jordan ryan moore

Bond… James Bond

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 08:31:21 -0800

I’m a regular listener to The Talk Show. The podcast typically is just two nerds talking about Apple, Apple’s products, and the competition, but they have their fair share of tangents. One of those tangets is that they’re watching one James Bond movie every week, from Dr. No to Quantum of Solace. I’ve seen a few of the movies, but I’ve never seen one with Sean Connery, and I’ve always felt like I’m missing out on a big chunk of pop culture.

Although I’ve heard it’s best to keep your goals to yourself, I’m going to watch every James Bond movie. I’m sure I won’t finish them this year (there are 22 for goodness sake, with #23 in the making), and I have no plan to catch up and keep pace with The Talk Show. I do plan on writing about each one, but I havent’t decided the format. I may write a few thousand words about one and only a two paragraphs about another — we’ll just have to see how it goes.

I watched Dr. No last night, so look for a follow-up post in the next few days…

Must-Have Mac Applications

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 07:00:00 -0800

Now that I have been a Mac user for almost a full year, I felt that it was time to post what I consider to be my must-have applications. I am a web developer, so some of these applications may or may not be useful to you, but I found these sort of lists helpful when I first switched from Windows.

Transmit 4 (free trial, $34 USD)

Transmit is an FTP client, except that it is so much more. I only have one day left of my Transmit free trial, but I am already a believer. I use Transmit for two reasons:

I edit source code remotely from my MacBook Pro. Transmit allows me to mount my development desktop via SFTP as if it was a local drive.
All of my music is backed-up to Amazon S3. I have an Automator workflow that watches my Music folder and uploads new music to Amazon S3 using Transmit.

TextMate (free trial, $53 USD)

TextMate is my favorite text editor, but I would not consider it my favorite IDE. Most of my work these days is in Perl/Mason, which TextMate is well-suited for. It is lightweight, and I love how projects are managed.

Reeder (free)

Reeder for Mac is an RSS reader that is still in early beta, but it is coming along nicely. It uses Google Reader as a backend for subscription management and syncing. It is almost painful to use Google Reader’s web-based interface after using this application. It’s a beauty.

Caffeine (free)

Do you watch full-length movies, or even twenty-minute television episodes on your Mac? With a single click on its unobtrusive menubar icon, Caffeine prevents your screensaver from running for a specified duration of time.

DropBox (free)

I have been a DropBox user since it was in early beta, but I have only recently begun using it on a regular basis. DropBox provides online storage that automatically syncs between any number of devices. I use it on my MacBook Pro, Windows desktop, and iPhone. It’s great for documents or files that you need on the go or that you can not risk being lost to a bad disk.

All of these applications are free or have a free trial, so give them a shot!

Why Wesabe Lost to Mint

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:26:35 -0800

Why Wesabe Lost to Mint:

A great read from one of Wesabe’s co-founders on why Mint beat Wesabe.

Apple Pre-Sold 600,000 iPhone 4's

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 09:44:15 -0700

Apple Pre-Sold 600,000 iPhone 4's:

I guess this sheds a little light on why Apple and AT&T were having problems yesterday.

Twitter Acquires Smallthought Systems

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:07:47 -0700

Twitter Acquires Smallthought Systems:

What little shop will they swallow up next?

Why Tony Hsieh Sold Zappos

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 09:10:00 -0700

Why Tony Hsieh Sold Zappos:

Read the article to find out why, but it sounds like Tony made the right decision:

Zappos continues to operate independently. Our relationship is governed by a document that formally recognizes the uniqueness of Zappos’s culture and Amazon’s duty to protect it. We think of Amazon as a giant consulting company that we can hire if we want — for instance, if we need help redesigning our warehouse systems.

In the first quarter of 2010, net sales at Zappos were up almost 50 percent, and we’ve added several hundred new employees.

Google ditches Windows on security concerns

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:29:00 -0700

Google ditches Windows on security concerns:

I can’t imagine that very many Google engineers were using Windows to begin with.

