   A couple of examples I have personally worked on would be: bringing photos and video into SecondLife  – sometimes static, sometimes live.  I also have personally worked on objects for Vivaty that bring audio, video, and images from Flickr into a Virtual Space.
• Augmented Reality is about the Real World (as in realtime video), with data from the internet and local storage dynamically overlaid.  The classic example is to take video with a smartphone, and dynamically overlay information for nearest subway stations. places to eat, and real estate listings.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality can be seen as the flip side of each other.

You start with the synthetic, and bring in the real / web.  Or … you start with the real, and you bring in the web / synthetic.

For the time being, the worlds are largely going to stay that way.  It takes a lot of processing power and a lot of code that doesnt readily exist at the moment to put the two modes together.

But I can see it — think the present boundaries are going to just stay put? :)

Blended Reality will give the ability to flow seamlessly between real video with synthetic overlays, to the scenario of completely immersive environments, back to straight live video.

Scenario: I walk to Central Park and pull out a decent sized tablet (jam 4 iphones together — That’s a good screen size to envision).  I see live video, and overlays of points of interest.  I may pick a point of interest (let’s say it’s winter, so we pick the ice rink).  I get a feed in-scene of the latest photos / writeups of the ice rink, and I can segue into a virtual world recreation of it.  I meet with friends who may be elsewhere, but who are enjoying the get-together in the virtual sense.  From their point of view, perhaps they see live video of what’s happening at the ice rink.  Maybe their friends in real life have a clickable visual tag floating on them from the viewer point of view (if the RL friends choose to make their location info available to some of their contacts)  Perhaps some of the video comes from my tablet! The gist of this is, mixing modes based on location…

I’m just doing the flat-screen writeup of this for the time being.  It’s enough of a start to envision stepping into and out of virtual and augmented spaces, whether on the go with some tablet, or behind a desk.  Think not so much of overlapping hard window definitions, but of smooth transitions from between flat / augmented / virtual areas of the screen.

As I said, this is just a sketch — thoughts that have occurred to me in the last day.  The basic idea is that I dont see the hard boundaries of Virtual and Augmented Realities staying put.  They are going to blur and meet in the middle ;)

I’ve been thinking about what I want to do, gig-wise.  For way too long, I’d been waiting for Second Life and OpenSim to pop up on the radar as a marketable skill.  I’m good at it, but hell, the average salary for SL gigs is way down there [1]

There is a lot out there in the Tech Landscape that thrills me:

Google Wave, Augmented Reality, and the iPhone (in addition to the Web 2.0 LAMP/AJAX stuff I love doing)

I am waiting for my developer login for Google Wave.  Visualize Email that turns into an IM, which flows into a collaborative document, with full playback of who edited what.  That’s an icebergian tip …

Or you can look at some pretty pictures and get an idea …

I also found it instructive to watch the video on how Wave handles Concurrent Editing.

One imagines Wave dovetailing with projects in SL, Augmented Reality, and all manner of mobile devices.

As for AR (Augmented Reality), three examples everyone should check would be:

• Layar, worlds first mobile Augmented Reality browser
• The Acrossair bit on the BBC
• The biz card demo

Oh, and the ARToolkit running on the iPhone …

Speaking of the iPhone, I have downloaded the SDK and have signed up as a developer.  Objective C hits me as a kinder, gentler take on C++ and Java.  I am digging it so far.

None of this should be taken as a sign I am leaving Web Development.  Far from it!  I am just looking at the likely directions that spring from it, where I think there will be a lot of interest and opportunity.

[1] I  have recent info from Susan, who heard it firsthand from someone presenting from Marketing Truths at SLCC

The countryside beckons.  Worn out roads need their picture taken.  They aim to put on asphalt makeup and cover their bots dots for a “Roadway Pinup Monthly” centerfold (daring Cornwall cliffs shed retaining walls, show you all!).  I aim to see a few roads.

I love to travel, and so have been mulling over dastardly plans on how to do that and get paid.  Snicker not, kind reader, for I am armed with a skill or two!  I shall Dance In The Country! Techstyle!

Perched in the midst of Getaway Central, Somewhere in Europe.  Perhaps I am in Tuscany.  Go with it, y’all…   Some people cant make it that far, ya know.  They have boring jobs and soccer brats and mortgages and neighbors with habits that scare them slightly and one too many frikken meetings to go to this week, and, yep, looks like the next one after that.  Their life is living them.

However, some people love to live vicariously….  We’re not just talking about the Peeping Toms and Tanyas…

And therein lies the country wheat germ of a hint of an idea.  Somewhere in this post I will spell it out, but I am going to my damnedest not to crystalize it in one sentence.  This is a post about the country, where paths meander.

