The game changing aspect of the iPad is Safari. There will be plenty of cutesy apps, but I would sooner chew my own arm off than work with Objective-C. It is a disgusting abomination of a language. But having Safari on the iPad means developing feature-rich RIAs in HTML 5, with fast JavaScript, that can be packaged to deploy so that they appear the same as other iPad/iPhone applications (Dock icons, etc…). Best yet, Apple is giving the finger to Adobe and Flash. The iPad is going to put a nail in the coffin of Flash and help advance web standards by leaps and bounds.

Yehuda Katz of the jQuery team summarized it best in this blog post. I completely agree with him. The iPad is a godsend for HTML and JavaScript developers and anyone who values open web standards should be doing back flips right now. A thin tablet device with a cutting edge browser and wireless networking is going to open up a world of vertical market possibilities for web developers. I was really impressed with what Graham Glass did with his iPhone web application for EDU 2.0, and can only imagine how an application like this could take advantage of the iPad.

Check out the Safari Developer Documentation on Apple’s site sometime to really understand the vast programming playground Apple is creating for us. I’m actually excited about web development for the iPad and am looking forward to getting mine to play with.

RailsConf 2007 was held in Portland, Oregon, which is about the most awesome city I’ve been to for a conference. It has all the amenities of a big city, but still keeps a quirky small town feel. Between the conference, awesome micro-brews, and Powell Books, it was a really good time.

This was the RailsConf I went to with my Windows notebook while 99% of everyone there was running on a MacBook, so I played the leper. The speakers were great, and it was absolutely hilarious when one of the vendors had the Extra Action Marching Band show up at lunch the first day to perform. It pissed off the stodgy convention center management, but it was a sight to see. Check out James Duncan Davidson’s excellent photos if you want to see how fun a RailsConf could be.

I was thinking of going to RailsConf this year, but it is in Baltimore. I’ve never been a fan of east coast conferences, and I’m worried RailsConf is losing its fire. Just like JavaOne tapered off in to boredom, RailsConf on the east coast could be its jump the shark moment. But if they ever get around to having it in Portland again, I’ll be there.

So it came as a great personal surprise when I actually saw a vendor demo for something both cool and practical. I sit on the .NET Center of Excellence for our oversized company, and part of the role is listening to vendors show off their latest and greatest. Our last demo was from a company called InnerWorkings and I had honestly never heard of them before the demo.

InnerWorkings has an incredibly awesome computer-based training (CBT) system for learning .NET. It goes beyond book reading and is heavily based around coding exercises which are even scored by the system. It has a Visual Studio plugin for working with the vast library of learning material and links to O’Reilly’s Safari Books for reference.

I had never seen a CBT product before this which I would actually considered to be effective. This looked good enough that I would almost be willing to invest my own dollars. If you need to bring a development team up to speed on .NET programming, or a specific area on the bleeding edge, I highly recommend taking a look at InnerWorkings.

I continued to play throughout my own military career, expanding out into many other games. I usually ended up being the ring leader / gamemaster and had the pleasure of running campaigns for AD&D, Shadowrun, Top Secret, Champions, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire: The Masquerade and various one-offs just for fun. I quit regular play over a decade ago after leaving the military, but I still collect the books.

Tabletop gaming is a bit of an enigma nowadays. In the era of World of Warcraft, everyone is too busy on their computers to actually sit down at the same table together to experience face to face gaming. And it is a loss. There are whole generations who will not know the joy of exploring Expedition to Barrier Peaks or the Keep on the Borderlands. Then there is the palpable terror of taking a group through Missing Blood or The Haunted House for the first time. These were the experiences of my youth that I think every imaginative kid should have have the chance to know and enjoy.

It is sad because in the age of instant gratification on the web, people miss out on actually using their imagination in a social setting. WoW is about the destination, killing monsters to get better gear; RPGs are about the journey — the roads travelled together by friends exploring the depths of their imagination.

The state of gaming is sad today compared to the heydays, but it is still going strong for some. I finally attended a GenCon last year and was awed with the quantity and quality of gaming experiences. I’ve resolved to go every year I can now and plan to take my daughter when she is big enough. Since the collapse of the big names (TSR, FASA, White Wolf), the gaming scene has changed a lot. But there are still some nuggets of awesomeness out there:

Pathfinder – Paizo is now carrying the reigns to the heart of D&D in their own RPG inspired by D&D 3.5. Their books and modules are extremely well written and bring back the excitement of what RPGs are supposed to be about. Where the current 4th edition of D&D feels like a computer game, Pathfinder is role playing gaming at it’s finest.

