Bob McCune

For several months now, all of the candidates have been hounding me to make a public endorsement of their candidacy. Everyone from Obama to Hillary to McCain to Romney have been looking for me to give them the final push over the top as we head into Super Tuesday. I have decided I cannot, in good conscience, stand behind any one of them.

Instead, I have agreed to officially endorse the one true candidate of change. And yes, that candidate could be none other than A Tasty Burrito.

Tasty Burrito is the true candidate of change. He promises to end the hamburger-centric policies that have plagued this country for far too long. His economic stimulus plan guarantees all middle and lower income families will receive sour cream and guacamole rebates and a government-provided “stay fresh” container for all ground corn-based products.

Now some will tell you his rhetoric is long-winded and gassy. That you’ll feel bloated by his speeches. I wholeheartedly disagree. I find his platform to be both delicious and quite satisfying.

But you say, “Bob, can we in this perilous time of war and terrorism, a rapidly declining dollar, and record foreclosures really trust the presidency to burrito stuffed in an Armani suit?” My response? Sí, se puede, yes we can!

For the past few months I’ve been spending a considerable amount of my free time learning Objective-C and Cocoa. Apple’s Leopard release has introduced so many new and interesting developer technologies that I decided it was finally time to dive in and learn to write code for my favorite platform.

One of the new Leopard APIs I’ve been excited to learn is called Core Animation (CA). CA is a new Cocoa framework providing you the ability to create UIs with rich animations and compositions by using with a simple, consistent programming model. This allows you to easily create visual effects for your applications that would be impractical, if not downright impossible, to do on other platforms.

One of the challenges to learning CA (especially given my n00b status) is the lack of books and tutorials on the topic. So, I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from the Pragmatic Programmer guys introducing Bill Dudney’s new book Core Animation for OS X. It provides in-depth coverage of all the key concepts including animations, filtering, layering, and 3D effects. I’ve just started reading it, but it looks great so far. I’ll be sure to write a full review when I complete it.

The book is currently available in “beta” PDF form with the final print version available in July. You can find out more about the book and get your own copy at its website.

I’d like to say thanks to everyone who attended my Spring 2.5 presentation at last week’s TCJUG meeting. We had another good turnout, which is always nice to see. Jeff Jensen at Intertech is always a great host and I had a fun time presenting. I hope the info was useful to you. I’ve attached copies of the presentation and sample code for your reference.

Thanks again!

-Bob

I’d like to say thanks to everyone who attended my JPA presentation at last night’s TCJUG meeting. It was a full house and there was a lot of good conversation during and after the presentation. As always, Jeff Jensen at Intertech is a great host and I had a fun time. I hope the info was useful to you. I’ll post the slides and demo application as soon as I finish making some Maven tweaks. Look for it early next week.

Thanks again!

-Bob

I was recently in the market for a new mouse for my MacBook Pro. I did some research and found the Logitech VX Revolution mouse had received a lot of good press and most users raved about it. I’ve owned a few different Logitech products over the years (mice, speakers, universal remote) and, although my experience with Logitech has been somewhat mixed, I decided to go ahead and pick one up.

I installed the mouse and configured it for my system. Less than a day later my system froze up with a kernel panic (see below), which is essentially the Mac equivalent of the Windows BSOD.

This is an extremely rare event, but I didn’t give it too much thought and rebooted my machine and got back to work. A couple of days later the same thing happened again but, unfortunately, this one left my machine in a bad state. As I hadn’t made any other system changes, it was clear my fancy new mouse (the drivers, anyway) were to blame. I uninstalled the drivers, ditched the mouse, and got my machine running again, but it continued acting up with miscellaneous problems and freezes. I finally decided to wipe my system and do a clean install.

I’ve been back to using Macs for about the past 3-4 years and have never experienced a problem like this. I had only experienced one previous kernel panic and that was due to me attempting to do something stupid rather than an actual problem with the system. I can’t say you’ll experience the same problem I did, but Logitech has earned the chief spot on on my shit list for causing me these headaches.

Well, after having my blog in maintenance mode for the past couple of weeks I’m finally back online. I resolved the issues and restored the data back to its original state and I’m running a shiny new installation of Wordpress 2.1. I also have a local test environment running on my Mac using MAMP and set up a cron job to perform daily db backups. Hopefully these steps will help me avoid shooting myself in the foot again. I still have a few tweaks to make here and there, but I should be back in business.

I’ve got a bunch of Spring-related topics to blog about so look for some new posts over the next week.

I wanted to quickly post to let you know that my blog will be down for maintenance sometime this week. I’ve haven’t determined when just yet, but wanted to give you a heads up in case you try to access the site and it appears to have disappeared.

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Yes, 2007 is almost here. My greatest goal for the year is to simply be more productive. It seems that every year my list of tasks and responsibilities grows and it’s becoming more difficult to stay on top of everything. At any given moment I’ve got about 50 things that I need to do and at least 100 more that I’d like to do. Attempting to do everything ultimately leads to accomplishing very little. It’s time to introduce some new practices into my routine to help me juggle all of these tasks and still maintain my sanity.

To that end, I’m finally jumping on the GTD bandwagon. I’ve read David Allen’s Getting Things Done in the past, but only half-heartedly embraced his methods. Over the past few months I’ve been spending more time integrating tips from 43folders and Lifehacker into my routine, but think I need to follow a more structured methodology to truly achieve my goals. So I’m re-reading the GTD book and jumping in head first. I’m sure I’ll be blogging about my experiences with it over the year.

So, what are some of my specific goals for the year? Probably the biggest, from a professional standpoint, is to spend more time writing. I really intended to do more in 2006, but… well, see above. I’ve got a number of topics I’m considering and plan to get at least a couple done and published this year. I do have a goal of writing a book in the future, but that isn’t on the agenda for 2007.

I will spend some more time investigating JSF this year. From what I’ve seen, it’s still not the time to introduce it into my real work, but some of the changes in the Java EE spec and the introduction of a framework like Seam definitely makes it look more appealing. Spring MVC definitely provides a better fit for what I’m doing now and I’m looking forward to using some of the new features that have been introduced with version 2.0.

I’m going to continue spending some free time on the Semblance project. If you haven’t seen the project before, I’d definitely recommend checking it out. If you’re using Struts 1.x, it provides a very compelling add-on to enhance the value of your POJO model. It also offers a really nice XHTML templating framework that could be of use to a lot of projects. I hope to get my current project tasks completed and code checked soon and I’ll see what’s in store for 2007.

On the personal front, I definitely need to put a higher priority on my health. I don’t think my wife and kids are thrilled that I am resembling Kevin James from the King of Queens. The first major thing to drop from my diet is Mountain Dew… sweet, sweet Mountain Dew. If you own PepsiCo stock, you may want to get out now. I’ve also recently purchased a health club-quality Elliptical machine. I can’t promise that I’m going to use it every day, but at least I’ve taken away my last argument for not working out.

I’ll just finish by making a few predictions for 2007:

• The Minnesota Vikings will continue to suck.
• Rosie O’Donnell will still annoy me.
• The SNL D**k in a Box video will continue to crack me up.
• Apple will market something and I will have to buy two of it.
• Saddam Hussein will still be dead.

God bless and have a great 2007!

I was recently compiling a list of Test-driven Development (TDD) “Best Practices” for my client project’s wiki site and thought this would probably be useful to the community at large. I’ve been an avid practitioner and proponent of test-driven development for a few years now and have found it to be one of the most important practices I’ve adopted. If practiced correctly, it will have a significantly positive impact on the design and quality of your code.

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