tigerbears

Pete Forde’s presentation on Jester is blowing my mind. I am totally going to steal his approach.

More to the point, this is a incredibly cool technology, and the presentation is coming with a great implied mini-tutorial on a few Ruby basics. Most appreciated was the realtime code demo. Seeing the database get modified by simple commands in Firebug’s Javascript console was a real “Aha!” moment for a bunch of us who like to see things before we believe they’re easy. :)

I think Jester will work well for this game idea I have. Definitely one to research and try out.

Something else that I thought was interesting was when Pete noted that we, as developers, often “aren’t creating for people anymore.” I’ve had a few conversations like that around here in the last day or so, and it’s about time that we start taking that idea even more seriously. Fortunately, it seems like more and more of us are at least thinking about it, but I think there’s still a lot of unrealized opportunities out there.Hm. More on that when I’m not posting via iPhone. ;) Thoughts?

Did I miss something in the opening talk, or is there no WiFi available … at an Ajax developers’ conference? I was looking forward to posting and reading more live updates. At least Bill Scott’s anti-patterns talk is interesting, and his book based on it will be cool, I’m sure.

Day One at Laguna is done; I won’t be back until Sunday for the main event, but thanks for putting up with a few fairly sorry photos, a sketchy post format and a lot of noise if you’re not into the bike thing. I wanted to get some practice with my mobile-fu before TAE next week, when the pendulum will swing towards geeks with stars in their eyes, closures on their minds and drinks in their hands.

Mobile posting with my iPhone via Postie worked out pretty well for quick ‘n dirty stuff, though I made a few mistakes while trying to post to multiple categories. The iPhone’s camera isn’t exactly a swanky Nikon, so it took a lot of practice to time my shots to compensate for shutter lag. Not easy when your target’s only visible for a couple of seconds before your shot, and is often at a very different speed from the last time you saw them!

With the crowd at Laguna, I think the cell towers were pretty overwhelmed, at least from an data standpoint. I talked to the guys at SanDisk, who were having trouble with their broadband cards, so I wasn’t alone. I had plenty of signal, but it took a while before I could get the messages sent. Fortunately, I was able to grab a seat in the shade at the Ducati Island hospitality booth so I could geek out for a few minutes in comfort. Bonus: I can type much better while I’m sitting; walking just sends my fat fingers everywhere on that keyboard. Don’t even mention the jostling or risk of knocking over a $20,000 custom bike. OK, so I missed the fashion show, but I’ve seen bored two-bit models prance around awkwardly on a makeshift stage before. I’ve even done that myself, once, so call it professional courtesy.

One frustration was that it took the iPhone a while to decide that it couldn’t send an email, and couldn’t try to send another one while it was making that decision. After iPhone realizes it can’t send, the first outgoing message would be placed in a queue for later transmission. It’s only at that point that you can try to send your second message. It’s easy to understand why actually trying to send that second message while the first is still outbound wouldn’t work. It would be much nicer to at least be able to add that message to the outbound queue and, thus, save your work.

The messages managed to arrive at their destinations out of order, which was a little unusual. Otherwise, the process was fairly smooth, and I like that it’s simple to send a picture via email.

To get the iPhone to sync its onboard Camera Roll with iPhoto, I had to connect the iPhone while iTunes wasn’t running. (iPhoto was, but I didn’t check to see if that was a requirement.) I don’t understand the reasons for it, but that seems like a good candidate for streamlining the user experience.

The MotoGP circus is at Laguna Seca again this weekend, so I’m taking a little break and heading a few hops down the 101 for some fun … man, I love this weekend. I’ll be practicing some moblogging from the paddock later today. Go Colin!

Read more for a consolidation of some practice moblogging posts & pictures from the event. When I get around to putting stuff up on Flickr, I’ll add them here. Enjoy!
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Since ditching my Pearl for an iPhone, I wanted to try out the whole blog-by-mail thing. I wasn’t really happy with the configuration options of WordPress’s built-in by-mail feature, so I tried out Postie. It’s been fun to play with and works well, but I ran into a snag and wanted to share the solution.When you post via Postie, you send mail with attachments (images, video, whatever) to a special account. Postie will fetch this mail on demand by POP3, format the post content, and submit it via WordPress’s post submission routines. Postie will do neat things like create thumbnails for your images and link these thumbnails to full-sized copies. These images and other content are given CSS classes so you can tweak their display as you wish. Very nice!The trick is that you need to hit a URL (get_mail.php) for your mail to be processed and posted. You can request it manually in any old web browser, use cron (for example) to hit it automatically, or use a “Cronless Postie” feature that the current author provides. I chose the cron approach since it could give me a bit of a sense of server downtime by its failure messages.What I didn’t notice until I applied some styles to these generated CSS classes was that if you request get_mail.php with a client that isn’t cookied (including my use of wget via cron), WordPress will filter out all HTML tags’ attributes in the post’s content. You’re left with no CSS classes, no Javascript for spiffy thumbnailing, no nothing … just some extremely simple markup that will get you by, but probably isn’t what you want.After some experimenting, I found that the client that requests get_mail.php must be recognized as a blog user with either Editor or Administrator access if you want this extra markup to come through. This doesn’t appear to be Postie’s fault, unless this is a bug in its “Roles that can Post” option, but may be a result of some inner WordPress authentication magic. Note: I have comments turned off on tigerbears.com, so it’s possible that you might have less stringent requirements. Good luck!