My (Lack of) Privacy

Wed, 19 May 2010 20:54:00 -0700

Until tonight, I have never really considered my (lack of) privacy on the Internet. My Facebook privacy settings have always been the defaults, which basically shared everything with everyone. My Twitter feed has been public, included location data, and relayed everything to Facebook and LinkedIn. My Foursquare check-ins have been relayed to Twitter, and so on. Not only is a lot of this information seen as spam by many people who read it, but I am realizing that a lot of it should be kept private. So, who should see what?

Facebook’s privacy settings are somewhat complicated. Things that I consider to be private (birthday, wall posts, comments) are now only viewable by friends. Photos and some other profile information (political and religious views, etc.) are viewable by friends of friends. Profile pictures and my biography are viewable by everyone (allows people to find and befriend me).

Twitter’s privacy settings are simple. I can choose whether to make my feed public or protected, and choose whether or not to include location data. I am still unsure what to do about this one. Should I protect my feed or should I filter what I post to Twitter? If I filter what I post to Twitter, that means that I might actually need to log in to Facebook to post semi-private content (which I never do because I am lazy). For the time being, I have decided to leave my feed public, but I have disabled location data.

Deciding what to do about Foursquare was fairly easy. I am just going to filter what I have relayed to Twitter (very little) and Facebook (probably everything). My only outstanding question is if I relay to Facebook and Twitter, will I have duplicate posts on Facebook since I have Twitter relay to Facebook? I guess I will have to wait until the next time I check in.

I do not really care to provide my professional connections on LinkedIn with a window into my private life. If they are a friend as well as a coworker, then they are probably already my friend on Facebook. I have enabled filtering (via #in) for tweets imported into LinkedIn, which means that I will probably never post anything to LinkedIn again.

I made all of these decisions and changes within the last couple of hours, so there is a good chance that I will change things in the near future, but I feel much better about my privacy now that I did earlier today.

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:02:00 -0700

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash:

Jobs lays out six reasons why Apple doesn’t allow Flash on iPhones, iPods, and iPads.

"[Netflix for the iPad is] a bit buggy and crashes whenever I finish an episode, but other than that,..."

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:57:00 -0700

“[Netflix for the iPad is] a bit buggy and crashes whenever I finish an episode, but other than that, it’s pretty great.”

- Matt Haughey

The Wind of Change is Blowing…

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:36:00 -0800

Recreating this website was not one of my new year’s resolutions, but I can’t take it any longer. There are too many things wrong with this it. If you think what you see of the website sucks, you should see the horrible admin interface that I created for myself. Hardly anything is salvageable. Back in January, I started developing a new website from scratch.

Application

The current website is horribly architected and uses a ridiculously slow custom library for handling data access and validation. I’m going to be following a new design approach, but new website will still be written in PHP (5.3) with MySQL for the database, and it will still use the Zend Framework. I’ve toyed with using Doctrine ORM, but it seems like overkill for what I’m doing.

Interface

I’m actually going to be releasing the new website application before completing the redesign; however, there are going to be noticeable changes at that point.

There are too many good bookmarking applications around the ‘net to have one baked into this website, so the bookmarks section is gong away.

Previously, the expectation was for musings to be multi-paragraph articles, worthy of dozens upon dozens of your thoughtful comments. I don’t have the time to write full-length articles, and I doubt that will change anytime soon, so the format is going to change. After the release, musings are going to follow a format more like John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. A musing might be a full-length article, but it could just be a link to a website with a single-sentence comment. This may decrease my Twitter traffic, but that probably wouldn’t be so bad…

And This Is Happening When?

Good question. I’m probably within ten hours of completing the application itself, which means it could be released sometime in late March or early April. The redesign? I wouldn’t count on seeing anything until July.

The M in MVC

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:17:34 -0800

I’ve been thinking a lot about code separation, and it’s something that my coworkers and I spent a fair amount of time talking about recently. For a long time, my idea of a model in MVC was a bunch of fairly dumb objects that also handled their own persistence, and I was putting business logic into controllers. I’ve come to believe that this isn’t the best way to do things. What follows is my current view of optimal code separation, although it’s not complete, and it could change in five minutes.

Models

Models are be dumb. Really dumb. If you’re domain is automobiles, a model might be a car. The car model could have basic properties (make, model, year, etc.), and the methods would be mostly mutators and accessors for those properties. Models have no idea how they’re persisted, or even if it’s persisted. They don’t know anything about other components in the system, except possibly other models. Models contain minimal business logic.

