All posts by mhanlon

Web – Use the Ruby on Rails Alternative …. ?

Web – Use the Ruby on Rails Alternative:

Ruby on Rails is simpler than J2EE for developing MVC Web applications.

Ugh. If good old Deepak Vohra had used WebObjects maybe he’d have written this article differently. Oh well.

Rails is nice and all, but having done a bit more in depth with it, and done my share of in depth work with WebObjects, I have to say D2W still has yet to be beat. Let alone EOF vs ActiveRecord.

Boston Marathon Liveblog…

This is the first in what I hope is an annual ritual: my liveblog of the Boston Marathon.

Now, I have no access to a TV, and can’t see the route from the office in Charlestown, but here’s a crack at it:

A bunch of people, much fitter and braver than I, are out there running, somewhere between Hopkinton and Boston.

Oh, and one’s just taken the lead! Now he’s behind and someone else has passed another person farther back the pack…

Just kidding. Every year I see those guys and girls taking to the streets (and my sister, last year, in her first qualification far the Marathon), and every year some little, stupid part of me goes, “Wow, that would be a pretty cool accomplishment…”

Thereby trivializing the hours and hours and months and months of work that goes into training and qualifying for the Boston Marathon. Thankfully, the vast majority of runners will be far too tired to come over to Charlestown post-race and kick my a**…

Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Writer Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84:

One of the outstanding figures of modern US literature, Kurt Vonnegut, has died aged 84 in New York.

What a royal bummer.

Destiny Calling“, a short story I wrote and sent to Kurt after finishing Timequake (Kurt Jr. Vonnegut) (got off the plane from London, took the A line straight home, threw the bag on the bed and started writing in the old Atlantic Ave apartment in Brooklyn – writing on that crummy old desk/kitchen table acquired from some guy’s basement down the avenue, a basement filled with Miles Davis memorabilia and furniture).

Writing forward

Good advice from Tess Gerritsen:
Tess Gerritsen’s Blog » Any way that works for you:

I’ve learned that the most important thing is to keep the story moving forward. Even if I realize that the story’s taken a sudden turn and I’ll have to go back and re-write three chapters to make the plot work, I just keep moving ahead. Only when I’ve written THE END do I allow myself to go back and fix things. The consequence is that anyone who sees my first draft may think they’re reading a half dozen different books spliced together. Characters’ names will suddenly change midway through (because I decide that I really didn’t like that name Olaf anyway.) Once, after writing about a third of a manuscript, I changed a character’s sex from male to female. Did I bother to go back and revise the early chapters? No. I just kept writing, using the character’s new gender.

Which is why a tool like Writer.app is invaluable. Get that? Invaluable. Meaning “beyond value.” Valu-ciferous. Which comes from the Latin: “value-giving, year ’round.” So you should pony up the $75… wait… it’s free. Pony up nothing, chum, and get writing. It’s not just me telling you, it’s Tess, too.

Go download it, get unplugged for a little bit, and see how far that novel gets then.

A mini-review (rated 2 stars)

by Gary Troup


Just a short review, this book can be summed up by the following:

Ugh.

I wanted to like this book, I really did. I thought it would add a little depth to a show (Lost) that has sort of lost its way.

But, for whatever reason, they got stuck with, or picked, an author, writing as Gary Troup, who hates the mystery/thriller genre.
Actually, I wanted to verify that, and did a quick dig to find out who ghost wrote the book, and it turns out he is a mystery/thriller writer. Doh. Maybe he’s just not very good. Or was thinking about writing in another style too much. Needless to say, I won’t be picking up any Laurence Shames books anytime soon.