Back to Tom and Tanya and their Peepers…

Would they watch an irreverent slidecast that shows the beauty of Dancing In The Country?  Which country?  Which part of the country? Well, send me money and I’ll alter my travel plans!  I sense that there is an opportunity to cater to the wannabe traveler.  Ok, well a subset of them.  I aim to displease those who would look down their nose at anything less than a high minded exhaustive treatise done by thee Almighty BBC.  Think of David Letterman and Monty Python pulling into town in a noisy oil smoking 1969 VW Bug with a grinding clutch and rusted shirt hanger antenna. Whoa there, move it, we have weak brakes!  Park, grab camera, some cafe coin for coffee, cheerful attitude, and a hankering to satisfy the insatiable desire of Jonathan Livingston Armchair Traveler Seagull.

I love to write and photo and video.  I also enjoy talking to the locals and getting the sense of things.  As it turns out, I’ve been doing this sort of thing in Second Life for the last 2 1/2 years.  Yeah, and the experience surely does spill over to the Real World.  Something about SL has made it much more comfy to strike up conversations with strangers.  Amazingly, most of them do not recoil in horror when I do this.  Could be all of the free Lindens I give em.

So the threads are  .. travel, take in the gist, write and photo it, and …

Omg.. is he going to talk about yet another fucking Social Networking Website?  Bucky!  How could you?  It’s almost 2009 you big smelly gorilla!

Now hang on there pardner.  We have the advantage of history.  We know what doesn’t work (like Sarah Palin applying for Mensa), and we know the world economy is on brink of collapse.  What a great time of opportunity!  Nobody can afford to travel, so we’ll do it for them!  We’ll mash it up on a web site with commentary, supplement with local feeds, point to Amazon Associates items that actually talk about the locale in question, and laugh all the way to the credit union.

So that is the thought .. how to mash up skills and local feeds, and turn the situation of traveling into a self sustaining gig.  It would be a side project.. a weekend here and there to start.  The two keys would be the power of the mashup info (content from elsewhere), and the irreverent look at things (local discontent :)

And that is the Dance in the Country.  Cha cha cha.

I am staying offline tomorrow, Saturday August 30th.

Why?

To switch gears a bit. Think of the last 20 years, and all of the change that has snuck up on us:

• cell phones
• blogs / facebook / myspace / linked in
• web
• twitter
• IMs
• email

It’s amazing when you think back to the 80’s.  In terms of communication, and the sense of being ‘always on’, they seem almost tranquil by compare…  It will be good to stop for a moment and reflect a bit.

So I will do my best to play hooky from the online world tomorrow.  One of the best parts is that I wont be checking online to see if anyone joins me.  It is a switch off day.  I’ll apologize on Sunday :)

I want to write about the speed of running Second Life on my PowerBook, but I’m also thinking I should be writing a review of the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Stadium Arcadium”. Short one: Good Double Album, better if they had clipped it down to One.

Segue: my computer needs a Red Hot Chili Pepper. Anything to speed it up. It’s not gonna happen though. It’s an old G4 with 1gb RAM. And SL just frikken kills it :-) It’s ok if I crank down the detail … I included a snap of my avatar. Yeah, it’s dorky. I figure it’ll evolve. I’m digging SL though – it’s giving me a bit of the “new” rush I felt when I started using the Web in ‘93.

So, to take the steps from the web world to the more immersive stuff, I’m going to cast my net for cheap fast hardware. I think this is going to mean a Mac Mini …

My vivacious new friend M (hey!) was IM’ing to me this week about second life. She meant the general idea of being online, being in chatting mode, and feeling detached from the real world. Face to Face as First Life, online as Second. I had asked her if she had heard of “Second Life”, as in Second Life from Linden Labs

I’ve wrapped up with Friendster, and am about to start a contract doing stuff with Second Life. In other words, my First Life (at least, the work bit) is changing, and I’ll be surrounded by Second Life, the work, and Second Life, the virtual world. Got that?

I’m looking forward to it. Check out the BusinessWeek cover story “My Virtual Life” which gives a good sense of what it’s like to wander in off the web, and into a much more immersive environment. The whole idea of how we ping pong between modes is changing quickly. At this point, many are happy to get the web on their mobile phone, but because of the way that feels, it’s not really convincing “being somewhere else” stuff. What happens in, say, five years when you get realtime photorealistic rendering on an ultra portable wireless device (less than a pound, 8″ screen, insert favorite specs here)? (btw, I am expressing a desire, and don’t know of anyone that’s doing anything that advanced) In other words, will First and Second lives start to blur a bit? Maybe they already have.

It’s going to be fun.