Delta Green – Pagan Publishing took the Call of Cthulhu mythos and gave it an X-Files spin. I’m a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft, and Delta Green puts a modern conspiracy theory flavor on top of it. There are a couple books of Delta Green fiction which are must-reads, and the gaming books themselves are fascinating.

Goodman Games – These guys write some of the best modules out there for D&D. They actually care about the story telling. I ran in two of their games at GenCon last year and they were a really good time.

Kobold Quarterly – This magazine reminds me of what Dragon magazine used to be like in the early days. Awesome content and a thrill to read. Every gamer should subscribe.

The Oldies – One of my favorite settings is still a combination of first edition AD&D along with some spice from the Arduin Grimoire series. You can easily find all the classics at good prices at any of the used game vendors like Noble Knight, and it will be a more satisfying gaming experience than a lot of the new crap out there.

Unfortunately, for every bright spot, there is a trail of failure — and that trail is littered with the former glory of the big names:

D&D 4th Edition – In an attempt to reboot the game, Hasbro/WOTC has created a tabletop version of World of Warcraft. While fun the first few times, it quickly loses it’s luster and doesn’t have the feel of anything I would want to run a campaign in. And it still has the wallet-sucking book-a-month bloat problem.

Shadowrun – This IP has passed through many hands. From FASA to Whiz Kids to Catalyst Labs, it has lost something along each hop. At the beginning, I was enthralled with the setting and possibilities. It was truly brilliant. But the rules are fundamentally over complicated and imbalanced, and it gets old having every adventure end in a double cross.

Champions – This was the original dream game for min-maxers. Even the early guides took a tongue-in-cheek approach to it. But the early game was concise and had a really fun combat system. The latest versions of Champions / Hero Systems are now encyclopedia-sized monstrosities of rules. I play to have fun, not to study.

White Wolf – The first version of Vampire: The Masquerade was pure brilliance. I actually had a campaign I ran for about a year set in my home town of Olympia, Washington. It was fresh and fun. Then the book bloat hit. Now I’m afraid to even look at the White Wolf bookshelf. And White Wolf literally held a contest at GenCon having people compete to see who could hold up their latest two-inch thick sourcebook the longest.

So I’ve resolved this year to try and be a more active gamer. I’ve already registered for GenCon this year, and look forward to meeting new friends and discovering new games. And anyone out there who was also a gamer should take a look at the current crop of winners and support them.

Here’s an overview of the whole desk. I’m a wide-open spaces person for desks, so my desk is a 30×60 inch commercial workbench. Simple and to the point.

My computer is a 13″ MacBook Pro with 4gb of RAM. I use a 23″ Apple Cinema Display at home. This gives me the best of both worlds. Plenty of screen real estate when I’m at the desk, while still having a small laptop for on-the-go work.

My only grief with the display is that it sits too low when I’m seated at the desk. A quick trip to my local Woodcraft store solved that problem. I bought an 8×8x2 inch block of nice hardwood and smoothed it down. I then glued a piece of thick brown leather on the top and felt feet on the bottom. It is the perfect stand for this display.

My second best investment was a BookArc for holding my MacBook vertically behind the display. It doesn’t hold the laptop completely vertical like in the picture, but it is very stable and helps save a ton of desk space.

Here you can see how the MacBook tucks in behind the screen.

For the keyboard, I picked up one of the compact Apple bluetooth keyboards. I love the compact size, and it is easy to get out of the way when I need to work on other stuff on my desk. I stuck with a Logitech mouse, the VX Nano. It is a shame Logitech quit making them. It is the best mouse I’ve ever used. It is a laptop size mouse but still works perfect for all-day work at the desk.

Finally, two of my favorite desk accessories are a Rotring 600 Series 3 .7mm mechanical pencil and ballpoint pen. These are the older models with the knurled grips. They haven’t been made for over a decade and have become collectors items on eBay. If it is good enough for Jason Bourne, it is good enough for me.

So this is the current state of my geek creation station. We’ll see how long it lasts, but a clean desk feels like a clean mind.

