Random Assortment of Things That Are Like News

First let's lead with a video of the cutest baby: Brynn. This was taken on Father's Day while the US Open played in the background. We celebrated with Jen's folks and Jen gave me time off baby duty for good behavior so I was even able to program on my personal project for a while, which felt very good.

Brynn continues to give us good sleep, somewhere between 6 and 9 hours a night. She has discovered her hands and is fascinated by them. She also is getting better at holding her head up, though not if she is tired or frustrated. She gets cuter by the day and has even started laughing while awake. We have yet to capture that on video though.

Yesterday we celebrated Jen's mother's birthday and sweltered in the incredible heat. They say we may break the record for the most days at or above 100 degrees in a row. It was bloody hot today. And we had two new people start at work. It's exciting to get new folks around, but it'd be better if my office wasn't a sauna. Usually it can be kept at a manageable temperature, but today was ridiculous.

I'm going to be doing a presentation on programmery stuff (Starling and Nape) at Rocky Mountain Adobe User's Group here, most likely in August. It's about how to make games that use the super processing power of video cards. I'd feel better if I'd made a real game with it, but we will take things as they come. I've got samples. Samples are good enough for a preso.

Over the weekend, I also swapped my laptop hard drive for a new one. The old one was working perfectly fine but kept warning that it was going to fail any second now. I monitored the status of the drive, and it did move a step closer to calamity, so that was enough to motivate me to trek down to MicroCenter and pick up a 1 terabyte drive for a wonderfully low price of $100. That's 10 cents a gigabyte! I brought it home, did a 5-hour-long system backup of my computer, made a system repair disc, then swapped in the new hard drive. That's when I discovered a system backup is not the same as a system image, and you can't do a restore to a blank hard drive with just a backup. So I shut everything down and swapped in the old hard drive, and then started another long process of making a system image. The next day when it was done, I repeated the swap and was able to get everything transferred over ... except my 1TB drive was only showing 600GB. What!!? Had I been had? I figured out that the system image remained very true to my old 600GB drive, and the disk partitions didn't expand to take up the extra 400GB. So now I'm about to try a program that purports to be able to move partitions around so they can be expanded. But of course it warns to make sure your data is backed up first, so I'm writing this blog post first. If I have to do another 4-hour system image transfer, I'd rather not try to type a blog post on my Playbook.

Speaking of that thing, I've been close to destroying it many times. The browser is erratic in what it will load. Sometimes it will load pages very quickly. Sometimes it will load it about 80% then stall for 5 minutes. It may load nothing. Or it may load most of a large image, but leave the bottom quarter cut off. Refreshing the page doesn't make the image come back, even after clearing the cache. It drops the wifi signal a lot. Sometimes it takes several minutes just to load a page that is almost all text that I just loaded fine minutes ago. I keep reading material nearby when I use the Playbook for web browsing just so I have something to do while the blasted things loads a page. Grrrrr.

Oh, Jen's heading back to work about half time. This means some changes to our schedules. I'll be covering some of her work time, and Jen's mom will carry the rest. More solo Daddy Time for me! I'm guessing I'll be doing a lot of walks and bouncing in the coming months. Good thing I get to do it for the cutest baby!

UPDATE: partition resizing and moving went smoothly and flawlessly. I would recommend the Partition Wizard MiniTool. And it's even free!

The Fathermaker

Here she is! The reason I get to be celebrated on Father's Day! She's starting to hold her head up and grab things, but she has not yet mastered these tasks. But as this video shows, she is definitely getting better! Happy Father's Day! I'm starting to understand the sacrifices and love you've given out over the years. Thanks!

GitHub for Windows

If you're not a developer, this next post will probably sound like "blah, blah, techity-tech, blah." Anyway, fair warning and all that.

So, I've slowly been getting won over by git as a version control system. I previously had been a fan of SVN, which despite some glaring problems was overall pretty good. git just seemed confusing and the terms they used were wrong. Also, there was too much emphasis on using the command line to do everything. I think in this day and age if you have to use the command line, the experience is broken. The command line is in fashion nowadays, and just like the trendy fixed gear bikes that are popular now, it doesn't make sense to me. Why make it harder? Anyway, that's a rant for another time. The point is, I didn't warm up to git until I got familiar with SmartGit, which is an excellent git client on Windows that makes git make sense.

Now I'm moving some code from one computer to another using GitHub so I can work on it from both computers. One of my coworkers had let me know about a new git client on Windows, and this one is from github itself. That sounds pretty cool. Since I was starting up git fresh on my home laptop, I thought I'd give it a try.

Let's start with the installation and setup. Traditionally git is a bit of a mess to set up. You have to install git, then you have to generate an SSH key using the command line, then you have to do associations with it and your repo while setting up SmartGit. It's a bit of a mess. Installing GitHub for Windows was slow, but very simple and smooth. Once the installer finished, it was easy to set up. I just logged in with my GitHub account and it handled all SSH key BS. That's awesome! Of course I had already generated and uploaded my key to GitHub, otherwise I probably would have had to deal with that.

Once I got into GitHub for Windows, I was a little less impressed. The UI is very different from traditional programs. I can't say I like it a lot, but I'm sure it will grow on me. Kudos, at least, to the GitHub team for stepping outside the Windows UI box. We'll have to see if it grows on me. Because they eschew the top menu bar, some things are harder to find than others. It took me a while to figure out how to branch a repo, for instance. In general the paradigm is different from SmartGit, focusing more on displaying the changesets rather than highlighting the file structure of your project and the files within it that have changed, like SmartGit does.

