Late Winter Geek-Out

I've been kind of slack about posting lately, and for that I apologize. I can only say it's a confluence of events that's caused the most recent communications blackout, although that doesn't really excuse anything because none of the events in question have really prevented me from blogging. It's more that they've distracted me from blogging. I'll try and do better.

I'll come clean right up front: a large portion of my distraction comes in the form of my beloved Amazon Kindle. I know I've used that excuse before and it's almost guaranteed I'll be using it again. What can I say? As I've mentioned before, I love to read and I love my Kindle. I've gotten hooked back onto John Ringo's Paladin of Shadows series and I've been engrossed in the most recent two books in the series, Unto the Breach and A Deeper Blue. Great stuff. And, thanks to the forward thinking of Baen Publishing, I have access to them through Baen's excellent and innovative Webscriptions eBook service. Baen is probably my favorite publisher (the fact that I have a favorite publisher tells you how much I read) and now that I've got the Kindle I live on the Webscriptions and Baen's Free Library websites. I'd recommend to anyone that is a Sci-Fi and/or Fantasy fan to check it out.

The next reason I've been incommunicado actually leads me to one of the things I wanted to talk about. I was busy all last week at work trying to devise a remote access solution for some mobile systems that my company has. I ended up settling on a very cool device from Sierra Wireless called a AirLink Raven X. This device is really just a cellular modem designed to use a high-speed EV-DO data link through Verizon or Sprint. The only difference in it and the AirCard or USB modem solutions provided by Verizon and Sprint is that this device is ruggedized and is designed to maintain a 24/7 connection to the network. The consumer solutions (USB modems, etc) behave like old analog modems: when you want to connect you run some software that causes them to connect to the network and then you surf. If you are inactive for some given period of time the software will disconnect you. That's fine for someone surfing on a laptop or whatever but it was totally unacceptable for my purposes. The Raven X, on the other hand, behaves like a cable modem. It connects when it's powered up and then it stays connected until it's powered down unless there's a problem. Power it up, plug it into the WAN port of a router, and viola! You have wireless local area network. Very cool. The Raven even has built in support for a Dynamic DNS service that keeps track of the modem as the IP address changes, which is a huge benefit when you're trying to connect to it from a different location.

Next up, I've been talking with a friend of mine who now owns a software development shop. He's doing it part-time for a while and he's getting to the point that he's having a hard time keeping up. Since I'm a big fan of extra money and he and I work well together, I'm going to become his "overflow" developer. As part of that I've been spending some time doing something I've meant to do for years: learn PHP. In the course of that I've gotten involved in MySQL again for the first time in a while, got my Eclipse development environment set up on my Linux box at home, and bought PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide (2nd Edition). I have to say that I'm really happy with the book so far.

More to come on the programming front, including my first Blackberry project or two I hope, in the coming weeks.