I think I find myself at that medium still today. I still really enjoy building computers, but I don’t want to overclock my system because I’m pretty much required to keep the computer in working order for a long, long time. I’m adventurous enough to run Linux 90% of the time at home, but I’m not going to compile all my own software from source. I guess a better motto would be “don’t be afraid to break it any more than what you can fix”. No, that doesn’t sound quite right either. Here it is: “Don’t be afraid to break it any more than what you’re motivated to fix.”

I ended up building a computer myself, and overall I’m quite happy with the decision. I don’t have anything against the Mac, but it just wasn’t for me this time around. Here are a few reasons why not the iMac:

• Cost. For the money of a 24″ iMac (I wanted the larger screen because anything smaller than 22″ felt really tiny after my dual 24″ setup at work) I found that I could get a pretty good system.
• Building a computer is fun! I’ve built four computers myself now (and helped in the building of several others), and it has always been fun. I found myself window shopping quite a bit for computer parts, and building my own computer was a great release for that.
• Customization. I find myself being picky about my computers sometimes. I like to choose a monitor and peripherals that fit me, and I didn’t feel that an iMac met my needs here.
• Future Upgrades. I can open up my new computer and upgrade anything I want. That just doesn’t happen with an iMac.
• Learning. This fits in with several of the above reasons, but I think it’s a reason in itself. By building my own computer, I learned a lot. By using Linux daily, I’m learning a lot, too. I already have a place to learn the Mac better (I have a Mac Pro at work), but most of my studies have involved Linux or other UNIX systems, so it has helped me a lot to play around with a real Linux system. I could have just virtualized Linux like I do at work, but I was ready to take off the training wheels and really use Linux almost full-time at home.
• Free software upgrades. Note that this really only applies to the Linux side of things, not the Windows side (which is OK, since I’m using Linux 95% of the time). I love that I can get the new features of a new release of Ubuntu without any extra dollar cost. I also love many open source programs like the GIMP more than their paid alternatives. (Note: I’m not trying to hate on Photoshop, but the GIMP fits in much better with what I need it to do. Using the Mac version of the GIMP is just not fun.) There are plenty of free Mac programs, but almost everything is free on Linux.

If I had decided (and I was really close) to buy an iMac, I needed to justify it to myself. Here’s why the iMac:

• Mac OS and Apple Software. This is a pretty big plus in my book. I like iPhoto and iMovie a lot compared to their Linux counterparts. I’ve found out that I have to deal with Vista a bit if I want to make a movie on my computer. The one drawback here is Finder. Just let it be known that I really don’t like Finder and all the Save dialogs in Mac OS – there are just too many ways to interface with it, and it’s really tricky to figure them all out. I’ll probably have it all figured out by the time they redo the interface. If iPhoto and iMovie updates were cheaper or free, I might have gone with the iMac.
• Wife Acceptance Factor: I didn’t make this term up, but the iMac’s form factor fit really well into a family setting. The fact that everything is integrated means fewer cords, which is a big plus in this respect. I made my way around this one by getting a monitor with integrated everything and doing a better job of cord management up front.

In the end, I will say that the things I miss out on the most by not having a Mac at home is the software – particularly the iLife suite. iMovie and iPhoto are really easy-to-use applications, and that’s probably what I need. I’ve found myself using F-Spot on Linux, which is just OK, and Windows MovieMaker on Vista, which again, is OK. I like Vista quite a bit as a part-time operating system, but it’s way too annoying to use every day. If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Vista’s annoying UAC “are you sure you want to do that” dialogs, trust me, you’ll hate them if you ever meet them.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I worked with elementary-age children who were at an age of exploration. They were often seeking of ways to test their boundaries, and it was obvious which ones had structured limits at home in the things they were allowed to do. This lack of parental responsibility was a frequent topic on our drives home, and we realized that proper boundaries could help children learn much faster than if they were given free reign to explore boundaries for which they weren’t prepared. It’s up to all us – parents, siblings, friends, whatever – to help raise future generations, so let’s never think it’s someone else’s problem.

• Convention over Configuration – Each framework tries to follow a set of standards in filenames, controller names, and so on so on. When I work on a site someone else designed using a framework, I know where things go and I can familiarize myself with that application much more quickly.
• Don’t Repeat Yourself – Specifying code in one place means that you only have to change it once should it need updating.
• MVC and a focus on “Fat Models” – Separate models, views, and controllers make life easier down the road when it comes time to switch to a new system that has a new database or when you want to make a fancy interface for an iPhone or the next new thing.

There are many other advantages to each, but let’s move on to the differences and disadvantages of these frameworks (keep in mind that this is from a somewhat unexperienced perspective, please let me know if these don’t convey the whole truth):

• CakePHP isn’t as mature as Ruby on Rails. Migrations aren’t fully integrated and the feature set seems to be a few steps behind Rails.
• CakePHP isn’t as easy to deploy as Ruby on Rails. This might matter more for larger applications, but I haven’t seen anything like Capistrano in Rails.
• Documentation is somewhat lacking in both. I had a hard time getting going using only tutorials that I found online. Rails has some great books, but I haven’t found any for CakePHP (although the tutorials and my familiarity with PHP made things easier).
• Ruby is new to me. In my opinion, it has a higher learning curve than PHP (possibly because I already knew Java before learning PHP).
• There are far fewer hosting solutions that provide good Ruby on Rails support. Although it’s pretty easy to get both up and running (especially for the lucky users of Mac OS 10.5), good hosting is pricier for Rails applications.

