Here are the details of my new home TV system.

First of all, the only paying services I have for TV entertainment are DSL and Netflix. You can get the cheapest Netflix membership and still get all the “Watch it now” content that they have. Not the best and most recent movies, but there is a lot of stuff you can watch, and I always seem to find something interesting for myself or the kids. I think you can get the basic Netflix account for under $10.

My DSL is the only other monthly expense, which is $60 a month. But it’s only that high because I have a static IP address, which I want to use to access my home computers remotely (at some point in the future).

In order to handle all the streaming content to not only my media computer, but the other 2 computers in my house, I bought an N-band wireless router for $80. You can get a G-band wifi router for under $60, but it is 50Mbps vs over 300Mbps. It is worth it because I can watch youtube on my computer while my kids watch a movie on Netflix.

Hulu is awesome, and it is even more awesome because of Hulu Desktop, which installs on your Mac as an app and interfaces with hulu without a web browser. My Apple remote worked with it without configuring everything, so I can change shows easily without getting up.

The computer I’m using is just the MBP I was using for development for G2One. It only has 2 MB of memory, and it seems to be working fine. I was going to sell it and buy a new Mac Mini, but I thought why not try this one out first, and it is working just fine.

A note about resolution… I have a 1080p HDTV, and the quality of the streaming video can be hit-and-miss at times. Hulu *always* looks great, but Netflix can sometimes deliver crappy video quality if the shows you are watching are older. And YouTube usually looks crappy on a 52-inch TV, but it is better than nothing.

Let me know if any of you attempt this, I’ll be interested to hear of other people’s experiences. I’m really happy so far, but then I hate cable companies. I get so frustrated with the DVR UIs. Don’t they pay usability experts to design them? AT&T Uverse was the best I’ve seen so far, so coming back to Comcast here made me want to throw up.

Another thing you need to think about is placement of the media computer. If you are going to use a remote, you have to put it in a place with line of site to your remote, so it can’t be behind the entertainment center somewhere. I also have a spot right in front of the flatscreen where I put my (very small Apple) keyboard and wireless mighty mouse. You’ll still need to put a keyboard and mouse somewhere because you can’t do everything with your remote.

Hello JavaScript

This also means that I will no longer be programming primarily in Java on the JVM, but JavaScript on the browser, which is a much more fun and rewarding environment for me. I believe that the browser-as-a-platform truly is the way of the future (just check out the graphical power of HTML5). And JavaScript is the major logical component of this environment. This is going to be a ideal opportunity to perfect my knowledge of a misunderstood, yet very powerful, language of the web.

Goodbye St. Louis :’-(

This is a bittersweet victory for me because I’m leaving a very technically nourishing environment in St. Louis. I feel like I’ve met every major software engineer in the area, and it will be a substantial loss to miss out on upcoming hackfests, Lamba Lounges, JUGs, and bar gatherings with friends and coworkers.

I’ve been in St. Louis for over three years now. I came here initially to broaden my technical horizons and learn as much as possible about the industry of software engineering. I’ve worked for six different companies while in St. Louis, and I’ve met some really great and interesting people at each place I’ve landed.

Thanks to Friends and Colleagues

I would like to thank three people in particular whom have been truly instrumental in my development and interaction with the St. Louis IT landscape.

Thanks to Jeff Brown for introducing me to Amon Amarth and Opeth, as well as hiring me to work for G2One and opening up my horizons to dynamic typing and metaprogramming.

Thanks to Mario Aquino for giving me my first decent cigar, teaching me how agile development really should be done, and advising me on what Cuban food to order in Little Havana.

And thanks to Alex Miller for telling me where I could purchase a Great Divide Chocolate Oak Aged Yeti Imperial Stout, giving me a chance to present at the first Lambda Lounge, and selecting me to speak at the first Strange Loop Conference.

Much love, STL

These three guys are just the tip of the iceberg. I had to fight myself from listing 20 different people I’ve worked with or met or talked to in St. Louis. If you live in St. Louis now, take a moment and think about how many brilliant people you’ve met or worked with here, and you’ll be truly astounded. St. Louis is an untapped market of outstanding talent in software engineering.

I have been doing consulting or contracting (whatever you want to call it) for the past 3 years now in the St. Louis area, and I’m ready to find an AWESOME place to settle down and dig in. I don’t care much where it is, but I would prefer it to be AWESOME. I am willing to relocate.