Services

Services are where 99% of business logic resides. Services know about models and handle persistence of those models. A car service should probably be able to create new cars, and find, change, and delete existing cars. Permissions logic is located within services.

Controllers

Since business logic is located in services, controllers are very light. They are just translators. Controllers receive input, convert it into something that services can understand, and send the necessary parameters to the appropriate views. In an application, you might have one controller for an HTML or web service interface and another for a command-line interface, but both use the same service.

Views

Views are dumber than everything except models, and that’s because they only know about models. Because models are dumb and can’t do anything dangerous, it’s safe for controllers to pass them directly to views.

Potential Problems

Most applications are probably going to need to check permissions in views (i.e., hide the “delete” button from certain users). Since this logic is located in services, controllers need to push this information into the views, or the views need to know about the services. I’m against views knowing about services, so I’d prefer the controllers to push the information down. I’m sure there are other problems with this design, so feel free to leave a comment or start a discussion on Twitter. I’d love to hear other opinions.

MacBook Pro and OS X First Impressions

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:54:02 -0800

Thanks to my new employer, Ning, I am in possession of my first Apple computer. After spending my first week with a shiny new MacBook Pro and OS X, I thought I would jot down some notes about my experience.

There are several things that I am sure have affected my expectations, likes, and dislikes. I am not your average computer user. Being a software developer, I believe I fit into the category of “power user.” For the past two years, I have been primarily using Ubuntu as my operating system, but I come from a long history of Windows usage (and continue to use it when absolutely necessary).

The MacBook Pro

Package and Product Design

Apple’s package design blows me away. It was almost enough to make me stop removing the product, but the MacBook Pro inside was too sexy to keep wrapped up. The exterior of the MacBook Pro looks and feels durable. I have always been afraid of snapping a laptop in half when picking it up by one corner, but not this thing. It looks like a smooth slab of metal, but weighs next to nothing. I drag it with me to every meeting.

Attention to Detail

Apple’s attention to detail is astounding, especially when it comes to the power plug. I know. You are thinking, “It’s just a power plug. So what?” Instead of the plug snapping into the laptop, it is magnetic. This makes it easier to plug in and stay plugged in, but is not as disastrous when you decide to run away with your laptop while it is still plugged in. Also, the plug is symmetrical. You can plug it in upside-down or right-side up. Both sides have a light to indicate the power status (charging, charged, etc.). This also means that you can see the power status while the laptop is closed. Each of these things probably go unnoticed by many people, but that is kind of the point. It is just easy.

OS X

Applications

I was quite pleased to find that almost every application I use is already available for OS X (Firefox, Eclipse, KeePassX), or there is a viable alternative (Pidgin/Adium). This probably has something to do with the fact that I have been using Ubuntu for the past couple of years, so I have disconnected myself from Windows-only software.

Application installation has been the most disappointing part of my experience. At first, I had no idea what to do with a .dmg file. I assumed what I was doing was wrong, so I did my due diligence and researched it a bit. Apparently you are supposed to mount the .dmg file, drag-and-drop the application into the Applications directory, and then you can safely unmount and delete the .dmg file. This is hardly intuitive. Many applications display a UI with the application file and Applications directory when the .dmg file is mounted, but it varies from application to application. Maybe I have been spoiled by Ubuntu’s package manager, but I would argue that installing most Windows applications is far more user-friendly.

Multi-Touch

Multi-touch is best new feature that I have encountered. My problem was that I never bothered researching the various ways to interact using multi-touch, so it was three days before I realized you could trigger a secondary click by pressing two fingers at once. Clicking and dragging is much more intuitive using multi-touch, as is zooming and scrolling. I have owned an iPod Touch for two years, but interacting with a full-blown OS in this way is amazing.

Differences between OS X, Ubuntu, and Windows

What happened to my home and end keys, and do I really need control, alt/option, and command? These are things I will cope with over time, but they are causing me much pain for now. Also, pressing print screen is much easier than command + control + shift + 3. I was not going to figure that one out by myself.