With all that said, there’s no way I’d like to go back to plain old PHP for developing a website. Things have come a long way even in just the past year for both of these frameworks, so I hope to keep learning them both. In the meantime, though, I’m devoting more of my time to Ruby on Rails, simply because I’m actually finding it fun to code in Ruby (and the Ruby Quiz is something I wish my programming classes had been) while PHP never had me quite as excited.

I enjoy the structure that Rails offers, and that way it has of making web programming fun again. I’ve used PHP for several years now, and I find myself rewriting things continuously just to make things better. While this has certainly made me a better programmer, the steeper learning curve of Rails lets me do more in a shorter period of time although the degree of difficulty is higher. Rails brings a common framework with it, and one that seems to be more accepted in my experience than any PHP framework that I’ve worked with.

So far, the major drawback has been the availability of free resources for the Rails newbie, although this is a problem that is increasingly getting smaller. My initial impetus to take that first step toward learning Ruby on Rails was an offer for a free PDF book from Sitepoint, a deal that has since expired but is still definitely worth paying money for. That book was a great resource for me, and I’ve since gone on to buy a similar book, Agile Web Development with Rails. Those two books provide a lot of the same information, but reading through them both helped me pick up on things that I would have missed otherwise. From here I may not have a lot of time to devote to learning Ruby on Rails, but I definitely plan on continuing that effort.

We all have customers, whether they go by that name or not. Those we’re trying to sell our services to should be the ones we think about first. I’ve met many brilliant computer programmers who sometimes add feature upon feature to their programs that end up being totally unusable because they don’t think about their customers. Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail did this to me recently when they thought I wanted my web-based email client to be more like my desktop email (like say, Outlook or Eudora). Sure, Yahoo and Hotmail felt more like desktop mail clients, but Gmail is a million times faster and easier to use.

Who are your customers? Try putting yourself in their shoes, or better yet, asking them how they think something should be done. If you get yourself into their mode of thinking, then you can try to sell them on the stuff they didn’t know they always wanted.

Since that lesson of playing outside, I’ve since moved to Los Alamos and been through all of Boy Scouting. I really do enjoy the outdoors, but it’s something that I haven’t done much since I was much younger. My friend Aaron and I used to go all over the canyons, and he and I even hiked across the canyon on our last day of Middle School, which took us about four or five hours to travel less than half a mile on a map, but it was a lot of fun.

So why all this talk about getting outside, especially since it’s obviously written on a computer, indoors?

I went outside again!

Some of our friends invited us to go Geocaching a couple of weeks ago, and we’re hooked. Part of the motivation is that we want to get out and walk around more to shed off some extra weight of being indoors practically since Emmy was born, and part of it is that we’re just ready to get back outside. I’m really exaggerating, though, because we definitely get outside, just not as much as we would like to. Geocaching helps us do that because it makes it fun to go outside. Basically, you look on geocaching.com for a cache that’s in a place you’d like to visit, whether it’s in the middle of town or in the middle of nowhere. Then you punch in the coordinates to your GPS receiver (that’s all the equipment you need, really) and follow the little pointy arrow to the cache on your GPSr. It’s not always that easy, but that’s the fun of it. You get to go treasure hunting, see some places you haven’t been before, and share it with the geocaching community.

For us, geocaching has been a lot of fun and an entertaining way to see new places. We’ve only done a few caches so far, but we’re very excited to take our friends and relatives with us this summer. It’s great because the only thing we had to buy was a GPS receiver, which you can get for less than $100. It’s definitely something that’s fun for us gadget geeks, but it’s also great for families or just about anyone else.

A setup that took me literally about ten days to do has now been reconfigured in less than a day. This is what can happen with open source: things are just getting better and better (especially when hardware manufacturers like Hauppauge and Nvidia recognize the importance of open source as well).

My first experiences with Linux were over ten years ago, when loading X Windows took about five minutes so I browsed the web using the text-browser Lynx. Since then, Linux has become an incredible tool that excels at what it does. The fact that it’s free still amazes me, but I’ve come to the point where I can do things in Linux that I just can’t do in Windows or Mac OS X, though that doesn’t mean I’m giving either of those up any time soon.

The hard drive in our laptop died a few weeks ago, which was bad news for our household. We could see it was coming, so we made sure to back up our data, but after it happened we had to find a way to replace it. In the meantime our computer was without a hard drive, but it wasn’t out of service. We inserted the Ubuntu CD and and the computer just worked! I was pretty impressed. I had used Knoppix and similar boot CDs, but Ubuntu detected all our software and booted rather quickly. The other boot CDs didn’t detect our wireless ethernet adapter, which meant we couldn’t use the Internet. Ubuntu found the wireless adapter, and established a secure connection with our network. We were even able to use it to buy our new hard drive. Thanks, Ubuntu! You’ve come a long way. Be sure to check it out! The newest version even has a Windows Migration Assistant, so I may be loading it onto our laptop again soon.