Garrett Bjerkhoel

The design on this site is somewhat dated, it's the same as last time, just a bit more polished than how I left it. When I was going back and trying to add CSS, it just felt unorganized and I saw room for some improvement. With that, I decided to re-write the CSS and I felt like using something I found a while back, Less CSS.

I have updated the site now with Less CSS, and it was a good experience to say the least. It's an interesting approach to CSS, and it felt a bit more natural to a programmer. It had functions, variables, and nested rules.

This past week I migrated a production application over from a shared server, over to a dedicated server. I had to move over quite a bit of stuff, the database, thousands of images, permissions, etc. When you're used to moving small databases around, you usually don't run into too many problems other than a incomplete file or just something that takes 5 minutes to fix.

To see how I solved it and made it more likely for a migration to move smoothly the first time around, read this.

This isn't about what I like so much about the iPad, but what I plan on doing with it. People are overlooking how this will actually benefit you.

I've made a few iPhone applications; one is off the store due to legal reasons (it was my fault, but damn you Sony Music), and the other one was lost in a harddrive crash (now I have Time Machine and git). They both were enjoyable experiences, and I learned a lot from them both.

I think the iPad is perfect for the kinds of applications that weren't really a fit on the iPhone in the first place. What could that be? Well, there are a few things.

1. Full screen picture gallery when it's on the Dock.
2. Alarm clock, this could be pretty slick.
3. Social games that you could only do between Bluetooth. What about a twister kind of game, were your fingers need to be tangled?
4. Some things just don't fit well on the iPhone's screen; Monopoly, Madden, Touchgrind, etc.

I don't want to bring my laptop to bed so I can watch a video, so I use my iPhone. Which is great and all, but it tends to feel dated watching a video on such a small screen when it was supposed to be viewed on a bigger screen. Although some will argue the iPad's aspect ratio is horribly flawed, unless you're some Blu-Ray 1080p loving 52" LED kind of guy, you'll live. This is the mentality that people need to bring when thinking of making apps for the iPad, making applications a more pleasurable experience on the iPad then it ever could be on the iPhone.

All the hardcore coders were expecting something targeted towards them, I don't really blame them, because I was hoping for a bit more as well. In the end I blame that solely on how hyped up this was going to be by all the blogs.

Seems like every year I make some goals for myself, but never write them down. Now I have no reason to not do everything I would like to see myself doing this year.

Over at ISO50 they just released 5 amazing covers. Alex Cornell's Empire Of The Sun is my favorite, check it out.

I put this site on GitHub because it's Rails 3 and I figured someone could learn from it, I also admire Gemcutter being open source like it is, so that was some inspiration as well.