Recently in Development Category

I have been a big fan of Mozilla for as long as they have been in existence. Before that I was part of the Netscape crowd and worked with them on browser development even before Netscape Navigator 4. Early on I did some work on the Thunderbird project and Sunbird. During my time at Motorola I was a member of the Netscape Customer Council and worked closely with their server development teams integrating the Motorola PageWriter two-way pager into the Netscape environment. In fact I hold a patent for that work last I heard. So as Mozilla worked on the open source code that would become Firefox I was right there rolling up my sleeves. Firefox 2 has been my default browser since it was released. And while it has had its share of issues over time my loyalty has not wavered. That is not to say I wasn't looking forward to its replacement. I was waiting rather impatiently to put it to the curbside and use something that was a little more memory friendly.

After the fiasco I experienced with my sites being taken down I am now starting to realize that I need to get my sites moved to a different provider. I have begun research to try and find a new hosting company. A hosting company with servers that are a little more robust and technical support that is a little more technical and a lot more available. The problem I am finding is that a lot of the places I am finding do not offer the level of hosting that IX Web Hosting does. I have their Unlimited Pro plan which allows me to have an unlimited number of domains on my account. I am also given unlimited data transfer and unlimited disk space and 16 dedicated IP addresses. I'm not naïve to believe I am actually given unlimited anything but for what I have there have been no complaints when I consumed 11.5 GB with a couple of photo shows I did online. Most of the plans I am finding from other service providers they allow only 4-6 IP addresses and other restrictions that could be difficult for me to live within. I am beginning to think that shared hosting may not be the answer.

I have come to the conclusion that I have a serious personality deficiency. This of course is not news to anyone who knows me or my wife Trina. Trina has been telling people for years that I have a lot of defects but I had until now chosen to ignore her comments. This of course has led to numerous occasions where I have ended up sleeping on the couch because I happened to ignore the wrong comments. In this case I am here to publicly admit that I have an issue. For some unexplainable reason I am a complete-ist. It doesn't seem to matter what it is, it has to be completed and consistent. It was first brought to my attention by my lovely wife Trina who expressed her frustration with me and light bulbs. I cannot deal with the fact that a light bulb has ceased to work. I don't know why but that really bothers me. I have to immediately replace the defective bulb. That's ok if we happen to have a spare bulb in the house. But if we don't, I can't rest until a replacement bulb is gotten and the bad bulb eliminated. That may not sound like a bad thing but light bulbs seem to choose the most inopportune times to die. For example, you get up on a Sunday morning where you have promised your wife you will go to church with her. You turn on the bathroom light to get ready and a vanity light blows out. You go downstairs and find that someone used the last spare bulb leaving you without a new one to put in the socket. You can no longer even think about church as you have a light that needs assistance. You therefore run to the store leaving your wife at the door thinking she was going to church but instead ends up at Home Depot in the bulb department as you try to decide if the longer life bulbs really do last longer or is that just a ploy to make you buy more expensive bulbs. At that point is where Trina is most apt to bring up my "issues" which she is now documenting in their own special notebook.

With my decision to move to Joomla! 1.5 began the long and arduous task of identifying what would work, what would not work, and what possibilities I had to make things cooler. I started out downloading Joomla! 1.5.3 and installing it on a test box so that I could begin exploring. I also began looking over the various templates that are currently available for Joomla! 1.5 to see if there were any I could use as a jumping off point. One of the great things about Joomla! is that they have a huge user community that is very active in the development and use of this Content Management System. When they began developing Joomla! 1.5 the developers opened up a contest for someone to design a new template that would be included as one of the standard templates out of the box. The Joomla! Forums managed the template contest. After several months of work the user community voted and a winner was chosen. One of the less obvious benefits is that all the templates that were entered into the contest were made available for download by the user community. This provided a great abundance of code from which you could learn or in some cases it was an opportunity to find a template that would be perfectly matched to what you were looking for.

Just over a year ago I began planning the migration and updating of Now Hitting. This was necessary since the Arizona Diamondbacks had decided to change their colors from Purple and Teal to Sedona Red, Sonoran Sand, and Black. I'm not going to get into my feelings on the subject of the color change, those have been written about ad nauseum on Diary of a Diehard. The point was that I was faced with the task of updating a system to change the color scheme and potentially the layout. In a Web 2.0 type of world, this wouldn't be a problem. You would simply open up the cascading style sheet (CSS), make a few changes to the color values and wha-la, a new look and feel with minimal effort. Yeah, that's great but unfortunately Now Hitting has been in existence since 1998 which predates much of the internet technology including CSS. Ten years would place the original Now Hitting somewhere in the Mesozoic era probably in the Triassic period. I was definitely dealing with a websiteosaurus of epic proportions.

Given my devotion to baseball, I typically try to minimize the number of projects I take on from April through October. Customer service is extremely important and I like to be able to devote as much of my time as I can when I take on a new project. There are times though when my worlds collide and I find myself having to accept new development work during baseball season. That usually will require a lot of very long days that include work, baseball, and development. These activities can consume roughly 21 hours a day. I'm usually ok with that since I rarely sleep more than 4 hours a night so what's an extra hour right?