I’m doing a recap on 2007 here at work for my own sake, and I’ve termed 2007 the “year of the hack”. Our site architecture is aged and is in the process of being replaced, but that work is a couple of years away from completion. As we attempt to add new and better functionality to our site, we constantly run into roadblocks from a content and technology perspective that requires us to cobble a solution together, typically using crazy Javascript. On any given page on the site, I’ve counted as many as 27 external scripts and numerous embedded scripts being referenced to achieve interactive objectives. Totally unacceptable.

My goal in 2008 is to find acceptable solutions to these problems while minimizing unnecessary script use.

I’ve come to the realization that I love utillizing older computers from yesteryear. And when I say yesteryear, I mean around 7 years old. Our current family computer is an “mature” machine I built in the early months of 2000. I haven’t been able to part with it, so I’ve spent the last 7 years updating it with new hardware and software to keep it current for our basic needs.

Lately, we have been running low on disk space and it has been extremely taxed with even the simplest of tasks, so there has been some thought of an upgrade. I’ve had my eye on the Macs, but our current financial situation wouldn’t allow me to get that Mac Book Pro I’ve been eying for the past several months (starting at $1999 for the entry-level… yikes). As for the Windows OS, well, let’s just say that the prospect of upgrading to Vista leaves me feeling less than inspired. I’m not a “hata”, but I haven’t found a compelling reason to make that jump quite yet.

I’d been a CLI Linux user for the past 6 years and loved to use the OS as a server with the LAMP stack and various Tomcat installations, but never found X Windows that attractive or user friendly. Looking back at it, I was using a Slackware distribution, probably the most user-unfriendly one out there, but after checking out others, I was still unconvinced. One day, my trusty server box with Slackware blew up and I was forced to buy some new hardware. Ubuntu was the new, cool distro on the block so I loaded that up, and to my pleasant surprise, it was a breeze (can I say a “delight”?) to install and I was up and running in under an hour, unlike my Slackware box that took months to configure to a tenuous state where if I didn’t alter anything it would be stable. More

I’m tired of RSS. Not of reading and keeping up with my favorite feeds, but of presenting the wonders and benefits to the business teams at the company. My team is responsible for keeping the masses up-to-date on the latest and greatest trends that can affect our business — and I believe we serve this role well. The problem is getting the masses to listen and really care about what we’re saying; to take five minutes out of their day and try out something new. Not that RSS is a new concept — the current RSS 2.0 spec was copyrighted in 2003. More

In large and small scale businesses there is a divide — one that separates the business from the more technical folk. In today’s marketplace, it is critical that these two forces meet somewhere in the middle, sharing an understanding of commonplace technical terms, techniques and trends. It’s scary when a business lead is driving an initative, yet doesn’t truly grasp the high-level technical concepts of the work; or when the business side sees something “cool” and says, “why can’t we have that on our site?” Sound familiar? More

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this, you may have seen some earlier posts (earlier meaning 6 months ago) which appeared on the same subdomain, but a different box. The old Slackware box blew up leaving me no choice but to build another, this time I wimped out with an Ubuntu installation. How fun is that? I’ve also chosen a new design — still the same minimalist style, but with a new logo! No one would mistake me for a designer…

Well, I’m back from a junket to NYC and the AJAXWorld East 2007 convention. Honestly, I can say I was a bit underwhelmed. I had my eye on a couple of seminars and was looking forward to expanding my knowledge listening to the “experts”. I was disappointed when half of the sessions I attended were marred by critical presentation mistakes, technical difficulties, or both. I mean, don’t you guys practice these things at all? Sheesh. A young man who had authored a book about “rolling your own” AJAX library was one highlighted on my list. We waited for 20 minutes (out of a total of 45 slotted for the presentation) for a DVI to VGA adaptor for his Mac. No luck. Finally, they transferred him over to a PC, only to find that many parts of his presentation and demo app. were, I think, pathed incorrectly. Whatever the case was, he fumbled around for 35 minutes while the filled-to-capacity room sat in silence. I was truly embarrassed for him.

I don’t believe I was the only one who got fed up with the lack of quality of presentation in the conference. One of the numerous vendor presentations went awry soon after it began. People were standing up and exiting in droves as the presenters stumbled to get their app working on the laptop. I guess after two days of putting up with this BS, people had had enough.

I’ve come up with another professional career goal: give interesting, accurate presentations.