1. Three Words: Dead Cat Bounce – If you haven’t heard this term before, it is a way of describing the financial markets when they make a small bounce after a downturn and then head downwards again. Unfortunately, I’m expecting things to get much worse this year, as all the problems that caused the Great Recession are still present and the mortgage mess is only getting worse. Add in the fact that all our large financial institutions are still fundamentally insolvent and exist at the grace of the American taxpayers, and you have a recipe for a big mess. Looking back in December 2010, people will say 2010 was much worse than 2009.
2. Oracle will buy VMWare – VMWare tried to gussy themselves up by acquiring SpringSource, and this will be the year they go a courting. Oracle is a natural, as it fills some holes for them and gets them the crown jewels of Java, the Spring Framework
3. .NET 4 will be a Killer – This is almost a gimme, but it is worth stating. With the dynamic language features in .NET 4, we’ll see a dynamic language crack the corporate mainstream market. This is nothing but good news for all the other dynamic language warriors out there like Ruby and Groovy. 2010 will be an awesome year for dynamic languages.
4. Java cements its position as the new Cobol – With dynamic languages making inroads on the heels of .NET 4, no one will want to be starting new straight Java projects anymore, relegating it to the world of endless maintenance.
5. Silverlight starts to kill off Flash – Silverlight 3 has almost caught up with Flex, and Silverlight 4 should push it ahead. Yes, there will still be a ton of Flash out there, and most of it will be annoying banner ads or boutique marketing websites. Developers who do not want to learn JavaScript but still build RIAs will be using Silverlight 4.
6. Chrome starts to kill off Firefox – Let’s face it, the only reason most of us use Firefox is for the plugins, with Adblock Plus being the biggie. Chrome is blazing fast and has a more streamlined browsing experience. When Chrome gets a rich plugin community going, and a port of Adblock Plus, Firefox will be on the ropes.
7. Someone buys ExtJS – This was my wildcard last year. I expected Microsoft to buy them, but they went with JQuery instead. They will be purchased by someone this year, and I’ll bet on some oddball shotgun wedding instrumented by greedy VCs.

Prediction #1 – Sun is toast : yep, nailed it.

Prediction #2 – Windows 7 will rock : another gimmee; Windows 7 is very good and was what Vista should have been.

Prediction #3 – Google and Apple will turn out to be evil after all : probably debatable. Google definitely, and Apple is still working on it.

Prediction #4 – Microsoft won’t be the evil empire anymore : swing and a miss. They’re sure trying to sound less evil, but they’re still Microsoft. I guess Ray Ozzie is not going to be able to move the mountain.

Prediction #5 – Oracle buys SpringSource : I was pretty close. They got bought by VMWare instead, which makes zero sense. I still think I’ll be proven right, as you’ll see when I make my predictions for next year.

Prediction #6 – Microsoft buys ExtJS : no dice. Admittedly, this was a wildcard guess. I am surprised that someone hasn’t bought them yet.

So all told, I had four of my six predictions mostly on the mark, which isn’t bad. I’ll have to start working on my scientific predictions for next year over the holidays. I just need a few good cups of eggnog first.

The good stuff first. The new 27″ LED screen is beautiful. The video card is an ATI 4850, which is plenty fast for most non-bleeding edge games, and it can be pretty cheaply boosted to 8GB of RAM. And Apple finally has quad-core CPUs! I can live with a dual core in the laptop, but if I’m paying for a chunk of metal that sits on my desk, it better have four cores. And the price isn’t bad considering what you get. A quad-core i5 bumped to 8GB is$2200.

If I didn’t have my current setup, and was the market for a new desktop, I would snap it up in a second, except for one small problem — I don’t like the glossy screen. I tolerate it in my current configuration because I still do all by Photoshop work a my PC with a good 20″ matte screen LCD. I’m sure most other serious Photoshop users have the same gripe. Apple has built their best desktop computers ever, and has handicapped it with a glossy screen.

I’m at a loss for why there is at least not a matte option, like on the 17″ Macbook Pro. My only guess would be they don’t want to cannibalize sales on the Mac Pros and 30″ displays. If I ever bought one of these, it would have to become my main computer and kill off my wintel box to justify the cost. That is not going to happen until Apple does right by their customers and ships these with a matte screen.

