I built my first simple web page at SAIC in 1992 when my good friend Gregg Hanna set up a publicly accessible web server for my working group. Since then I have had a lot of people suggest that my web sites could look better but frankly I have always been more interested in content and developing cool web application functionality. Recently I have been putting some effort into improving my design skills and the best resource that I have found is "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams The author Robin Williams does a fantastic job at explaining four basic concepts of design: contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. She then provides good examples that show the reader how to recognize bad design and how to correct design errors. I spent some time redesigning my main web site and really enjoyed the process. I started by determining the worst aspects of the old design based on Robin's advice and then tried to correct the design flaws using her ...

As I mentioned in my last blog article I am (mostly) shutting down my consulting business in order to have time for work on writing projects and to try to develop three business ideas. All three involve web apps/services and I want to use Clojure for two of them and Rails for the third. Rails 4 should be released early in 2013 but I thought I would get a leg up and start experimenting with Rails 4 now. Fairly easy to set up and try: git clone https://github.com/rails/rails.git cd rails gem install sprockets rake build ; rake install And then version 4 beta is installed: ✗ rails -v Rails 4.0.0.beta ✗ rails new testapp -d postgresql I had to comment out the assets group in the generated Gemfile before bundle install but otherwise everything worked fine.

I would like to wish you Happy Holidays ! I hope you are with family and friends enjoying yourself over the holidays. I wanted to share with you my plans for the future. Starting in January I am planning on mostly shutting down my consulting business. I have been consulting for about 14 years and consulting has provided me with a great life style but it is time for a change. Before consulting I worked at SAIC, Physical Dynamics, and Angel Studios. I will still provide some consulting services but will limit the time directly helping customers on very small projects. I plan to spend most of my "work" time writing and developing a few software as a service business ideas. I have written published books for some great publishers (Springer-Verlag, McGraw-Hill, Morgan Kaufman, APress, Sybex, M&T Press, and J. Wiley) but because I prefer writing on niche subjects (things that are of special interest to me!) I will probably only write free books published as PDFs in the f...

I took a ton of hi-def video and pictures. Here is a Google+ photo album of a few of the pictures (small representative sample) I have a Canon T2i camera with a nice 24-105mm L-lens. I mostly take hi-def video hand held. If we were in the same place enjoying a glass of wine together I would show you the hi-def video, but the pictures in the linked photo album are OK as a representation of the experiences Carol and I had.

Note: update: Holland America gave us a fair refund - I withdraw my complaints listed on this blog article My wife and I have been on 15 cruises and the service provided by Holland America on the 23 day cruise we are on right now is so much worse than the other 14 cruises we have been on that I feel motivated to write up our experiences. Note: our cruise was up the Amazon River and we did have some memorable experiences which I will blog about in the next week or so and provide links to some of our pictures and videos. In order of "worse things first": We booked a tour to Santarem (large industrial city) and Alter do Chao (a pretty little town on the water with amazing beaches). The tour guide was from Santarem and spent all 4 3/4 hours of the tour in her home town and blew off taking us to the scheduled stop in Alter do Chao. She did give us lots of unwanted shopping experiences, and wasted time stopping the bus by a new highway project and going into lots of detai...