February 2009

If you have been affected by cancer (and who hasn’t in some way) I just wanted to mention a great opportunity to share your story and make a donation to support cancer research in Canada. It is called Why I Give and it is an initiative to not only allow people to make donations to a worthy cause but to tell their story of what inspires them to give. So if you lost a friend or family member to cancer you can tell their story in whatever way you want in hopes that it will in turn inspire others to donate.

If you are worried about revealing too much, there is even a means to tell your story anonymously. Please take a moment to head over and help see this worthy site take off.

www.whyigive.ca

(Full disclosure: my brother is one of the students who started this initiative. The donations and site however are very real.)

It somehow feels like a lot longer but I’m only on my third week in Bermuda. I think the main reason it feels longer is because I’ve been sick. Only with the common cold mind you, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Now that is mostly behind me and I am starting to get settled in.

With most of my stuff unpacked and in a place, if not its place, my little cottage is starting to feel like a home. For a while I was sort of living out of boxes, thinking that maybe someone would change their mind and I would be moving somewhere else. But I’ve purchased my own helmet, and while I’m still renting a scooter, I’ve decided on buying one myself. I’m hoping to do my written test this week and then schedule my driving test as soon as possible so that I can legally drive any new scooter I get.

Work is busy and constant, which is fine as long as the weather stays cool and wet and I have no desire to get outside to take photos or otherwise. I will say that this February is not nearly as nice as it was last February. Granted anything can happen between now and this weekend, but I doubt I will be hitting up the beach like last year. But it shouldn’t be too long before those of us still acclimatized to Canada will find that it is beach weather.

I’m hoping that it will be that nice when my brothers come down to visit. If they are able to come and visit. Still need to sort out the logistics on that. But I am embracing my new island home a little more than I expected, and also reaching out and meeting people outside of work, so I think that things will turn out alright in this chapter of my life—assuming work doesn’t kill me.

It was something that years ago, when I was still an undergrad I remember looking at as something which will happen years into the future. Well, here I am years into that future now, and the moment is upon us. Like every moment in time, this will be fleeting, but made significant by a globe of geeks celebrating all at once. How appropriate that it is to occur on a Friday the 13th.

The event that I am referring to is the point at which the Unix timestamp, that is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch (1 Jan 1970), reaches 1234567890. It may seem foolish to some, but things have been celebrated for less. In fact, is hasn’t been that long since I updated a previous site to celebrate the passing of a similar event.

In this case, the time in question is 19:31:30 AST on 13 Feb 2009. Since the timestamp is a singular point in time, this will occur at the same time around the world. For those of my readers in the Pacific timezone that is 15:31:30 while the UK will celebrate at 23:31:30.

Happy timestamp celebrations everyone! There is a countdown online.

Earlier this week, my brother spoke about how important it is to properly separate life, work and school from each other, especially in terms of mental and physical space. I will say that in theory that is a good idea. It is the same principle that should dissuade you from lying down to watch movies or study because it will make it hard to sleep even if you really tired. Your body gets confused.

However, my brother is in a situation which permits this possible separation if he desires it and is disciplined enough to pull it off. I want to respond to this, first by posing some practical questions and then by talking about some quite common real life situations. Separation is still possible, but the lines do need to blur a bit.
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The news of the week is that I took and passed the written test needed to obtain my driver’s license in Bermuda. Unfortunately it seems to be a busy time for the road tests because I wasn’t able to be scheduled until March 25. I guess with another month of practice, I’ll be that much more likely to pass the test when the time comes. I also bought rain pants this week seeing as how we have been having a fair bit of rainy weather. You can get quite wet on a scooter if you get caught in a downpour. Other than that, I’ve been working away. But I’ve written a bit on my thoughts of Bermuda, so far.
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There are a lot of acronyms in this title, but the bottom line is that I must say I am quite impressed with the changes that have been made to ASP.NET with the addition of their MVC extension. It takes away most of the awkwardness of ASP.NET’s web forms and leaves the rest of the quite robust application pipeline. However, in my time playing with it so far there was one issue I had.

A little background for my non-technical readers: ASP.NET is the web based application environment created by Microsoft which runs on Windows servers. Basically it is an alternative to writing web applications in PHP, Java, Ruby or any number of other popular options. Most of you know that my preference has generally been PHP. I’m not adverse to most of the alternatives, but that was the environment I started with oh so many years ago and it stayed with me.

The term MVC stands for Model, View and Controller. It is a concept in software engineering for the architecture of a program where you separate the presentational elements (view) from the business/domain logic (model). In between the two you have the interaction control (controller) which determines what model bits go with what view bits and generally just keeping everything in order. Generally this separation of concerns is considered to be a Good Thing™. Despite that, the lines are often blurred. There are many ways to maintain this separation, but systems (for the web anyway) which claim proper MVC status tend to go about it in similar ways. One popular system which uses this paradigm is Ruby on Rails. Traditionally ASP.NET did not really provide an MVC setup (I won’t go off on their traditional system now), so this is a pleasant departure. However, like I said: I had an issue.

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