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Been a while, hasn't it?
Oct. 10th, 2012 03:34 pmI've been busy. That's my excuse, and I'm stickin' with it.
Well, actually I have been busy. A couple of the busy type things are going to get their own post, but the main order of busy-ness has been I've been out pounding the virtual pavement looking for work. Again. You would think that when you're not dedicating eight hours of your day every weekday working for The Man you'd have plenty of time to do things like post blog entries, but the truth of it (as anyone who has done so knows) is: looking for work is a full time job. It's hard and it's draining and it takes it out of you.
That, and I've been trying to improve my computer skills by learning about a programming language called Ruby. Ruby is Perl circa 1997; a hot language, the Shape Of Things To Come and the future of the Internet. Ruby by itself is a good language, but it really shines as the language Ruby on Rails is written in. Rails is a web development platform that makes database-backed applications super easy. I already have a couple of sites in mind that I want to design in Rails.
The really big items will get their own posts later, but I did want to brag on one small achievement. Last week Newegg had a nice build-it-yourself computer package for $300. Everything but the video adapter and hard drive, including the case. I probably shouldn't have bought one, being out of work and all, but the price was right and my old computer was driving me crazy. That system didn't have a bottleneck, that system was one giant bottleneck. This new one is so much faster I could just plotz. Six-core processor and 8 GB of memory. Earlier today it was running my JT65 ham radio software - which involves fast Fourier transforms and was clogging up the CPU on the old machine - and the program was purring along without breaking a sweat. I worked a ham in Japan this afternoon with it that I'm not sure I would have been able to work on the old system because of the lag in decoding the signal.
There's still a day or two of configuration coming up. For instance, I want to install Ruby and Rails on it so I can do some development work. But so far it's looking really, really good.
Well, actually I have been busy. A couple of the busy type things are going to get their own post, but the main order of busy-ness has been I've been out pounding the virtual pavement looking for work. Again. You would think that when you're not dedicating eight hours of your day every weekday working for The Man you'd have plenty of time to do things like post blog entries, but the truth of it (as anyone who has done so knows) is: looking for work is a full time job. It's hard and it's draining and it takes it out of you.
That, and I've been trying to improve my computer skills by learning about a programming language called Ruby. Ruby is Perl circa 1997; a hot language, the Shape Of Things To Come and the future of the Internet. Ruby by itself is a good language, but it really shines as the language Ruby on Rails is written in. Rails is a web development platform that makes database-backed applications super easy. I already have a couple of sites in mind that I want to design in Rails.
The really big items will get their own posts later, but I did want to brag on one small achievement. Last week Newegg had a nice build-it-yourself computer package for $300. Everything but the video adapter and hard drive, including the case. I probably shouldn't have bought one, being out of work and all, but the price was right and my old computer was driving me crazy. That system didn't have a bottleneck, that system was one giant bottleneck. This new one is so much faster I could just plotz. Six-core processor and 8 GB of memory. Earlier today it was running my JT65 ham radio software - which involves fast Fourier transforms and was clogging up the CPU on the old machine - and the program was purring along without breaking a sweat. I worked a ham in Japan this afternoon with it that I'm not sure I would have been able to work on the old system because of the lag in decoding the signal.
There's still a day or two of configuration coming up. For instance, I want to install Ruby and Rails on it so I can do some development work. But so far it's looking really, really good.
