The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Category: Uncategorized

  • July

    With just a few hours remaining in July, I’m happy to report that this month saw my first several sales of Chef. It’s interesting how that very first sale made me feel – just a couple days prior I had been asked by a few people if I had sold any. At that time, it had been released for right around 3 months and I’d had not a single sale. I almost felt embarrassed to respond with the “0”, I think because of how much work I’ve put into the software and maybe I was just being silly to think that I could make a little money with it. Thankfully I may not be silly to think that after all.

    July also saw my first real support incident with it, one that was a little hairy but which I got resolved in a little over two evenings. It resulted in a new build, off of my 1.0 branch which forced me to make some changes (for the better) to my build system to allow building multiple code lines. This also allowed me to use Perforce’s integration capabilities to automatically merge this bugfix into the mainline – my first dealings with this in Perforce.

    As I type this, I’m running an RC build of sorts for version 1.1 which I plan on releasing later this week. I’ll get it installed on our Chef PC and run a few more tests before calling it good. Look for it on Friday morning!

  • Hosting

    Due to an internet connection mishap and some resulting downtime over the past two days here at home, I decided it’s time to upgrade my hosting account and move my Chef website to it.ย  No longer is it running out of my basement.

  • Desktop wallpapers

    A few can be found inย this gallery album.ย  Here’s one from today: Neo.

    Neo

    Every now and again I add some, so if you’re really bored, check back.

    ย 

  • Adobe Lightroom

    Adobe launched Lightroom in late January of this year. Sometime last year I heard they were working on a photo editing application for photographers but shrugged it off because I had Photoshop Elements and had no need for anything else. With the influx of photos from the new camera, however, I needed something different and turned to a Lightroom demo after seeing the name again on a photography forum.

    Let’s see, I downloaded the Lightroom trial (full-featured, 30 day trial) last Sunday afternoon, played around with it for a few hours, and purchased it Monday or Tuesday from Amazon.com. It is a very slick software package.
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  • Pictures

    Well since I’m not tired tonight, I may as well continue my rambling….

    Now, on to pictures. First, I take a lot of photos. I mean a whole bunch. For example, on our recent vacation I took nearly 3000. There’s so many that I have to review and change how I handle them.

    Pre-DSLR, I would take pictures and upload all of the non-blurry ones to the photo gallery. This worked great because there weren’t ever that many of them (some of you may disagree!), and the picture taking lag time was so great on the PnS that most of the photos ended up being documentary in purpose – recording events with no real creativity. So great, now I have one place for all of my photos to be kept and displayed. This one place was backed up, and life was simple.

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  • New Hobby

    So as you have probably gathered, I’ve become immersed with a new hobby. Photography.

    Ever since my first digital camera 5 years ago, I’ve grown more and more interested in capturing the world around me. With each successive model of camera, I’ve gained more resolution and more control over how the pictures were taken. What caught me off guard was that as I learned more and my cameras got better, I was getting more and more frustrated with them. Too slow, too large of a depth of field, poor low-light shooting, etc.. As time went on, I kept my eyes on the digital SLRs and tried to deny that I really wanted one. I knew what they could possibly offer me, but the price was just too steep for my occasional photo taking.

    With the news of the child on the way, it was a perfect time and excuse to finally bite the bullet and purchase one. I mean, really, 20 years from now do we want to be looking at photos taken with a PnS or DSLR?? ๐Ÿ˜‰

    I never thought that I would consider the money spent on this camera to be worth every penny, but it sure is. I finally have control over everything I used to fight against in my old cameras. I can now get close to taking the pictures I envision when I’m looking around at things, and it’s a great feeling! The hardware is no longer the limit!

    Those of you reading this that don’t really like taking photos probably don’t understand this, but oh well. For years I’ve wanted the capability I now have, I just didn’t know it yet. I think I’ve just discovered a world I find almost as deep and rich as writing software; those of you that know me well know that that’s saying a lot.

  • Chef 1.0

    It has been a lot of work, but tonight I finished updating the website and released Version 1 of Chef Kitchen Management System. Give it a whirl and then tell others to try it too!

    Chef 1.0 Boxshot

    Now it’s on to the world of Google Analytics and AdWords ๐Ÿ™‚

  • Domains

    Ok, so I have a question.ย  Which of the following domain names should I use as the main domain for Chef?

    EjiChef.com

    EjiChef.net

    MyRecipeSoftware.com

    TheRecipeSoftware.com

    EjiSoftware.com

    I own all of the above, and will point them to whichever is the best to use as the main domain.

  • Chef and Vista

    As I mentioned last night, I made the 1.0.0 build of Chef and started doing some installation testing on Vista.

    It’s official – Vista’s UAC is kicking my ass.ย ย  It’s during the database setup that I’m having the problem.ย  Sql Server gets installed OK, it’s for some reason the database restore that times out.

    Kinda tired of running the sql express install at this point.