The joys of home ownership pressing demands at work have stifled my personal innovation time. Sometime in the last millennium I used be enjoy writing exploratory projects and releasing libraries that others may find useful. Over the last few months I've been looking for inspiration for a project that would help me …

Agility is one of the most abused terms in my profession. Recent events in my day job have caused me to rethink what agility means. We have a very elegant, loosely coupled system that allows us to build entire sections of our website in hours. The framework handles everything from CDN integration to doing automated …

I thoroughly enjoyed the Iron Man movie. My son wanted more of a SpaceMarine clunky feel to the armor, but I though they nailed exactly how I saw Iron Man from my youth. At least half the theater stayed past the credit roll, I was surprised by how many people knew about the extra bit. It took some real willpower to sit …

I just read an article in a java trade mag entitled: SpringSource CEO: "The Future of Enterprise Java is Clear and Bright" The premise sounds positive. Basically they took OSGI, Spring and threw it on Tomcat as a web server. The idea of being able to deploy OSGI bundles with the bag of beans development style …

A coworker whipped up a generic REST interface for any Ruby on Rails activerecord (data model). What he described (in 5 minutes) was a nice implementation. I wanted see how the generic django REST interface was coded. http://code.google.com/p/django-rest-interface/ I was pleasantly surprised to realize that they Python …

So today started out great. Temperatures in the 80's, so I took the kiddies outside. I put my cellphone on the trunk of my sisters's car, put the kids on their bikes, put skates on my feet and rolled out to enjoy the day. Things were going well with my littlest one making turns at each end of the block. My sister …

Today at work our main Flash developer asked me about expanding his skills and learning either Ruby or Python. My personal preference is towards python but ruby has its place. Flash is really doing well in the Java/Enterprise space lately so I went that way. Most of the Flash backend in our work is xml based so XML was …

I watched Michael Clayton today A decent legal / espionage plot. Predictive enough. The lawyer is defending an international chemical company for years. One day he goes off his anti-depressants and decides to champion the farmers being killed by the chemical additives. Drama ensues when the 'fixer' Michael Clayton is …

I attended a book signing and talk by Harry Boonin at Kesher Isreal today. He gave an interesting talk about the history of the temple and an insight into the history of the Jews in Philly. An interesting bit was his mention of a part of the building's history where the Christian community collaborated with the Jewish …

What better first post for my renovated, Philly style blog, then to mention "Glock Day". A local range in the city (Philadelphia Archery and Gun Club) hosted some helpful representatives from Glock and offered free test firing of their models. The staff was helpful and it was fun. It reminded me of testing …