New Year Update

Posted: 2012.01.08

I've been pruning away the deadwood, literally and metaphorically...

  • The pear and magnolia trees in our front yard, damaged by the October 31 snowstorm.

  • The Facebook, Twitter, Google+ social sharing widgets that I added in November. They were polluting my site with nasty bloated Javascript, and nobody ever clicked them! (The Flattr button can stay because it's just a hyperlinked image.)

  • Google in general: I don't want to be so dependent on one huge corporation, especially one that's losing its mojo. GMail's "new look" is an imitation of the worst aspect of Apple's look: the cryptic icons. Google Plus is unusable on Android. Android is the lesser of two evils. Chrome is just... annoying.

    I'm afraid Google is following the path of AT&T. People within Google have created some great things, like GMail and V8, just as AT&T spawned some great things. But as a business entity, AT&T belongs in the same hell-pit as Enron, Bank of America, and the East India Company.

    I stand ready to abandon ship, GMail and all, if things get ugly.

  • The online banking account I never use because it sucks so bad. Unfortunately, pretty much all the good banks outsource their online services to this same cheesy outfit. Blog rant forthcoming!

    (I guess I'd make do with it, if I didn't live near a good bank.)

  • My webserver: In the process of moving to a new machine, I cleared out all the cruft from my initial foray into freelance web dev. The new machine is a 16-core Xeon with 12GB RAM, running 64-bit Linux (CentOS 6) -- not some underpowered piece of trash. I'm still with Webfaction, a fine hosting company.

  • CoffeeScript: it stimulated a lot of great ideas, but it's got too many bells and whistles and glitches -- and god-awful error reporting. Simplicity dictates that I revert to vanilla Javascript, which, like plain C, is a decent language for the most part.

  • Flash audio/video on PeterNovelli.com: it's time for HTML5... with fallback to bare mp3/ogg links.

    I think we'll also lose the AJAX-style tabs, another source of bloat and bugs... we need to keep it simple for smartphones, with their buggy browsers and sometimes poor bandwidth. My original rationale was that people should be able to browse around the site while listening to songs, but who actually listens to music on websites anymore? Besides, now we have 1-2 minute clips instead of whole songs.

  • Color themes on this site. I love the retro green-on-black look, but black-on-white is easier to read on laptops/smartphones in daylight.

Plans for 2012

Focus on my core business: straightforward web dev/design, lean mobile html5 apps, and sysadmin work.

Add music to the mix... get to more concerts and jam sessions, (re)connect with fellow musicians, do websites etc for 5-10 of them, play a few paying gigs myself, and maybe even make a little money from downloads (if I get around to recording anything good! :-)

Release a few open-source projects:

  • 'Minx': my little "artistic CMS" built on Node.js & MongoDB.

  • OpenMelee, or at least the 2D game engine (Lua, C/C++, OpenGL, SVG). Maybe a Javascript/WebGL port, too.

  • A few little tools, scripts, and examples.

Expand the Reference section on tnovelli.net. It's the most popular thing on my site. So, I'm taking all my half-baked cheatsheets for vim, javascript, mongodb, git, rsync, bash, etc, and turning them into clean, compact, mobile- and print-friendly HTML for all. If it saves time for even one of my collaborators, it's worth it.

The obligatory predictions for 2012

No big breakthroughs on my radar.

Tech Bubble 2.0: Facebook IPO FAIL - everyone expects it now, but it'll still signal the end of the gravy train. Expect a moderate slump, not another 2001 crash. Also, software based on the Mayan 400-year calendar may fail, just like Y2K. Stay away from Tenoctitlan on Mayan New Year's Eve, and you should be all right.

Economy: more of the same nonsense... denial, deferred losses, buck-passing, bailouts... no resolution. (I expect to do okay though.)

American Spring...? Normally we turn to politics, not protest, in an election year... but this time nobody's getting their hopes up, and we're in a real mess...