wow… long time without news. I’ve been c0ding lots of PHP3 script and I’ve been real busy. New on my plate is a cool webtracking system for tracking all kinds of stuff. It puts the data into a MySQL database. I can query all kinds of different reports with it. I’ve been very busy with projectX also. Things are rolling in that department. I think I’ll be deep into c0de soon with that, and I’ll have to give up my day job… if I can pay my bills on time. All I can think about now is c0ding PHP3 scripts. Its cool, I like PHP3. I’m going to have to write some c0de in C here in a few days to take care of my UsageTracking system. It needs a way to archive/delete data each month and calc totals. I think I’ll just do it in C, unless I learn Perl real fast. hmmm… Perl…

My Palm kiks ass y0.

Internet Appliance is also going good. I think that they are going to have some cool new stuff comming out soon. I’ll be happy when they go to GLIBC, but too bad they are going to use RedCrap…errr…Hat. I’ve got a project that uses Debian and its looking good. I just need to write all the admin screens for it. I’m going to use PHP3 y0! Databases are the way to go. Everything should be in databases. Thats what I’ve asked for a long time ago. Ok, I’m done.

All day hacking session today. Two Red Bull’s later and I’m done with the dynamic specials pages. Now I have to finish the Add-Dealer-Admin and the Add/Edit Contacts pages. On a different note, I went to the skatepark today to chill a little and it sucked. Way too many people for me. That park is packed all the time now. Whatever. Oh, my palm pilot kiks yo! Now I know that my workstation is perfect for full scale developement. This whole day, not a single problem. Linux r0xx0rz, try that with winblowz. I need to find a good development IDE that I can edit remote files. I guess I could just keep them local and then scp them over some how. I’ll look into some IDE’s after I get the admin screens going. PS, my WebCAM sucks. Welp, I’ve got to get hacking on some more webpages. They need to be done by tomorrow so I can show them at the meeting in the morning. Busy…

Welp, things are very busy for me. Too busy I think. How else am I going to make money to pay the rent though. Project X is comming along very well. Internet Appliance is going well also, for some wierd reason… hmmm… I finally fixed the sqeak on my bike. Looks like mother nature forgot summer again… Bayarea… Maybe I’ll go to the skate park this weekend. Too busy though.

WoooHooo, I got a Palm III the other day and might I say, it r0xx0rz! I like it. It totally kicks ass. Now I’m going to get the clear color case for it, and the cool color stylist, and something to carrie it in, and ….

Lets just say, I like it.

Wow, what a day. Internet Appliance had the first VPN eval today, and it was a success. Worked perfect. Not one problem. I like that. I also started working on a customer support database for keeping track of customers in the office. I hate tech support, why can’t I get a nice programming or MIS job. Its always tech support kind of stuff. All well. When I get rich I’ll just kick back and write c0de all day long. Bye!

Wow, I even fixed the archive section. It will now only show the last 10 messages that I have posted.

Welp, San Diego was ummm fun. Got to check out some cool Cobalt Qubes. They just look good, don’t they… Too bad they don’t do very much, for the price that is. I guess they just look good. I’m going to add a feedback to the news entries here, that will be fun. Maybe tomorrow.

My wife is the cutest thing I have ever seen.

Meetings suck. Every time… ring..disconnect..ring…disconnect.

I’ve been tweaking this page some more. I’m going to add a cool looking title bar to the top of these windows soon. Just need to get the GIMP started up. I also want to add a archive function so the old messages will be put into another file. Fun with PHP3.

Thanks for visiting my new home page. I will be adding news to this every so often about my life and my work.

Today projectX had a great meeting. I’m looking forward to making a bunch of money on this. I am also looking forward to coding this site. I like it.
Too bad its top secret or I’d tell you about it. heheheh 8^)

I just installed Text Pattern for my journal. I may or may not keep it. It did import all my previous journal entries, but I can’t get the comments to display on the old items.

Anyway, I’m going to just play with this for a while and see how it goes.

So I’ve been trying out Skype for a last few days. It actually sounds better than my Cell Phone…

Anyway, a friend I was chatting with told me about Gizmo. So I downloaded it and started the install. I wasn’t really paying attention to the install until I seen a message that said something like, please wait while we send email to your friends….

What happened is that it started sending emails to everyone in my address book. I started clicking on the “Cancel” button, but it just kept going. I managed to get it stopped. So there is like only 10-20 people that got the email.

That’s kinda embarrassing when 100’s of customers get this stupid email. Lucky for me, I don’t think it was more than a few.

So anyway, I have Skype and Gizmo running right now. I’ll probably stick with Skype because it’s more popular.

Edit: It’s Gizmo… It works with my chat program also, so I’m going to use it.

Well, Christmas has come and go for another year. Jane and I enjoyed family in CA this year. Everyone was there. It was a blast.

The drive over was great. We just few up there. No traffic, no snow, and it was a really nice day for driving.

Once we were there, we stuffed ourselves with really good food. Lots of candy and other treats were plentiful. I think I ate way too much.

Christmas day felt like three days. We opened presents in the morning. Then we opened more presents in the afternoon. Then that night we played the swap game and opened even more presents. It was fun.

Then monday we started our journey home. It was a long drive because some of the roads were closed while others were flooded with cars. But we made it home and boy were we glad to be home.

For Christmas I received a great jacket from Jane. It’s an awesome leather race jacket. I really like it. I also got a few shirts and pants, a few lights, tire air pump, tools, a set of classical music CDs, and other stuff. I made out well this year.

Now it’s time to get back to work.

I’ve been contracted to create a streaming text server/client. The main goal is to have instant updates to a web based application. It will also include a simple chat system for users to communicate to operators.

