Hobby projects? | The Coffeehouse

Rossj

Life is too short to spend all of your time fighting with your tools, and worrying that what you are working on is going to be old hat this time next year. And having someone so far away from the coal-face make arbitraryun-informed decisions (designers don't know how to use SCM - pfft) doesn't help when you are just trying to get your work done.

"Use simpler tools and frameworks, get more done" is my new motto.

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

Since I work for 8+ hours a day, read C9 + TUAW + Digg + Techcrunch + 100 other sites, have my iPod and my Cell Phone with me at ALL times I'm a little overwhelmed by technology....

My hobby project is redoing my back yard from a giant sandpit with lava rock + sand + dirt to something more appealing Grass, a Gazebo type area, some lawn furniture and some trees....

Lowes has sod at $3.03 for 10sq ft. I have yet to find out how big my back yard is...

as an aside, I'd like to find out if there is any remodeling and/or any modeling software to redraw areas of certain types (insert grass, remove trees, etc)....maybe I can write one...

Massif
aim stupidly high, expect to fail often.

Cybermagellan wrote:
Since I work for 8+ hours a day, read C9 + TUAW + Digg + Techcrunch + 100 other sites, have my iPod and my Cell Phone with me at ALL times I'm a little overwhelmed by technology....

My hobby project is redoing my back yard from a giant sandpit with lava rock + sand + dirt to something more appealing Grass, a Gazebo type area, some lawn furniture and some trees....

Lowes has sod at $3.03 for 10sq ft. I have yet to find out how big my back yard is...

as an aside, I'd like to find out if there is any remodeling and/or any modeling software to redraw areas of certain types (insert grass, remove trees, etc)....maybe I can write one...

So in an effort to get away from technology, you're wondering whether you can get software to help you? And if you can't you're going to write one?

Mwa ha ha! They've got you hooked.

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

Massif wrote:

Cybermagellan wrote:Since I work for 8+ hours a day, read C9 + TUAW + Digg + Techcrunch + 100 other sites, have my iPod and my Cell Phone with me at ALL times I'm a little overwhelmed by technology....

My hobby project is redoing my back yard from a giant sandpit with lava rock + sand + dirt to something more appealing Grass, a Gazebo type area, some lawn furniture and some trees....

Lowes has sod at $3.03 for 10sq ft. I have yet to find out how big my back yard is...

as an aside, I'd like to find out if there is any remodeling and/or any modeling software to redraw areas of certain types (insert grass, remove trees, etc)....maybe I can write one...

So in an effort to get away from technology, you're wondering whether you can get software to help you? And if you can't you're going to write one?

Mwa ha ha! They've got you hooked.

Well not to help me, but people like Lowes, Home Depot, Ace Hardware, etc...have software so if you walk in and say "Hey I want to install this door, with this door handle, how's that gonna look?", you don't have to guess, you can walk over to a kiosk and do it..

I want to know will my house look good in this color, you can bring a photo in, set your paint areas and select colors....

Kinda like the WPF demo but for entire home areas.

SlackmasterK
I write my OWN blogging engines

Ion Todirel wrote:
do you have a table for javascript errors? do you log javascript errors?

No, because I don't add javascript when it can be at all avoided; I don't believe there's any there except:
- Framework (generally throws a server-side exception, which I catch)
- AdSense (I haven't seen this causing any errors)

To me, JavaScript is basically a band-aid for functionality not available from HTML; explaining its automatic creation in ASP.NET and AJAX. We're pushing this spec way beyond where it was originally intended to go.

Besides, logging client-side errors would mean another server trip, generally eliminating the point in using JavaScript to begin with.

Cybermagellan wrote:
as an aside, I'd like to find out if there is any remodeling and/or any modeling software to redraw areas of certain types (insert grass, remove trees, etc)....maybe I can write one...

For a cheap, effective modeling solution, look into Rhino3D. Version 2 is the best IMHO.

For a cheap, effective rendering solution (which excels at outdoorsy stuff), look into Bryce. It was made by Metacreations, which became Corel, at which point I lost track of the custody chain.

Dr Herbie
Horses for courses

Cybermagellan wrote:

My hobby project is redoing my back yard from a giant sandpit with lava rock + sand + dirt to something more appealing Grass, a Gazebo type area, some lawn furniture and some trees....

My garden has taken over as my hobby too (when I get the time and the ground's not frozen).

This weekend I repotted two of my Bonsai, and bought a pickaxe to start digging over a flowerbed (we have very stony soil).

I shall probably spend most of the next few weekends doing similar in preparation for spring.

Herbie

Ion Todirel
buuu

Rossj wrote:

Learning UIKit for iPhone

Objective-C? yeah

esoteric
λ

A streaming XML API (version 1, done), a parser and AST for a simple imperative language and a code coverage tool for that AST (pending) - and then a little functional graphics programming in haXe (in progress). All in due time.

FaustoCoppi

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C

HumanCompiler
Compiling humans...and code

Playing with LINQ to SQL, FBML and Amazon web services to see if I can get a piece of the pie over on Facebook. Seems to be a lot of potential for ad money. Smiley