Steampunk Perry

Back, but for how long?

2011-04-21T17:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-03T22:31:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-05-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-26T22:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-04T09:47:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-10-05T17:00:00.000-07:00

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.

New Projects

2008-07-22T17:23:00.000-07:00

Steampunk Webwerks has 2 new projects starting. We're creating a brand new site for a commercial painting company, Grund & Company, that has been in business for over 110 years. And we're also having an initial meeting with the folks at the Center for Spiritual Living in Seattle. We'll be redesigning their current site and moving it to Drupal.

Website Banner

2008-07-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a banner I designed as the beginning of a website redesign for a friend of mine. He's not quite ready to go ahead with reimplementing his site using Drupal, but I'm hoping I can convince him to take the plunge soon. He is currently using the banner on his site.

Seattle Drupal Camp 2008...

2008-06-28T22:23:00.001-07:00

The camp was a success. There were over 80 people in attendance over two days and lots of information was disseminated. I'd have to say my favourite tracks were the one Arthur Folesche gave on the Media Mover module and Gregory Heller's talk on Information Architecture. Although the scheduled speaker for the track on Ubercart was not present, it was still a good discussion and I learned a lot about what is and isn't possible. Lets just say that e-commerce is hard to do well, even with a strong platform like Drupal. I'm looking forward to getting more involved with the Drupal community in Seattle and plan to start attending the Seattle Drupal User Group meetings regularly.

Astarte Biologics Site Live

2008-05-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

Our fourth project site, Astarte Biologics, went live today and the customer is pleased with the result. We spent about 6 hours on-site finalizing build out of the site content and doing some final data model tweaks. The final step now that the site is live is SEO work which will be an ongoing effort.

Finally

2008-04-09T23:29:00.000-07:00

Steampunk Webwerks - We finally have our website up and running. We're currently working on a couple of projects and proposals. I'm working on a conversion and redesign of Astarte Biologics website. These guys needed an updated look and the ability to easily modify and add content without requiring much, if any, HTML knowledge. We're using Drupal to implement their new site.

Welcome

2008-03-04T13:02:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my blog about the happenings at Steampunk Webwerks and specifically what I'm up to on our projects and technologies. As you may or may not be aware, we are dedicated to making the web a better place one website at a time. We are accomplishing that goal using a dynamite CMS tool called Drupal which allows us to deliver more value to our clients than a traditionally designed website. We put the content control where it belongs, in the hands of our clients.

I've been developing software for 19 years and have a wide range of experience. I've worked on a variety of hardware including Apple II, TRS-80, TI-99/4A, Apple Lisa, IBM System/36, IBM AS/400, IBM-RT, and IBM RS/6000 plus many more. I have experience with nearly all flavours of Unix (HP-UX, AIX, MIPS, Sequent Dynix, AT&T, NCR, DG-UX) as well as VAX and IBM mainframes, Linux (RedHat, gentoo, Ubuntu), OS/2, Windows 3.1/95/2000/2003 Server/XP/Vista and limited use of Mac OS/X. I have programmed in a plethora of languages as well including BASIC, JCL, RPGII, Pascal, C/C++, Visual Basic, Java, JavaScript, Informix-4GL, SGML, XML, HTML, CSS, XSLT, shell script, Flash, and others. I have developed applications against a variety of databases as well. The list of databases includes Informix, Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL Server, Cloudscape and MS Access.

Throughout my career in software development I have worked on a wide range of applications including Point Of Sale, Order Entry, Inventory Control, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, General Ledger, CASE Tools, Document Management and Authoring, Manufacturing Execution and Shop Floor Control/Data Collection as well as traditional and web 2.0 user interfaces.

As you can see I've had the good fortune to be exposed to and work with a ton of technologies across a wide range of industries. And of course this list is not exhaustive. I'm sure I could go on boring you for hours with all the cool stuff I've gotten to work on.

Hopefully I've provided a little insight into who I am, at least on the "professional" side, and you feel just a bit like you've actually met me. Oh yeah, I'm also a speed freak who loves riding fast motorcycles like the Yamaha YZF-R1. And I play the greatest sport on the earth, hockey.

Thanks for stopping by!

=Perry