Infinite State

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…