TAE is coming up again, and I’m really pumped up for it. It’s only my second time, but I had such a blast in Boston last fall that I wasn’t going to pass it up when it’s just up the 101, even on my own dime. I still see most of my old Netflix buddies pretty often, but it’ll be cool to catch up with the Yahoo guys and other reprobates.

One of my favorite presenters from last October, Glenn Vanderburg, recently gave a talk at JAOO called The Beauty of Ruby. Since I’m coming to Ruby from a Java perspective, as he did, I was interested in seeing what excited him about the language.

I’m not going to try to reiterate all of his points, but I’d definitely recommend it to anyone else who might be feeling a little bit leery of abandoning their beloved static typing. ;) We’ve been doing it for years on the client side in Javascript, but it feels a little different to do this after so many years of Java. Glenn has a great point about this, and I’ll let him make it.

I’m psyched today because a cool consulting opportunity I’ve been excited about for a while has finally coalesced. It’s still in stealth mode, but I can say that it’s a small venture with some folks I’ve really enjoyed working with before. It is not a Dew-brewed idea to jump-start “Web 3.0,” whatever that’s going to be. It’s just a good thing I feel good about helping out. I’m extra excited because it’s another chance to flex the muscles I started training in the early days at Netflix.

Those days were some of my favorites in my entire professional career, so I’m always excited to work with another newly-hatched organization. I love the clean slate, the opportunity, and the limited resources that demand and inspire creativity. Most of all, I love the camaraderie.

Unfortunately, we’ll probably be building it with Rails, which is only bad in that I’ll owe Pete Forde a beer. Can I write off a bad bet come tax time?

Once again, into the breach!

Welcome to tigerbears!

I’m Bill Kunz, and I’ve been working the web full-time since 1997, though I’ve been tinkering online since ‘91. I’m currently a consultant wearing several web-centric hats: developer, UX architect, project manager, product manager and others. Before striking it out on my own (again), I was a the senior front-end engineer at Netflix for just shy of nine years. When I left, I was one of three employees remaining from the days when we were a stealth mode startup scrambling to release our beta site to the world. Some of my favorite professional memories are from those days … what a ride!

My last position at Netflix was with my buddies on the Community team, responsible for the Friends section of the site. The challenges we faced are shared by plenty of new ventures these days, so you can expect some commentary on that from time to time.

Most of my recent development experience has been front-end development, writing custom Javascript libraries for Ajax-based and other client-side logic / rendering, and server-side page generation with Java / JSP. One of my upcoming projects is a good candidate for Ruby on Rails, so I’m especially excited about that opportunity.

Process-wise, I’m a strong advocate for an agile development approach (when appropriate!) and have led teams of engineers and designers under this banner (whether by that name, others, or none) for over ten years.

When I’m not typing away for one reason or another, the hobby I’m most passionate about is motorcycle racing. I’m a backmarker with the AFM in California and am big fan of the guys playing in the MotoGP series. I race an ‘02 Honda F4i and take to the streets on an ‘04 Ducati 749s.

Thanks a lot for stopping by. I can be contacted by email and other means. I’ll usually keep comments disabled here, but I’d like to hear from you, so don’t be shy. I also welcome opportunities to work with teams or individuals on solutions large and small, on a formal or informal basis. I’ll soon have a more thorough bio and resume available for those who are interested.

meta: tigerbears runs on WordPress. Its theme is based on Barthelme by Scott Wallick, whose clean approach to blog design is a breath of fresh air in a MySpace world. I had to destroy a lot of his work by slapping on a quick color scheme of my own, among other tweaks, which is based on the livery of a series of US Navy fighter squadrons and my beloved yellow bikes. As a scheme, it needs work, but it’s been good for learning more about this system. Please pardon the dust and clashing colors while I play. ;)