mlsamuelson.com

I'm setting up a new MacBook Pro for development work. Thought it might be nice to have a list of programs installed and customizations made. Perhaps others will find it helpful, too. This setup is fairly well road-tested by this Drupal and web application developer.

Firefox

Find these via https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

• Firebug (Developer tool. Great for CSS and Javascript work.)
• Web Developer Toolbar (Developer tool. You should know it. Great for turning off Javascript, messing with cookies, measuring parts of a page.)

Until recently, I worked for the Idaho Commission for Libraries as a web developer engaged with a number of projects based on Drupal and a few custom coded apps. It was a job I held for about eight years, starting as a part time grant funded assistant to the library networking consultant. As my skills increased, the agency's needs grew, and the Internet germinated, and it became a full-blown web designer and state employee position. A few years later I was reclassified as a developer.

Today I caught an NPR interview from a few days ago with Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody." I was installing a new Drupal site, and so listening with divided attention. Nothing in the interview jumped out at me until the last minute when Shirky mentioned social media has a tendency to favor phatic communication, a mode of communication with the goal of opening social channels between people.

I received an email that ended thusly from my friend Alejandro Adams, mentioning his in-development film Babnik:

"I hope Babnik lives up to the (ahem, your) hype and pulls one out for the 'plot' team (but not at the expense of character!)."

My reply, in slightly edited form (and intended as a treatise on story and not to be misconstrued as a chastisement):

The conversation went like this:

"E, would you like lasagna for dinner?"

"No! I want macaroni and cheese!"

"Have you ever had lasagna?"

"I want macaroni and cheese! Macaroni and cheese!"

Five minutes later...

"So, E, we're out of macaroni noodles. What if we made it with spiral noodles?"

"Yeah! Spiral noodles!"

"Or, hey, we could make macaroni and cheese with long flat noodles. Does that sound good?"

"Yeah! Macaroni and cheese! Noodles!"

"What if we mixed some tomatoes in?"

"Yay!"

"And maybe some hamburger?"

When there are no rules, the second law of thermodynamics will come into play and the entropy of the system will increase. One way in which entropy increases is that, without any restrictions on communications among subsystems, communication will occur in an unrestricted way...

from Code Complete, 2nd ed. by Steve McConnell

The above statement pertains, in context, to software development, yet "Twitter" is what popped into my mind when I read it.

I came into the office from a three-day weekend (I work a compressed four-day week) to find my phone blinking. In my job I consort with a lot with libraries and this message was from a librarian who called to ask if I had any recommendations on what to look for when interviewing an IT manager. The answer was, not really - I'm a web programmer, and haven't spent much time around IT managers - but I know some interviewing tricks.

I gave her three questions. The last was my favorite:

In prosperous times indie filmmaking is a tough field. And these aren't exactly prosperous times. It's difficult to land a distributor, but before that, hard to get into film festivals - even with good press in Variety.

The blogosphere has been alive today with serious discussion of the new iPod Nano's revolutionary design, featuring... wait for it ... curves!

I bought my son a DoodlePro a year ago to keep the boy occupied in church so he wouldn't crawl under the pews. Looking back, I'm amazed at the forward-thinking design, as the curvature of this product is not just a design decision - a sort of packaging meant to keep the innards from spilling out all over the place - but is also a feature. Amazing. I wonder if the iPod people were inspired by the DoodlePro.

My wife had a meeting tonight, so for dinner with the kids I threw together what turned out to be delicious calzones. Much to the surprise of all involved.

Here's a rundown of what I did and what I used:

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

16 oz. block of mozzarella
some Parmesan (to preference)
2 eggs

Grate the cheeses, mix in the eggs.

1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp thyme
1/4 cup green onions
2 cloves garlic