So let’s talk about what Net Neutrality really means. Imagine if your electric company got in to the appliance business and the next day your refrigerator quits running. You take a look and nothing appears wrong. Being the wise troubleshooter, you remember to test step #1: is it plugged in. It is plugged in but you figure out it is not getting any juice from the outlet.

You check the breakers; they’re all fine. By this point, you’re pretty irate so you call the electric company. The third-world tech support person tells you they are sorry to hear about your problem, but there is just too much demand for electricity. You see, too many people are plugging in those amperage-hogging power tools, so they have to prioritize the allocation. If you want to ensure your beer stays cold, you either need to buy one of their refrigerators or pay a bit extra a month for the additional guarantee on quality of service.

This is effectively what the large ISPs want to do with your internet connectivity. An educated person would call this extortion, but to them it is colloquially referred to as “an additional revenue stream”. If two large Italian gentlemen in thousand dollar suits paid you a visit and said “nice computer you have there, it would be a shame if you couldn’t get electricity for it”, someone would go to jail. Yet when large publicly traded companies do the same thing, we’re supposed to call it the “free market at work.”

There are only two reasons to oppose Net Neutrality: ignorance or corruption. I’m attempting to address the first problem by helping people understand the swindle that is taking place. Everyone with a computer should be up in arms that we don’t have Net Neutrality already. There is not a lot I can do about the second part. The national ISPs are lining the pockets of our elected officials to have them ensure they can continue their extortion racket. And with the United States Senate, there are ample quantities of both ignorance and corruption.

So write your representatives, post on blogs, make some noise! Americans need to know this matters and we’re not going to be led like sheep to the slaughter by the ISPs in pursuit of greed.

The big news is the new job. I left my position at Orange Leap and returned to work at Bank of America in the Office of Architecture working for one of my favorite former bosses. It was a huge shift of the pendulum for me. At Orange Leap, I was spending 99% of my time doing heads-down coding. Start-up mode. Now, at Bank of America, it is completely the opposite. I’m doing enterprise architecture more at what one might call the “paper architecture” level. For me, that means zero coding, which has jolted me out of my slump since I’m still a geek at heart and need to feel the satisfaction of writing cool code.

One advantage to not being bound to code at work is I can invest in the code I want to write, not have to write. I had a lot of time to reflect on the state of the Java world, and have decided to invest my personal coding into Ruby instead of Java. I’ll have to eat some crow with my Canadian friend, whom I mercilessly harassed for his Rails habit at ExtConf, but it is worth it.

I’ll address the easy part first: why not Java? I not exactly giving up Java. I’m perfectly happy to be paid to code in it, and will probably use it for years to come. But I see a bleak future ahead with the pending purchase of Sun by Oracle. I can’t really think of a company I hate more than Oracle, excluding the dirtbags at SCO. Java will be monetized to the detriment of the community; count on it. And yes, there is some cool work being done with languages using the JVM as the base (Groovy, Scala), but I would like a clean separation from a possible Oracle impact.

The second nail in the coffin was the purchase of Spring Source by VMWare. This made no sense to anyone, in spite of Rod’s blog entry explaining the reasoning behind the madness. As I suggested in my prior post, this is just a small course adjustment to SpringSource’s final destination. VMWare will be acquired by one of the big players, and SpringSource was only acquired to serve as additional bait. Even my good friend who is very involved in the local Spring community is acknowledging this gig is up.

So with two of my favorite technologies headed for a gruesome destiny, I decided it was time to bust out of the box. Ruby was my only choice. Ironically, I was pretty passionate about Ruby a few years back before it was cool. I attended the 2nd RubyConf in San Diego, and the first two RailsConfs. I’ll never forget seeing Why the Lucky Stiff perform at the Chicago RailsConf.

I put down Ruby because work called for Java. I should have stayed up on it. But now, getting back in to it after a few years absence, I feel like a kid again on Christmas Day. Ruby and Rails have matured dramatically as a language and framework, respectively. The community is even more vibrant than before and the syntactic prowess of Ruby is a breath of fresh air after years of Java. I’m looking forward to burning my personal braincells on something as enriching as Ruby.

What about JavaScript? It is not going anywhere. Some of the first stuff I want to figure out with Rails is how to get it to play nice with ExtJS and JQuery. JavaScript really is the future, and Ruby on Rails feels like the perfect match for getting it to the browser in an elegant manner.

So Hello Ruby World! I’m looking forward to getting to know you again.