News

Finally had my first baby .

I would expound a little more but I am on a pretty tight schedule .

Things didn't go completely as expected. We were shooting for a natural birth but our baby decided she really wanted to come out but first so we ultimately ended up having to op for a c-section. My wife did absolutely amazing, I don't think I have ever seen anybody with so much determination. Baby and mom are both doing terrific now. So without further adieu, here are some pictures. (click on the thumbnails for full size)

It looks as though Macromedia is about to be gobbled up. Good news is that it's not Microsoft doing it (thank god.) It sounds like Adobe's aquisition will be completed by this fall.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153750,00.html

I am not really sure what I think about this. I have been drifting away from macromedia products for some time now due to the fact that I am about 95% programmer, 5% designer. I am just more content using programming tools like Zend Studio for my design work then I would be using tools like dreamweaver for my programming. I do however enjoy playing with Flash and Fireworks. In the whole merger process, here is what I hope happens.

In my perfect world Adobe will pretty much take the interface and the concept behind the interface that macromedia uses for all of its products and put in the functionality of their programs. I am a big fan of the functionality of alot of Adobe's stuff, I just hate how slow and cumbersome it can be to use.

I hope they just leave flash alone. It really does not need any more major overhauls. Maybe a few small upgrades, but I would hate to see them ruin the direction actionscript has taken. In my opinion the interface for that program works quite well too.

I also hope they continue moving along with dreamweaver and just ditch go live! As long as whatever they end up doing with design software, so long as it is mostly standards compliant I will be happy.

In either case, the way I see is this could either be a really good thing.....or a really bad thing. Only time will tell.

I'm done with almost all of my major projects at work, so now I get to move on to my own personal wish list.

1. Redesigning my site
2. Gettin up a couple of more 'general' blog to post my nonsense in.
3. Writing an article about the Unit of Work pattern.
4. Getting PHP4 and 5 to run as parrallel apache modules on a linux server.

So for those that have stopped visiting cause I haven't put anything new on in a few weeks. Do come back soon. I hopefully will have all manner of useful things flowing out of my fingers again.

Zend just recently released a beta version of Zend studio 4.0. It boasts of Database support, Improved PHPDoc and PHPDocumentor support, a code snippet library, and few other things. If they finally recognize the clone keyword then I'll be happy . In any case I went ahead and downloaded it and will be doing a pretty thorough evaluation of it be the end of the week. Stay tuned and you can see my opinion. (For what it's worth)

Oh, and here's a link to it: http://www.zend.com/store/products/zend-studio/beta.php

I just happened upon this story. Looks like google hired the lead firefox engineer. They also were known to have recently hired several IE developers and have secured the domain gbrowser.com. What do you all think Google is up to? Could it be that Firefox is going to fork into a browser that has large corporate browsing???

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=internetNews&storyID=7422857

So after my shoutbox warning (I know I know...the spam is automated) I came in this morning to see yet another shoutbox spam. So I have now banned the stupid man/woman/computer's IP from my website. I also decided to go look through the comments I have recieved that have been identified as spam and indeed they were all spam...so I blocked their IPs too.

SO THERE

My wife was so kind as to get me what I've always wanted and never bought for myself....a Gift Certificate to Border's Books. Needless to say I was ecstatic and immediatly went and spent the gift certificate plus a few more dollars on an nice O'Reilly book: Head First Design Patterns. At first glance it looks like a pretty fun approach to design patterns. Now, as far as design patterns go I have a pretty good, broad understanding of several different types of patterns, but I figured this book would go the rest of the way in embedding the concepts deeply into my brain. I just started reading the introduction a couple of minutes ago and I'll let you know how it goes. It should be fun.

For those of you interested in how Design Patterns can be used in PHP I recommend you go to PHP Patterns. That site was created by Harry Fuecks. He hasn't added new content in quite a while as he is kep pretty busy with his blog over at Sitepoint, and the info is only for PHP4. (PHP5 has better ways to do a few of his examples...but it wasn't out when he made them.) In any case it's still a good launching ground for patterns in PHP.

Somehow the release of MySQL 4.1 slipped right by me. This (in my opinion) is a huge production release. Mysql 4.1 offers support for subqueries. These have been a long time missing in MySQL and will prove very useful to many, many people. Another huge thing for me is that I can now start using the MySQLi PHP extension in my scripts. This extension will do great things in helping me make some of my DB abstraction alot smoother in my apps with the prepared statements. I know, I know, you are now saying that ADODB has supported prepared statements for just about ever. Well, which do you think is faster? Parsing statements in PHP? or Parsing statements with C? I might even throw up a bookmark to see if my point and objection to using ADODB for prepared statement is one to be taken .

For those that care, here is a link to the Changelog for MySQL 4.1.

Well, I'm now working on that new server I wrote about this morning. Turns out we have absolutely no server OS CDs anywhere in the office so I decided to do a FreeBSD install via ftp. Well, either we have some major connectivity issues here at the office or the pipe over at freeBSD.org is being heavily used. I am stuck at about 5 KB/sec. So, that gives me alot of time to sit and stare blankly at the blue download screen. However, I got bored with that fairly quickly so I decided to go get a book to read. I picked up Fresh Styles for Web Designers and decided to give it a shot. It's written by Curt Cloninger over at Lab 404. He does some editorial work for A List Apart as well. I'll post my thoughts on it when I finish it. It looks to be an interesting read. It just does an overview of the different styles of design that are out there today. Being that design is a weak area for me I am hoping to learn lots. We'll see.

Well, my workplace has purchased a nice new Dell PowerEdge server that I get to work on. It'll be my first time using real server hardware or an enterprise version of Linux (Redhat Distro). I'm kind of looking forward too it though. I enjoy learning new things and playing with computers, so when I get a task that lets me do both I am usually ecstatic.

On another topic, I will soon be making a post concerning inline-block. All I will say about it now is that I am horribly suprised to have finally found something IE does right and Mozilla doesn't do at all.

Catch you all later.

Well, I have finally cleared off my workload and learned a few new things in the process. This has all given me some inspiration to again start posting to my blog. So I hope I am able to impart some knowledge to all you folks. Feel free to post any comments to my thoughts and what not.

Well, quite apparently a number of stupid porn/obscene sites are for one reason or another directing traffic to my site. Don't know why, I don't really care why. It does kind of make me mad that they show up in my referrer list. It makes me even madder that people are apparently going to those sites from my referer list. So now I get to dig through the code and see if I can throw a filter or something in there. I swear, you are having a good day and all of a sudden you check your site and find out that you have unknowingly linked yourself to bad sites....I hate the internet sometimes.

I have officially moved the location of group therapy. You can now find this site at http://group.digitalsandwich.com. The reason for doing this is that I am doing some fairly major changes to my site and I wanted the changes to not affect group therapy as well as the other way around. If you don't know what group therapy is I would reccomend you give it a look see. It's kind of fun.

Group Therapy