If you read my blog, then you know the type of work I do best, so please let me know if you hear of anything AWESOME that you would like to pass on to me.

Thanks, all!

Even if your grandparents had been science fiction writers, it would have been hard for them to predict how the evolution of technology played out to affect your life. You may have heard something like “Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have television”, from a sagely octogenarian when you were young. Now think about what we might be telling our great-grandchildren along the same vein.

“In my day, we didn’t have nanotechnology that allowed people to buy furniture plans out of thin air and transform their coffee tables into ottomans!”

Of course, that is just a guess. Judging from how wrong the sci-fi writers of the past predicted our future (where are my flying cars!), my statement is most likely way off. But you get the picture.

So what’s my point?

Technological evolution is a natural extension of biological evolution, and the rate of evolution in general is increasing exponentially. As in all exponential curves, there is a limit that the curve approaches, but never reaches. So what happens as the rate of evolution approaches infinity?

I’m going to talk about this idea and quite a bit about the nature of humanity and the universe in general in an attempt to put our human experience into context. I hope to emphasize the roles we are all playing as technologists in this grand scheme of things on a cosmic scale.

Hope to see you there!

Here are the slides from my presentation:

I got a lot of very nice comments on the presentation, including 3 people who told me that I convinced them to use jQuery on their next projects! Thank you for all your encouragement, and I hope jQuery fits your UI needs. You can see the live examples I was showing here, or check them out from github here.

The best thing about Strange Loop is that DZone was there, and they taped most of the presentations! So soon (not sure when) I’ll post up the video of my talk.

I got a good response from the GrailsUI presentation, and hopefully we may get a few more developers interested in joining up to help with GrailsUI development. I tried to convince people to learn JavaScript as usual. All my code examples are available on github here.

This presentation also went very well. Code samples are here.

The conference itself was excellent. I met a lot of smart, interesting, and fun people I’ve been working with over the net for years. Thank you to everyone who took the time out to say hello and chat. What a great bunch of developers.I got to sit and have drinks with Jeff Brown and Graeme Rocher and talk about the future of Grails. And I also had etoufee with Guillaume LaForge, Dave Klein, and Paul King. Not to mention the oysters with Daniel Honig, Nathan Neff, Colin Harrington, and Hamlet D’Arcy. I also sat at the conference at the same tables as Rod Johnson, Scott Vlaminck, Scott Davis, and Hans Dockter.

Did I miss anyone?

You website will suck without a fluid, usable UI. Your UI will suck without a rich, maintainable interface. Your programmers will suck if you don’t give them the tools they need to build the UI you need.

JavaScript has gotten a bad rap. The browser has become a first class application environment, and JavaScript is the leading platform within the browser for rich applications. Sprinkled throughout the web, there is a ton of unmaintainable, unreadable, buggy legacy JavaScript code, acting as very bad examples of client side programming. Many times, a software engineer’s first introduction to JavaScript involves this ugly code. As JavaScript guru Douglas Crockford says, “Most of the people writing in JavaScript are not programmers”, and this misrepresents the JavaScript language. So, sometimes backend programmers disregard JavaScript because of its inaccurate portrayal by script kiddies. Then the UI languishes, or is written by programmers that just want to find a quick way to make a library do what they want and move on.

Client programming deserves just as much attention as backend programming.

jQuery is a tool created by good software engineers that applies modern and correct software paradigms to the DOM-JavaScript relationship. It can help you produce an elegant, functional, maintainable UI — and most importantly give your users an excellent experience with much less effort than other JavaScript libraries.

In this presentation, we will explore the web and the role that JavaScript has played it in. We’ll talk about how JavaScript was used in the early days of the internet, and how it is being used now. Web 2.0 applications with rich user interfaces must think of their Client Tier (the browser) as a first-class application environment itself in order to give UI developers the resources they need to rock their UIs and keep their users involved and active within the communities they want to create.

Today’s AJAX environment is a new playing field for JavaScript, and jQuery is playing a major role on the field. It provides a JavaScript toolbox that is unobtrusive, functional, and pragmatic above all else. jQuery just gets things done in a way no other library today can do.

After an introduction to the environment for jQuery, I will be talking about the features of the library and giving code examples of jQuery tools being used at some of the best-designed sites and frameworks on the web today: Netflix, Google, Digg, Dell, Wordpress, Drupal, CBS, NBC, Technorati, etc.

I hope to see you at the conference, but you had better register soon. I hear it is going to sell out.