Note to Self 1

I haven't been blogging much lately, which is no surprise to anyone who follows my blog. To those three readers, I'd like to tell you that writing - to me - is a very much a love/hate relationship. When I'm inspired, writing becomes an obsession I can't possibly put aside. Even if what I produce is not noteworthy among my colleagues, the process of putting my thoughts into words helps me clarify personal thoughts like no other learning experience could. It confirms truths. It tears-down misconceptions. It's the highest form of human expression. It's REALLY exhausting. So If I don't have the time or energy to write, how do I effectively maintain a blog?

The title of this post sums up my solution. If I don't have the time or energy to write the kind of post I want, just write short bullet points on the things that I've been exploring. What I really like about this approach is that I do a lot more in the course of a day than I could possibly convey through my blog. For example, since I last blogged, I've experimented with jQuery, VMWare Player, Virtual PC, Python and SQL Alchemy. Even at the best of times, there is no way that I'm going to cover all of those topics before forgetting one or more of them. With that said, time to write some notes.

• jQuery rules, though I've had problems debugging using FireBug. Apparently it requires a bookmarklet though that still doesn't seem to work for me.
• The mapper class in SQL Alchemy - Python ORM - gets rid of having to manually set properties of derived classes when the corresponding base class is already known (i.e., Employee.Name = Person.Name). This is the sort of code that really annoys me and I'm glad there's a way to avoid it.
• Virtualization rocks, but it gets tough on a laptop. My host machine is Vista and my guests are all XP. I've tried Vista as guest before, but it was so slow I couldn't really do anything with it. Some of my virtualization links can be found at http://delicious.com/dwhawley/virtual.
• I've been using both VMWare Player and Virtual PC. VMWare Player works with more than just Windows allowing me to periodically play with Linux, but doesn't have the really cool pause feature that Virtual PC has. Virtual PC seems a bit snappier to me, but it lacks support for USB. No excuses for that.
• Azure is really cool though you should keep in mind that this is in direct competition with Google Apps. Either way, I'll be using both.
• Of all of the features I've heard about Windows 7, I'm most excited about it's smaller footprint.