Finally checked out on the Hunter 27 at Fairwind. I can now move up to the big boats! The plan is to be checked out on Island Side and Osprey by next summer.

Finally trained on the hunter 26.5. Moving up to the big boats soon!

Oxnard Slip:

Pelican Bay – Santa Cruz Island:

Spent the weekend training on the soling with two awesome Fairwind trainers. Also spent some time working on maintenance: we removed oxidation build up on the gunwales using a fine abrasive liquid.  We only ended up finish the port side because the one side took the entire morning on Sunday.  Still a good learning experience.  I have to have a couple more training sessions for docking/undocking then I should be ready for my check-out.

Wsdl2objc let me down. The objective-C code it generated was horrible an it didn’t handle any of my complex data types correctly. Sudz-C on the other hand (with a few tweaks) was stellar.

My latest project has been to create a social app based on the Facebook Graph API.  So far it has been quite a trip.

The business layer of this whole enterprise is running on one of my ubuntu servers; consists of Netbean web services running in Sun’s Glassfish application server.  MySQL is running on another physical ubuntu server, thus physically seperating the database from the business logic as well.

The IPhone application is written in Objective-C, which looks weird since I’ve been spending most of my work development time in Python these days.  Regardless, once I got going it wasn’t too hard to wrap my head around the concepts.  The only complaint I have is that it does kind of suck that there aren’t any robust libraries for processing SOAP messages for the iphone(although I did find this:  wsdl2objc).

Now that I understand how to develop the various subsystems, I am in the process of refactoring the web services architecture to make it more flexible for future development.

Fairwind, my new yacht club, is located in Marina del Rey. It is a co-operative yachting association where the members contribute to all aspects of clubs activities: Training other members and their families, maintaining the fleet, accounting, etc. Of course the main purpose of the club is to sail with a great group of people.