I’ve recently begun drinking the koolaid of Git, and damn it’s tasty! The things I can do with git that I couldn’t have done before (or would have been difficult to do) makes me excited about it. In fact, the one feature that I thought was a drawback — the no-one-true-server nature of it — is actually its strongest selling point. See, the way I’ve taken to doing my development now is I create two “remote” repositories.

A few months ago I had the opportunity to meet with the crew developing PhoneGap down at their headquarters (Nitobi, down in Gastown district of Vancouver). It’s only a few blocks away from where I work, but the horrible downpour of rain made me think twice about going (hey, it is Vancouver after all). Next time I’ll bring my laptop with me, but it gave me an introduction to what they’re looking for help with, and where they’re taking PhoneGap.

I love living in Canada, and I especially like living in Vancouver. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I have a lovely wife, a great job, a wonderful city…what more could I ask for? Oh right, that’s it…warm weather! I’m not meant for frozen water falling from the sky, or bundling up into so many layers that I feel like an onion (or a parfait). I don’t like the cold.

On the train ride to work today I was listening to “Daft Punk” on my iPhone while reading my blogs, my usual morning activity. And as my mind wandered, the song “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” came on; it’s one of my favourites, as I’m an avid electronic music fan. But since I was reading Ajaxian and several other software industry business blogs at the time, the song seemed strangely appropriate. Everyone is trying to find ways of working harder, developing better software, releasing to market faster, and having a much stronger market position (honestly, this is what was running through my head).

At work I needed to perform an animation on a sprite-based image (e.g. one large image containing multiple stages within an animation, pre-rendered). Since there was no easy way within Mootools to iterate over an array of class names, I created one. I called it “Fx.Index”, but if you have a better name for it, please leave me a comment. Fx.Index = Fx.Base.extend({ initialize: function(el, css_classes, options) { this.element = $(el); this.

Apparently buying a GM car 8 years ago entitles me to recieve a wonderful little email from GM about the proposed bailout. It seems they’re trying to stem the flood of people abandoning them in the wake of the US bailout. Dear Michael Nachbaur, You made the right choice when you put your confidence in General Motors, and we appreciate your past support. I want to assure you that we are making our best vehicles ever, and we have exciting plans for the future.

Yesterday at the Elephant & Castle Pub I was talking with a friend who’s decided to finally take the leap and move into doing business as a free agent. He’s filing all the business applications, getting consulting jobs (he already has 2 long-term gigs lined up), and is going through the motions of becoming his own business entity. All that’s left is a name. Web businesses aren’t bound by the same requirements of conventional businesses to have a relevant name, but we have different problems.

I’m developing an Ajax web application in Mootools. Two actually, if you consider the work I do with my day job. At work we’re using the older 1.11 version of Mootools, but in the interest of helping this great project, I’m doing my spare-time development using version 1.2. Mootools 1.2 makes it a lot more obvious how to extend and create your own subclasses of existing objects. Instead of writing all my fancy UI components as a series of functions within my page’s class object, I can create separate objects to handle individual features and call out when I need to.

I haven’t had anything resembling a blog in years, and while I have had quite a lot to say in the past, I felt as if no one would really care one way or the other. This impression has changed recently, since I’m once again working in an office environment, and my interactions with co-workers shows that I do have some bits of wisdom rattling around in my brain that’s worthwhile sharing.