Javascript can’t do sockets by it’s self. It will take some type of application running on the user’s browser to communicate with the socket server. There is only a few choices out there to do this.

First I tried the Java way. I created a simple Java app to connect to my socket server and pass messages to the browser. It worked great on the Mac, but fell down on Windows. The main reason why it fails on Windows is because MS doesn’t integrate Java with their OS. They can’t because they lost their license to do so. So the users will have to download a very large application and install it. The users for this system just can’t figure that out.

Next I tried AJAX polling. This would work for all platforms, but it was slow. If you adjust the polling for less delay, the server load goes up. This would not be a problem except that I’m sending a lot of data through the line with many clients attached.

Last option I’ve tried is Macromedia Flash Player 8. It provides a way to connect to a socket and feed the info to Javascript. This works basically just like the Java applet but is a much smaller download for the user. It works perfectly and this is what I’m using now. The draw back is that it’s Flash 8 and nobody has it installed on their systems yet. So the users need to download and install it for my application to work. You wouldn’t think this would be a problem, but it is. The users have many problems installing software. Also there is a situation where the latest MS update would remove Flash 8 and install Flash 7 making the users have to re-install version 8 again.

One of my main goals is to make the application available on all platforms and browsers. Using AJAX and Flash, it is possible to cover most of the browsers and platforms. Currently Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD, and MS Windows are supported. Safari, FireFox, and MSIE are also supported.

Microsoft Employees Rage As Internet Explorer Ship Sinks
Posted on 12/29/2005 @ 16:39:49 in Browsers.

No way to build a market: No more Mac users. No more Dell users in the UK. HP’s shipping Netscape. Internet Explorer 7 is the ultimate “me too” knock off. And nobody’s madder than Microsoft employees and fans.

Microsoft employee Rory Blyth:

I think IE is horribly behind the times. When every other browser on the planet that’s worth a damn supports tabbed browsing, it’s just crappy that I still have to have different copies of IE open to have multiple sites open at once.

As of right now, my favorite browser on the planet is Apple’s Safari.

Windows Live developer and creator of RSS Bandit, Dare Obsasanjo laments:

We haven’t innovated in the browser for almost a decade. Given that Microsoft views IE as a defensive option to make Windows an enticing product, there is less incentive to make it the ultimate browsing experience as products whose bread and butter is the Web browser. Why do you think there are so many Google employees working on Mozilla?

Microsoft should either cede innovation in the Web browser to Mozilla/Google or make IE more than just “icing on the Windows user experience cake”by transfering the product to a team whose bottom line depends on browser innovation.

A bewildered ex-Mac IE developer Jorg Brown recalls a conversation with a Microsoft superior:

Over the whole sad journey, the single most surprising thing I ever discovered was from a small conversation that went:

Me: “Look, if it makes sense to devote dozens of people to WinIE, then surely it makes sense to devote half a dozen to MacIE!”

Higher-up: (confused look) “There aren’t dozens of people on WinIE. WinIE had some great people on it! We need those great people on products that make money!”

Me: “Then why on earth did we pursue IE in the first place? Just so that the DOJ would sue us?”

Higher-up: (confused look)

Some day I hope to get a proper answer on our motivation to do WinIE and MacIE in the first place. It seems to be that we were scared of not having control of the HTML standard. And indeed, now that Firefox is gaining traction, Microsoft has added more people to WinIE again.

Epilogue: All of this made it a lot more easy for me to quit and go work at Google.

Microsoft Exchange partisan and leader of Orlando SBS IT Pro Association, Vlad Mazek, rages:

There is a 0 day exploit of another Microsoft file format that makes your Windows XP system wide-open for hackers if you made some bad decisions. On top of those is still using Microsoft Internet Explorer to surf the Internet – what in the world are you thinking? How many times do you have to stab yourself to bleed to death? If you know the answer to that please download Firefox today and say goodbye to IE-borne online threats.

The IE team dropped all development of Macintosh version of IE, then outright said it would not develop anything for XP anymore and everyone would have to upgrade to Vista, then they slacked away on security work and instead focused on visual issues while they got spanked on features by Firefox (which is why I switched). The Internet Explorer team needs to be punished, severely, for slacking away and compromising your computer and data security. This is not the case with almost any other Microsoft product. Will Bill fix it? Not as long as you continue to take it and not vote with your feet or at the very least tell them you are not happy with the risk they are placing on your computer.

And Linux Apple BSD Lotus Firefox users thought they were mad at Redmond…

(via Email Battles)

This is great! The sun is back out and it’s going to get almost 60 this week. I’m going to for sure finish the roof on my garage to get that finished up.

I also received my garage door today. I’ll have it in by this weekend also. I can’t wait! My garage is almost done!

I’ll probably get the man door installed in it by the weekend also. That’s going to pretty much finish it off.

Even the electric will be done by the weekend. I’m stoked!

The roof is finally finished on the Garage. I spent the last two days working on it and now it’s done. No more water in the garage. Tomorrow I hope to get the garage door installed. That will be nice to close is up and keep the elements out.

The wiring was finished up yesterday. So now I just need to get the power from the poll and I’ll have lights and plugs working.

In a few weeks I’ll be able to start working on my projects!!!

New from Apple…

Dual Intel processor iMac, four times faster than the current iMac. I’m going to buy one soon as I get the money.

Dual Intel MacBooks. The replacement for the powerbooks. It even has iSight built in. This is an awesome laptop.

Also OS X.4.4, iLife 6, iWork 6, and a bunch of other things.

Wow, Intel Macs. That’s awesome.