I love books. I’m not a bibliophile, I don’t collect them (at least, I try not to). But I do tend to buy a lot of them. In the last month I ordered a ton of new books about topics I’m interested in or actively working on. Most of them are on my bookshelf at work.

Database Books:
Oracle Automatic Storage Management: Under-the-Hood & Practical Deployment Guide
High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More
MySQL (4th Edition) (Developer’s Library)

Systems Books:
Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization

Ruby Books:
Practical Ruby for System Administration (Expert’s Voice in Open Source)
Enterprise Rails
Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O’Reilly))
Rails Cookbook (Cookbooks (O’Reilly))
Enterprise Integration with Ruby
Rails Recipes (Pragmatic Programmers)
Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails

You might be able to tell that I’m on something of a Ruby/Rails kick right now. Ever since I threw together my first rails site (which has yet to make it to production) I’ve enjoyed both the language and the framework immensely. When an opportunity arose to use Ruby for some scripting I needed to do for work I jumped on it and haven’t looked back. I built a simple monitoring framework for my servers spending just a few hours a day for a few days, and it’s currently in place for most of my non-production systems.

It didn’t take long after I had gotten it up and running that I realized that a front end was what it really needed (and, moreso, that a front end would make it more useful for my coworkers) so I am planning on taking the Modules I developed (which is one of the first thing that Enterprise Integration with Ruby harps on you about, putting everything in Modules) and converting the driver code that I wrote to call those modules into a module itself and dumping it all into a Rails site with my Controllers calling my Modules.

A lot of the technical folks I know these days don’t buy a lot of books. They prefer to google whatever information they need, and that works great – to a point. It’s harder to browse google when you only have a general idea of what you need. It’s also exceedingly difficult to do when one is offline, and I’m not allowed to drop my laptop onto the network at the office. Why work on the laptop at all then? Because I almost always have it with me, and if an idea strikes I want to be able to grab it and at least jot down a few notes, or better yet, sketch out a skeleton. You never know when inspiration will strike. This weekend it hit me while I was taking my son out for a walk (and all I could do then was send myself a calendar entry via my googlephone) as well as while visiting my relatives for Easter.

Plus, I love the feeling of holding a real, dead-tree book in my hands. I’m thinking about ordering a few more books in the near future as well. I’ll try to keep this area updated with any other thoughts about the above titles or books I end up buying.

I have a few more things I’ve discovered about the G1. Firtst and foremost, you can only attach pictures to emails with the gmail client. With the normal web-based Gmail client you can’t attach anything. If I were to speculate, that would be because Google doesn’t have a built-in filesystem browser that one can use to find files to attach. Second, a bug: if you are in the gmail client with a message open and a response to that message comes in the number of unread messages does not increment, but the message is marked read and the number of unread messages decrements. This can cause the number of unread messages in the main message list to display a negative number.

Also, sometimes messages get stuck in “sending” status when they’ve actually sent successfully, and sometimes gmail will create extra, draft copies of a message.

I still love this phone.

I went out on Tuesday and picked up a G1 (the Android-based Googlephone). So far I find it useful, convenient, and fun. It very, very close to what a mininotebook should be. As more apps get released it will only get closer.

That’s not to say it’s without quirks. The rich-text version of this form won’t accept text input. I had to type that last sentence twice because I somehow managed to make it disappear. Facebook is quirky while on wifi (possibly because of weak signal) buit works fine on Edge. When an app starts going nuts there doesn’t seem to be a way to kill it short of a reboot, even when you pull up the alt-tab menu where it would make sense. The tab soft-key (alt-q) does a tab character, never a field-advance.

Even with all that it’s still easily the best phone I’ve ever used. It blows my Windows Mobile device, which I loved, out of the water. There are apps that are so obvious and so wonderful that you can’t help but love them. Even the apps that are obviously missing are bound to show up soon.

It’s a shame I had to pay $23 to get it unlocked for use on AT&T, but that’s T-Mobile’s fault.

The phone is so sexy that Wendy wants one and she just got a new phone two months ago. I’m going to keep playing with it and I’ll post anything neat I find here.

You know, this should mean something.  So I was on the F5 site, trying to find a solution to a problem I’m having, and I’m searching around.  I throw a term into the search box, hit enter, and up pops a list of hits – the last of which, a forum post, looks relevant.  So I start reading it.

I wrote it.  The year before last.  When I was trying to solve the same problem.  How did I end up solving it, you ask?  Good question, and the answer involved me winning an award.

I swear.