Infinite State

Turns out the plate in my shoulder is made of Titanium. Not clear whether it will set off the airport scanners, but I’m now carrying a little card from my surgeon to help explain if it does…

Guess I’ll find out the hard way the next time I get on a plane.

The answer was so simple, but until I stumbled on this wonderful little AppleScript I was constantly frustrated by the difficulty of just copying the full path to whatever you were looking at in Finder. Now I’m happy.

I recently spent some time testing out MyFax for internet fax send/receive. A friend had good experiences, so I was optimistic. Unfortunately, everything was a problem for me. Their web site was complete Safari-unfriendly (I’m on a Mac) and I kept getting error pages that indicated a pretty poor job of running their business. Worse, trying to send email faxes (e.g. 1234567890@myfax.com) with PDF attachments from Mail.app were consistently failing to include the PDF content in the fax. I tried from their web site, same problem. I tried from Firefox and it finally worked. Forget that.

So I tried out RingCentral, thanks to this great FaxCompare site. I was immediately thrilled to find a decent native Mac app client for their service, and it worked perfectly. Notifications are clear and fast (MyFax seemed sluggish) and I’ve had no problems yet. Best of all? I can send faxes with PDF attachments from Mail.app, no problem.

So if you’re on a Mac, looking for a reasonably-priced internet fax service — I’m happy so far.

That’s my clavicle and its new best friend. For what it’s worth, I hate it. Definitely better than having those bones shifting around, but I really don’t like this.

I stumbled on this quote in a Wikipedia article on Lutes:

Matheson, ca 1720, stated if a lute-player has lived eighty years, he has surely spent sixty years tuning.

My immediate thought was that if a programmer has lived eighty then he’s probably spent sixty holding some combination of the control and arrow keys.

Inspired by some recent comments I made at the New York CTO club, my colleague Dan Woods just published an article at Forbes.com in which he interviewed me about what I see as some of the most significant advantages of the Groovy language in enterprise software development environments.

I will just add that over the past year I have  found Groovy to be a lot of fun and surprisingly satisfying to work in. Over the years, I’ve worked in so many languages that at this point I just want something that allows me to clearly express the ideas I’m working with, and support the evolution of those ideas over time. For me, a lot of the pleasure in programming is still the process of coming to understand what it is that you are modeling. One of the things that I like best about Groovy, is that you can evolve your code alongside your understanding. So you can begin with a three line script that just does something very basic, and useful. You can then iterate those same lines into a more structured class, statically typed variables, interfaces and packages for managing name spaces and complexity, access modifiers for encapsulation, and build and deploy your code as a jar file or a war file just like any other Java component. And that component runs on the mature, high-performance Java virtual machine that we really know how to tune, monitor and scale.

Now if I could only get voice-recognition support for programming, I could use some of this recovery time to get some coding done…

…is they break if you hit them hard enough.

I think it is required, given my previous posts on all the benefits of cycling, to disclose that a few days ago I went out on a snowy morning when I probably shouldn’t have  and broke my collarbone in two places. While this has provided lots of entertaining stories, it certainly raises some tough questions about something that I love to do.  I’m scheduled for surgery on Wednesday to have the bone repaired and a metal plate inserted. I’m encouraged that apparently Lance Armstrong is wearing one too, but I suspect that his is some advanced carbon fiber molybdenum composite…

Earlier this week I stopped for a red light on Park Avenue. Like most mornings, it was a school of yellow taxis and me, and a few other hardy bikers. Temperatures were in the 20’s and I was sporting a functional but perhaps hilarious look. I snapped this after fumbling my camera out and raising even more questions in the minds of those cabbies. Ninja alien tourist? Psychotic bike commuter? Both, probably.

Got this?

Try using the latest SLF4J version. I upped to 1.5.10 and it resolved it. For more details, see Adam’s post in this thread: https://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?p=2400801

Not sure if my Latin is correct, but my meaning was to seize the coldest day.

I just got into the office after a fantastic but normal morning commute. My bike is leaning against the wall by the window, and I’ll feeling way too warm under all the layers I’m wearing. Hard to believe I’m overdressed for temps in the 20’s and cold winds.

Riding through Central Park on the way here I was thinking that there’s a special pleasure in seizing something wonderful that other people don’t seem to see. All those people on the subway, packed in and unhappy (you can see it on their faces and read it in their bodies) — I know they can’t all hop on a bike and ride to work, but some of them could. And if they did, wouldn’t they find the same glorious parkway, almost empty except for a few hardy runners and the very occasional cyclist? The trees are leafless, bare and structural. The sky is available, cold but embracing. The buildings are at the periphery, a reminder but distant enough. I can’t say the air is much sweeter, but there’s certainly less diesel in it.

And each day, I get the warm, fluid feeling of using my body to move me around. Sitting at my desk is a rest between the rides. I’m about to run for the Y around the corner and try to slip in a fast swim before I shower and dress in more office-appropriate clothes. But I have to say to anyone reading this: it’s available to you, in some form. Right now. It turns out that “freezing” cold weather really isn’t so cold with a little bit of clothing and your body making its own heat.

I’m grateful every day I ride for many things, including the wise friends who urged me on or supported me in crossing over the line from seeing it as crazy to realizing that everyone else is just missing it. Think I’m crazy for riding my bike to work in mid-January? Then you need to try it out and discover what’s out there that is vibrantly alive and rewarding.

Each time I encounter another cyclist (in this weather especially) I say hello or good morning and see if they’re up for a little conversation and commuter-shop-talk. This morning I met two and had great little human exchanges of a kind that you don’t get on a subway. Camaraderie in the cold helps, but they both had the same light in their faces that I knew was shining out of mine: we were out in it, seizing it and loving it, and all the people bundled up against the cold and stepping down off the curbs could barely see us go by.

I’m going to get a mounted camera so I can start posting some images from these rides and capture the changing seasons of the city.

To the water!