Moock Blog. Coolio.
Hello. Fun weekend. Lots going on in my life, and most of it I want to write something about. Went to see Thievery Corporation this weekend, they were great. Read a good book yesterday. I’m back at work today, and updates will resume shortly.
As an aside, Macromedia has announced that their developer conference will be held November 18-21 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Umm, what is the deal with this? It’s the week before Thanksgiving? Someone over there needs to have their head examined. They had announced that it was going to be held in San Diego this year at last year’s show, which I enjoyed thoroughly. It has been held in October, in a warm climate, the last two years. I just went from being a sure to attend to a not likely to attend in one fell swoop.
Well, since Todd went ahead and linked to it, I’ll add that the project I have been working on for the last couple of months is PGA.com as well. My area(s) of the project included a variety of tasks, but the single largest one was building a real time golf scoring system that integrated with a few different XML golf scoring feeds on the back end, and with our content management system for output. Since some of our vendors for scoring had never used XML before, I had the opportunity to actually author my own XML format for golf scoring. I’ve learned a lot along the way about the challenges of using XML for something like this. The vendors that had their own xml formats, by and large, didn’t understand the value of maintaining the semantic nature of the information they were marking up. They were obviously used to output markup, like html, and so combined unlike information into elements, did not name like information attributes consistently, and generally did not implement XML in a manner that made lot of sense. This meant that I had to do some gymnastics to get the information out of the XML in a raw form. One thing I can tell you is that ColdFusion MX might just be the best platform to use for doing XML development available right now. My development time was considerably lower than some of the open source XML software that I have worked with in the past, and I had little trouble adding additional vendors once I had built the initial framework. ColdFusion Components make it much easier to swap out the data layer of an application without having to rewrite everything that sits on top of the data layer. I guess I will post more about this in the coming weeks, we’ve got a lot of other work that we want to do, and some great ideas for future features and development.
The other thing I will comment on now is that this might be the most skilled, top to bottom, team of designers, client side coders, back end developers, content managers, system admins, and project managers that I have worked with to date. Everyone was a real pleasure to work with, and the environment here at CNN Center is a great place to work. This is a good thing considering how many hours I have spent here in the office over the last 24 days. It was certainly made more interesting by the current war situation in Iraq. CNN goes into hyper-mode during these times, and it's been interesting to see. We also get a bunch of the raw live feeds here in the office that let us get a glimpse behind the broadcast scenes both in the studio here, and out in the field. This week it is all about The Masters though, and I have to get back to my server and feed watching, more later.
While I was in Aruba, I read both Pattern Recognition and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I enjoyed both books for different reasons. William Gibson’s writing has gotten better with each of his books in my opinion. He does a great job of setting a mood for the book, and then playing a melody around that mood. It seemed to me that Pattern Recognition explored territory that none of his previous books have explored as well, this sort of texture of life that revolves around design and brand in today’s world.
Eeesh, I’m tired. I’ve worked every day since I got back from a wonderful, relaxing trip to Aruba with my entire family. In the three weeks that have passed since then, I have basically lived at the office. It’s gotten pretty bad. Last night, I took a nap when I got home from work at sixish. When my alarm went off a little after seven, I was supposed to be getting ready to meet someone for dinner. Instead, I got up and began getting ready to go into the office. It literally was about ten minutes before I realized that I wasn’t supposed to be going into the office. What ensued was a great sushi dinner with good conversation and plenty of Saba and Tako, but I was a little horrified that I’m that far into automatic mode.
Hello, still alive. Been busy, first out of the country, then launching a redesign of a Web site. We’ve got some tweaking to do this week, but it’s live now. I’l link to it when the tweaking is done.
eeesh, Neglecting my site duties horribly.
eeesh, Neglecting my site duties horribly.
Considering everything that I could have done this weekend, I got a lot done around the house. There is a really spiritually and emotionally rewarding feeling after baking some cookies or cleaning up a room.
Considering everything that I could have done this weekend, I got a lot done around the house. There is a really spiritually and emotionally rewarding feeling after baking some cookies or cleaning up a room.
Anil Dash: Six Apart buys a fax machine
I’ve been thinking about Konfabulator this weekend a bit. It uses the Spidermonkey Javascript runtime from the Mozilla project as it’s core. I think it’s worth noting that we are seeing more and more fruits of open source code on the Mac OS X platform all the time now. Open Source seems to be enabling innovation, and writing something like Konfabulator from scratch would proabably have been a much more daunting task without the ability to embed the Javascript runtime. I seem to be seeing people note on a regular basis that Mac OS X is the best platform for innovation by independent developers now, and open source code is one big reason for that.
Google Buys Pyra. Woah.
Sorry about the lack of updates this week. The port that my admin tool is running on is blocked at my new office, and I haven’t had time to reconfigure things so that I can get to it. Lots going on offiline, I really feel like I’ve gotten myself off to a fresh start this year thus far, although I still need to work a bit more on those pesky resolutions.
I walked in on the tail end of this conversation last night while out at a charity kickoff for Kate’s Club. It’s an organization that I think I’m going to get involved in in some capacity. Moral of the story is that most people do not like to be told they look like elves.
Today is my last day.
Mark Richards, who I work with, just selected a plain bagel for his breakfast.
I’m having an interesting week so far, not free of stress by any means. Over the weekend, I played paintball for the third time in as many months. It’s an addictive adrenaline rush, and has left me wondering why it hasn’t taken off more than it has. I followed that up with a softball practice on Monday for the team I joined for this spring, “Team Bad Guy.” So I’ve been a bit sore the last couple of days, these sports use different muscles than my normal gym workouts. Aside from that, lots of house maintenance tasks this week, and a lot of worrying about finishing tasks properly at my current position before moving on to the new one on Monday.
Ok, so maybe this Darrin guy isn’t quite as bad as I am making him out to be. In other news, I took a new contracting assignment today relaunching a site for a major sports media organization. Exciting stuff, new technology, and a great team from the looks of things. I wish I could tell you more, but you know the drill. This is making it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the stored procedures and cfml code that I am currently working on. Next week is going to be a very long week.
There is this guy I work with named Darrin, I really don’t care for him.
I’ve been under the weather the last couple of days, missed a day and half of work with some sort of stomach/flu bug. I did get to do a lot of reading yesterday, and I read Jennifer Government from cover to cover in addition to finishing up a couple of other books that I have been working on. I enjoyed Jennifer Government’s tone and story, and I liked the commentary on one possible future that the book made. I’d recommend it to people who enjoy dark cyberpunk type material.