I’ve moved to Disqus for comments. I like their interface and the way comments and commentators can be tracked across blogs, articles and discussions. I created my first Rails plugin in the process too, but I’ll save that for another post.

I spent some time migrating to Git this weekend. For those that aren’t familiar, Git is a distributed version control system. Unlike a centralized VCS model like Subversion with one main repository that all participants check out/into, Git gives each participant their own local copy of the repo and then provides the necessary tools to push, pull and merge between them all. As the sole developer of my code, I wasn’t really expecting a big benefit from this though and was really just doing it to learn about the new kid on the block.

I have an hour and a half commute one way, and spend about 1 hour of that on the train hacking. I usually commit when I get home in the evening (my repo is on my web server). This often means that my commits contain half finished changes, which kinda sorta defeats the purpose of version control (even if I am just one developer). One of the things that I really like about Git is the ability now to commit locally. I can commit each change as I finish it and have that all preserved when I push everything up to my “main” repo on the server.

Git also makes it really easy to create branches locally, which is another feature that I was really missing, even though I didn’t realize it. Because of the scatter shot way I do development on this blog (add something over here, a little something over there), it’s happened more than once were I have changes in my working copy that can’t go out because they’re half finished, but I really want to push out this other cool, new feature that I can’t wait to get out. With local branches, I can now branch and merge as much as I want, working an any number of features at once and never getting “stuck” with a changes that aren’t ready to go out.

All in all I’m pretty impressed with Git, both the internals and just the overall flexibility it allows in workflow and process. I’m looking forward to working on a project using it with other developers.

I’ve never completely understood the world of stock markets and investment banks. Sure, I get the (very) basic ideas and concepts of how it works, but my reaction is always the same… “Are you serious?”. I’m amazed it works at all.

This “intrigue”, coupled with a few years working in the Federal Reserve, leaves me standing in awe of the events that have transpired this year. When Bear Stearns collapsed and the Fed stepped in to save it, I couldn’t believe I was living in such interesting times. To think that the Fed would step in and save a private institution, an investment bank (outside it’s regulatory supervision) was really surprising. And then they took over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which didn’t have quite the shock factor at first, but becomes more interesting considering recent events… which of course are the fall of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch.

I’m not going to comment or analyze it all, I’m neither qualified nor really interested in trying to figure it out. I think it’s clear though that the financial world is undergoing drastic change.

And as a result the world of startups and technology and the web will undergo drastic changes too (well, maybe not as drastic as the financial world). This article really covers it well and was the inspiration for this post. Basically, we’re going to see more of a movement towards apps and services that provide real, tangible value (like saving people money or providing value in their real, non-online life). This is really exciting to me.

I am very much in interested in building products and services that are customer oriented and that solve real problems. I’m working on a small app that I hope does this for it’s intended audience. I won’t go into details here, but it’s really got me thinking more about creating things that help people in real ways.

There are several posts on Hacker News about the Podcaster application being rejected by Apple for inclusion in the App Store because it duplicates functionality in iTunes. I’m not convinced this app was rejected because it competes with iTunes as some people are suggesting (the line from Apple was that it “duplicates functionality”), but I do agree it’s a serious issue for developers to be only getting this pass/fail vote from Apple after they’ve committed the time, energy, and resources to build the app and submit it. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, but I’m guessing Apple will be going back on this one.

This is one of the reasons that I think Android (Google’s open platform for mobile devices) is going to be a majorly disruptive force (in a good way) for mobile apps. They are breaking down the barriers that have existed around mobile app development, and putting control back into the hands of developers instead of the service providers and handset manufacturers. I guess we will have to wait and see just how this plays out as well, but the idea of the mobile development space becoming more like development for the web is very interesting and exciting.

I’ve been working on a side project lately. It’s giving me a chance to use a lot of tools and tech that I’ve been interested in for a long time, like Google Maps, jQuery and AJAX. It’s also going to serve a good purpose once it’s reached an alpha state, which should be relatively soon.

I’ve added the ability to comment on posts. Now I just need to find somebody to comment on said posts :)

It’s been 12 days since I last posted. My plan was to post once a day for the next month, so I’ve obviously fallen off the wagon a bit. In retrospect though I don’t feel bad because I’ve made good progress on several other projects I’m working on.

• ANSI Common Lisp — I’ve been reading and working my way through this book. I’ll save my thoughts about Lisp for a separate post. I do like the style of this book though. It reminds me a little of the famous K&R C book in that it’s sparse yet efficient. I’ll post some more thoughts about the book too once I’ve finished.

• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide — I got this book just about a week ago and I’ve already read through both the core and web specific sections (not including the reference material), which is something like 500 pages I think. It’s funny, but I never imagined I would get so excited over JavaScript. I can’t believe that I’ve gone this long as a web developer without really knowing the underlying language. Again, I’ll have to save my revelations for another post, but I would highly recommend this book to anybody who deals with JavaScript, and especially for anybody doing any serious (Dynamic HTML/AJAX) programming in JS.

• Introduction to Algorithms — I’m going back to school. I owned this book as an undergrad, and now I own it again. This is a meaty one… I’m just getting started, so it’s going to take a little bit.

• bonesisalive.com — I’ve started work on the comments feature. I was about half-way through adding support for Akismet to block spam comments, when I realized it was really a bit of premature optimization considering I don’t even have any readers at this point. I know full well I’ll have to implement it at some point, but I think it’s much better to just get the feature out. Especially because once I get the feature out I’ll feel better about publishing the link to this blog around. It feels kinda silly to have a sight that no one can comment on at the moment.

I received a call right at 5:00pm this afternoon about a critical, last minute before launch, must be fixed bug. The problem was buried in some old data, in a horribly designed schema, in a decrepit old system that’s been around for about 7 years now. I was not happy.

I’ve been realizing lately how much I want… no, yearn… to work on code and systems that somebody loves and cares about.