Summary

Overall, I am extremely pleased with the MacBook Pro and OS X. I have already been discussing getting the Mrs. a MacBook since her HP laptop committed digital suicide several months ago.

Ten New Year’s Resolutions for 2010

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:01:04 -0800

A little late, and not in any particular order…

Waste Less Time

I spend way too much time skimming RSS feeds, tweets, and useless news articles. In 2010, I will waste less time.

Play More Music

My wonderful wife talked me into buying a Yamaha MO8 last year, and I haven’t played it in more than two months. In 2010, I will play music at least one hour per week.

I can’t remember the last time I read a dead-tree book from cover to cover. I have also been lax about reading my Bible on a regular basis. In 2010, I will read five dead-tree books from cover to cover (including the Bible).

Blog More

Year after year, I seem to leave this sad little website to collect dust. In 2010, I will post at least twice per month.

Tweet More

Since we’ve moved to Bellevue, I have less contact with friends and family, so Twitter (and Facebook) are how most people know what I’m up to. In 2010, I will tweet more.

Exercise

Except for my twenty-five minute walk to and/or from work, I don’t exercise at all. My wife and I recently got memberships at LA Fitness. In 2010, I will exercise… more.

Backup Data Regularly

My wife’s hard drive crashed last year, and we nearly lost all of our digital photos. In 2010, I will backup data regularly to a local and remote location.

Respond to Emails and Voice Messages

I’m really bad about responding to emails and voice messages. In 2010, I will reply to emails and voice messages within forty-eight hours.

Relaunch Rain Cloud Development

I renamed Sanctus Studios to Rain Cloud Development last year. In 2010, I will design a logo and website and publish a website for Rain Cloud Development.

Try New Things

Over the past few weeks, I’ve tried all sort of new foods (Korean, Dim sum, muffulettas), and I’ve loved it! In 2010, I will try new foods and activities.

Feel free to pester me and make sure I’m working on all of these throughout the year.

Re: In a Perfect World…

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:49:00 -0800

Every January, one of my tasks is to update my resume. Since my resume is hosted on this website, I decided to take a look at what else might be collecting dust around here. It’s strange to me that I spend most of my waking hours attached to an Internet-connected device, yet it’s been more than six months since I’ve written anything.

I looked through my first In a Perfect World… musing and decided to write a sort of response…

Life would involve less work and more play.

Sadly, I fear this to be true for quite some time. I’ve decided to go for a Master’s degree after I graduate this June.

Public education would have more value than a piece of paper at completion.

Thanks to some of the wonderful faculty at UWT, my education is beginning to become more valuable to me. I’m enrolled in a Human-Computer Interaction course that is focusing on user research-driven design. The class is actually being co-taught by the lead of the Gmail design team.

Adobe would release Photoshop CS4 for GNU/Linux (and I’d have the time and knowledge to use it).

This hasn’t quite come true, but for some crazy reason, Google put some effort into the WINE project, and now Photoshop CS2 runs nearly perfectly for me in Ubuntu. The problem is that I still need the time and talent to use it.

This wouldn’t be the first thing I’ve written for the ’net in the last several years.

It wasn’t “several years” this time, but more than six months between musings is nothing to brag about.

I wouldn’t be coming up with more items to add to this list just to avoid finishing a school project.

Once again, the only reason I’m probably writing is putting off finishing a school project. I’m giving an elevator pitch in my HCI course tomorrow.

In a Perfect World…

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:35:54 -0700

Life would involve less work and more play.
Public education would have more value than a piece of paper at completion.
Adobe would release Photoshop CS4 for GNU/Linux (and I’d have the time and knowledge to use it).
This wouldn’t be the first thing I’ve written for the ’net in the last several years.
I wouldn’t be coming up with more items to add to this list just to avoid finishing a school project.

TypePad AntiSpam

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:07:41 -0700

TypePad AntiSpam:

This looks like a promising replacement for Akismet.

The Stapler’s Secret

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:33:06 -0700

The Stapler’s Secret:

Apparently staplers have more than one way of stapling — it’s called “pinning”.

The PHP Benchmark

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:54:26 -0700

The PHP Benchmark:

Live PHP benchmarks for loops, echo vs. print, and more.