Time Flies

So hard to believe the last time I updated this blog was over 2 years ago. A lot has happened in that time. I'm now the Chief Architect at Intelius, Inc. and we are currently working on reimplementing one of our main websites using the Symfony PHP framework. We are in the final stages of preparing to push to production, and I'm hoping we have a much better experience than the failed Obamacare website.

Back, but for how long?

It has been quite a long time since I've posted. I'm now working for Intelius, Inc. in Bellevue, WA. I'm a lead developer on the framework team and am involved in most of the middle tier and front end development. We're using jQuery now instead of prototype and lately I've been doing some integration work with a third party company named Gigya, to enable sharing from one of our applications. I hope to get back to blogging somewhat regularly as I've missed it.

Picking up Steam

Things are getting pretty busy around here. We're wrapping up an Ubercart e-commerce addition to Astarte Bio and continuing to make ongoing changes to the Center for Spiritual Living site. We have 3 to 4 additional projects in the queue and just today received an inquiry for help in completing two more sites that have been left in a bit of a lurch as a result of a lead developer moving on.

Finally...

Got rid of that stinking piece of crap operating system Vista and installed a proper OS, Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope. Man what a relief and sense of freedom. I'd been running Vista on my laptop for quite some time and that POS kept crashing on a nearly daily basis. As an experiment to see if it was my hardware I booted Ubuntu from the live cd and let it run for 5 days with no problems whatsoever. Browsed the web, connected to my wireless network, connected to my home network and transferred files between various operating systems including Windows XP Pro and Windows Server 2003 and didn't have a single hiccup. I cannot recommend this OS highly enough. If you are technically competent at all you should definitely dump Vista in favor of Ubuntu. My only regret is that I did not do this sooner. So much lost productivity due to a worthless sub-standard operating system. I'm not a Micro$oft hater really, I love XP Pro, but Vista was a heaping stinking pile of crap and I put up with it for way too long. If you are doing any kind of web development you'll definitely save yourself a bunch of time and aggravation by ditching Vista and running Ubuntu instead!

Get Ubuntu

Flowplayer Google Analytics

While reviewing google analytics for several of our client sites I wondered if it was possible to track when a particular video was viewed, including when the player was started and if it played to completion. I came across this very helpful post on the Flowplayer site and thought I would pass it along. Now I just need to find something similar for the 1 pixel out player for playing mp3 files and I'll be set.

SharePoint Security

There seems to be a lot of buzz recently about security and SharePoint. Since SharePoint has become a de facto standard in organizations that run Microsoft Exchange, security is definitely something to be concerned about. And I'm not just talking about security from malware and/or viruses, I'm talking about corporate wide security policies about how and who gets access to information stored in your SharePoint system(s). The problem here is that SharePoint is so easy to setup that many groups within large organizations stand up the server in their workgroup and then proceed to give outside access to clients and partners, many times without corporate IT knowing anything about it. While there are several companies providing extranet solutions for SharePoint, one company in particular, Epok, Inc., seems to have the cleanest and most comprehensive solution. If you are finding yourself needing to extend SharePoint outside your organization you should give these guys a serious look. Here's a recent report on SharePoint security by Osterman Research.

Center for Spiritual Living site is live!

The Center for Spiritual Living site is now live. The initial phase of this project is complete and the client seems pleased so far. They have been trying to re-create this site for close to 3 years and have had a couple of non-starts until now. The client initially contacted us on June 26, 2008. We responded to the RFP on July 8, 2008 and were awarded the project on July 15, 2008. At this time we put together a contract for the project and scheduled our first face to face meeting for July 24, 2008. From our first face to face meeting to the site going live was a span of approximately 8 weeks. We're looking forward to continuing development of this site in phase 2.