ben lowery

Being a programmer in the spring is its own special ring of hell.

• I have a new desktop background. Thanks Dug.
• More integration of Dojo 0.9. Got our build playing nice with the new Dojo build system, which is JavaScript running inside Rhino (actually Dojo’s custom Rhino which supports syntax compression). There’s a ton to like here.
  • We maintain all of our JS in a bl directory, parallel to the dojo directory. The old build system didn’t do anything intelligent with this code, but the new one includes it in the release. Very nice. This makes copying a proper release a lot easier. Scons still makes my head spin a bit, but I think that’s mostly because I know about as much Python as I do Spanish.
  • We can layer builds, so we can have one glommed together hunk of JS depend on another glommed together hunk of JS. Technically this works with the old Dojo with a recent builder, but I hadn’t messed with it. This is great for different entry points into the site where we might be loading a ton of JS for the reader, but a subset of that ton for something like search or about. Figuring out how to partition things to best take advantage of the cache will be interesting. For the time being, I’m just going to do it per page and then revisit things once we have a handle on what’s needed where.
• My patch for cookie support was accepted into Core. Yay! It needs some more tests, though I wasn’t sure how to test the secure and domain properties sans a proper web sever. Have to see what the other devs think. Also got my feet wet with the test framework and test runner. So far, looks pretty good. Need to take a peek at how the async test stuff works.
• Main Street Sweets caught on fire yesterday. There’s a sign out front saying they’ll reopen soon… mmmmm ice cream. I was up the block at Coffee Labs when the fire happened; kinda wish I’d had my camera as it’s not often you get to see a ladder truck in action. Good luck and best wishes to them for a speedy recovery and reopening.
• Speaking of Coffee Labs, they’re now selling coffee wholesale to a few local Whole Foods and other various places. And they have a spiffy new web site!
• Food Report
  • Breakfast: Coffee (Ethiopian Yirgacheffe) from the Labs. Nice acidic, light body. I need to start taking my own mug if I’m going to keep getting coffee instead of caps. And a peanut butter sandwich. Mmmm dark chocolate peanut butter.
  • Lunch: Chicken fingers and rice from the Hack with a special treat: mocha bubble tea! The kids were all freaking out at how gross / awesome it was. The dichotomy was striking.
  • Dinner: Yankee Pot Roast and mashers (Hack) with a salty peach crumb cake for dessert. I had never thought to put salt in a crumb cake. I now know why.

Ka is a wheel.

• A clean(er) apartment is a happy apartment.
• Started the port to 0.9 in earnest. No cookies for me.
• Submitted a patch for a new dojo.cookie for 0.9. Cookies for me! The new test harness stuff is pretty sweet, need to dig into that some more.
• The new build system for Dojo is hotness incarnate. Layered builds + known Dojo + no more Ant + really really fast == happy Ben.
• svn_load_dirs and svnmerge are my friends. They really want to be your friends too.
• Definition of irony: Macy’s, who has huge “Celebrate Mother’s Day” signs all over the store does not have a maternity section.
• Food Report:
  • Breakfast at Coffee Labs. Small latte and butter scone.
  • Lunch at Hackley. Sloppy Joes, extra sloppy. “Georgia” salad.  Georgia salad is apparently salad with pecans and apples and blue cheese. Can someone from Georgia verify?
  • Dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. Weight Management Endive and Pear salad. Actually really quite good and supposedly around 500 calories. Keeping it south of 1000 at the Factory is quite an accomplishment. And I finally got the salad I kept talking about all last week…

Another good day around the new house.

• Played McGregor for the first time in the morning. Played the back first, went 41 / 46 with a tasty snowman on 7. It’s so April. The course layout is great, just need some time to get the greens smoothed out and rolling quite a bit quicker.
• Lunch at Panera, Crispini and a Greek salad. All in all pretty good.
• Packed up, drove back to Tarrytown, stopped in New Palz for dinner.
• Dinner at La Stazione. Nice place with fairly good food. Sitting outside for dinner is so nice.
• Back at the apartment in Tarrytown. Sigh.

Ah, so good to be back home.

• 75 and sunny today in Saratoga Springs. Warmer than SJC or LAS. Just a perfect spring day.
• Met the neighboors across the street, Dave and Amanda. They got us a nice little housewarming present, cookies and sweets from a local bakery.
• Took a little exploratory drive over to Cambridge and Greenwich (pronounced Green-wich up here) and found a great silver place in Cambridge (Chasing Silver) and a great local market in Greenwich (Greenwich Local Market). Mandy got some earrings and we picked up some local goat cheese, honey, and chocolate ice cream. All taste pretty darn amazing. Yay for local foods!

Ah, travel.

• Yesterday ended up being a 3:45AM to 2:00AM day. Note: don’t wear your contacts the whole time.
• Flying back. SJC -> LAS, LAS -> ALB. You can track my flight from LAS -> ALB.
• Pulled Dojo 0.9 into our extern and I’m working on integrating it in a branch. Yay for long flights.
• Dead Like Me is a fantastic show.
• I love flying Southwest. I havn’t done it much in the past, as they don’t really serve the NYC area, but they fly out of Albany. The flight attendants had us entertained the whole ride from SJC -> LAS and most of it from LAS -> ALB. I have mixed feelings on the ABC boarding though… So far I think I like it, though I havn’t boarded as a C yet.
• Today was the second day in a row I didn’t get into bed until 2AM. I need some sleep.