The two odd decisions that hamstring GitHub for Windows for me are about cloning remote repos and picking a folder for where to clone a repo. On the latter point, you can only set one default directory for all your repos to get cloned to. You can change it before you clone a repo, but it is a bit cumbersome and not intuitive. It'd be great if your file organization already puts all your repos in one place and all your repos are hosted on GitHub. That's not the case for me, though. I am mixing SVN and git repos from different libraries and projects and mixing in design files that aren't stored in git. And I can distribute my projects in different areas, such as putting some in webroots of servers and others in my general projects directory and others still in my shared libraries directory. So, selecting the target directory for a repo when you're in the act of cloning it is something they need to add.

The problem of cloning remote repos is a bit of a deal breaker for me. As far as I can tell after looking at some documentation, there's no way to clone repos hosted outside of GitHub, and furthermore, no means to clone repos you don't have associated with your account from the GitHub client. To clone a GitHub repo that your account isn't associated with, you have to go to GitHub, go to the repo, and click their Clone in Windows button, which opens up the GitHub client and adds the repo. It's a curious functionality choice to make. But what kills it for me is that you can't get remote repos outside of GitHub. Okay, okay, it is GitHub for Windows after all, but at work we have git repos hosted in Assembla. The lack of being able to enter in a git repo URL in the client makes it unusable for me in my work environment.

I'll give it a try at home for a while on my personal projects, but I don't see myself using this client for anything else until they remedy those issues.

Cross-posted on my ActionScript blog.

Caution: Your Head May Explode

UPDATE: I fixed the link to the gallery so that it links to the public version and you all can see it.

So, just a warning, your head may explode from the extreme amount of cuteness from the pictures we took during our trip to Maryland for a wedding. While we were waiting to go to the wedding, we took some pictures of Brynn in our hotel room. And she is so freaking adorable. Oh, and there are also pictures from the wedding, too, so you can check those out too. They're all in my gallery.

This cuteness thing is just increasing. As she is getting a bit older, she is just getting more and more darling. Rather than constantly needing to be held, she is content to wiggle and make noises and "march" in place. One less cute thing is that I have discovered lint deposits in the fold of her hands. I'm ... not really sure how that happens. It's still sort of cute, just less cute than normal.

Suck It To Me

The soothing techniques we've used for Brynn are changing as she is developing. Walking her to sleep is no longer always the answer. Sometimes she needs to be set down to be happy. But one pretty constant technique that is now more popular than ever is finger sucking. Not hers, yet. She hasn't gotten that down. Our fingers are the targets. She sometimes will keep a pacifier, but a finger is the soother of choice.

To Baltimore and Back Again

Brynn asleep on the plane in the Bjorn

This was a busy and momentous weekend for us. We flew to Baltimore for the wedding of Jen's college friend Jason ... and we took Brynn with us! This was a bit of a nervous experiment in how it would be to travel with her, and thankfully she did really well. She got in her first plane trip at 5 weeks, whereas I think I was in college before I had my first plane trip. On the trip out there, there were probably around 8 infants on the flight, and Brynn was among the well-behaved. If I were not a parent, I would have been frustrated by all the crying that happened on that flight. However, being a parent, I had sympathy for the families dealing with distraught babies. Good, good. Perspective is sinking in.

Some cool art in the Denver airport. Our girl is not a little beast, for which we are grateful.

I was curious how we'd juggle the Bug's needs. Diaper changing on a plane could be interesting, especially when the drink cart is blocking the route to the bathroom and the diaper is approaching blow out status. On the flight back we ended up folding down both our tray tables and doing a change right there. At the rental car facility, I ended up using my suitcase as a changing table for her.

What are you doing, Dad?

Other than us having to run through a downpour to get to the rehearsal dinner, and some pretty bad rush hour traffic, the first day went well. We were dreading the night, though. However, our minds were blown when rather than becoming extra difficult, Brynn slept for 8 hours straight! It was so wonderfully awesome. Of course, that didn't translate to 8 hours of sleep for us, because we kept on getting up to check if she was still breathing. The second night wasn't as good, but it was still a 4 hour block followed by a 3 hour block and a 2 hour block.

The wedding was great. The weather was perfect and everything went smoothly. We had our first non-family baby sitters while we were at the ceremony and during part of the reception. Brynn did well, and so did we. But I did spend a lot of the reception dancing with Brynn in the Baby Bjorn so Jen could have a chance to chat with her college friends. After the reception we went out for pizza and we had our first experience taking her out to a restaurant. She did splendidly since she was asleep the whole time.

On Sunday we met up with some more friends of Jen's and had brunch at a diner and then perused a flea market in the area. She did pretty well through that, finally getting the knack of keeping a pacifier in and being satisfied with it.

All in all, it was a great first trip with Brynn. She did great, and we felt good about it. On top of that she was a hit with everyone she met. Now we have to decide about some weddings in the Fall and if we'll want to attempt them with her in tow at 6 months instead of 5 weeks. Well, to avoid thinking too much about that, here's a video of her smiling in her sleep. Even when asleep, our little girl is so expressive!