Sarah and company¹ have done a great job decorating our house and it really has become our home. Something we had talked about doing but had escaped us this far was adding some color, since the original color is a little on the light – safe for the masses – side

Since Sarah’s sister, Lyn, was in town this past weekend, they were tasked, in between trips to the pool, with making the final decision on the colors and buying the paint. I was surprised saturday afternoon by 5 gallons of paint and the tools needed to get the job done. We prepped the bathroom saturday night and got Lyn ready for her return trip the following morning. First thing sunday morning we took Lyn to the airport, had a nice breakfast on our way back and got started on the first room. It is awesome!

I am trying to get a couple of photos ready, along with some before & after images, to show the great effect a little color can have in a room. If you really can’t wait, this image can give you a little hint about the color we went for. Another step in making this house become our home.

1.- Thank you to everyone that has been part of this process, we love to have you here!

Morning entertainment gracefully provided by one smooth roll off the booth and onto the floor. At least the sugar packet was caught!

We are investigating the web portion of an application at the office and there are some items that need to be investigated in the mean time. For instance, I need to find a practical approach to bring the APS pages supplied by the vendor into source control.

During each version update they supply a new set of APS pages, most of the time only some of the code within the pages changes but the number of pages is significant enough that I am looking for some help from CVS. In addition to the changes from version to version, there are some customizations that we have to implement within each version release. I need to identify a simple workflow that will help us deal with what changes need to be handled as a new version is released.

CVS provides tags and branches to identify certain points with a code repository. I believe that using branches for each new version released by the vendor would allow us to work within each branch, even in a historical fashion. Having access to previous versions would allow us to do some regression testing if we found it to be needed. However, I fear that by using branches, our repository will become a little too — mmmm — complex? Not the right word but I need to look into this a little bit more.

Apple announced a few days ago the release date for its next version of OS X (10.4) named Tiger. I have been trying to do some research about the benefits of upgrading, since this is the first version update since I bought my Powerbook. The need to evaluate this decision is because of the $129 fee for this upgrade – $95 if you pre-order through Amazon.

From a developer point of view, I would love to upgrade in order to remain on the leading edge of this OS X. Apple lists over 200 new features with Tiger but I wonder how much of this is actually marketing talk vs. true value for the user. As a regular user of OS X, the two applications that I am looking forward to is the new search technology named Spotlight and any improvements made to Mail.app. Anything else would be extra as far as I am concerned at this point in time.

I have also been reading how Tiger is not worth $129 for the new features that it provides. A lot of people have been talking about Dashboard but I don’t see much benefit from this technology with regards to my daily activities.

I also would like to see this OS in production before I go ahed and make the investment. I am assuming that a lot of the new Windows users migrating to the Applie Mini will face this same question. It will be interesting to see the adoption rate of this version from users other than the true Apple fanatics. We have an older Mac still running Panther (10.2) at the office so I might suggest we buy the upgrade for that machine and see it first hand.

update: I just checked with our campus bookstore and they offer a maintenace plan where they will cover any Apple release for the next 3 years (starting this past March) for only $79. They expect 10.4 and 10.5 to be released within the 3 year space. Even if they only release 10.4 within the covered time frame, it is still a cheaper alternative to the $95 from Amazon. This could be a good alternative and most likely we’ll do it of our Mac at work.

update II: we bought the 3 year maintenance deal from the campus bookstore for the office Mac. Once I am able to see Tiger first hand, I will decide if it’s worth doing the same for the Powerbook.

I have a couple of monitors that I am interested in selling. They are great monitors but now that we have a smaller office space at home, they are simply too big. In the spirit of simplifying things I decided to put them up for sale and see what happens. After I approached a couple of mailing lists and not hearing back from anyone on these lists, I decided to give craigslist a shot.

In case you are interested, you can view the product page for 2 21″ Viewsonic P815 monitors.