Blizzo :: The Morgan Blog

10957/365 = 30

Thats right, today is my 30th birthday. My 20’s are officially behind me like so many whispered dreams of youth. I have had trouble sleeping the past few days in anticipation of this event, which is really… silly. If our society used a base 8 number system instead of base 10 then I would have another two years before I hit this youth-ending milestone. So my right brain shuns the idea of this arbitrary date having more meaning than any other, but my left brain has never been one to back down from a challenge.

My 30th birthday is ushered in with all the fanfare of going to the DMV. My family is far away in Colorado and I have work on my desk to keep my head on fire for weeks to come. Maybe next year I’ll throw a big party… at Baskin-Robbins.

Today is Amy’s birthday! For those of you not in the know, Amy is my wife, my best friend, and the star character in the sitcom that is my life. Happy birthday Amy, I love you!

I suppose enough people know this by now that I might as well announce it. After much deliberation with my family, I have accepted a position in New Jersey with Vonage, the VoIP leader for phone services. I will be coming on board as a Senior Web Designer/Developer and I have some exciting projects on my plate. I will be sure to share more about that with you as it progresses, once I have a better handle on what I can and cannot reveal.

I will be starting the first week of June. In the meantime I am going to be wrapping up things in my current job (as a web developer for the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center) and getting my house ready to rent. I will be out there alone for a couple of months, and then my family will be joining me.

This job will be more demanding than my prior positions, so I am not planning on doing freelance work anymore. Instead, I will be reformatting Blizzo.com to serve solely as a personal site once again, for my blog, photography and other randomness. I’m going to stretch my wings on this one, so get ready!

All this AJAX buzz has forced me to look at more formal ways to structure my web applications. My experience as I learn Ruby on Rails led me to investigate PHP frameworks, to see if there was anything usable out there. While I wasn’t happy with what I found, I did find a reference to a new PHP framework being developed by the creators of PHP. It wasn’t that long ago the webpage just said PHP Collaboration with vague references to what they thought they would like to do, but now the site has been redone and is labeled the Zend Framework.

A cursory glance at the Zend Framework Components lists:
Zend_Controller, Zend_Db, Zend_Feed, , Zend_Filter, Zend_InputFilter, Zend_HttpClient, Zend_Json, Zend_Log, Zend_Mail, Zend_Mime, Zend_Pdf, Zend_Search, Zend_Service_Amazon, Zend_Service_Flickr,
Zend_Service_Yahoo, Zend_View

They seem committed to making web services easier to use, which is a good thing as the web becomes more communicative between discrete entities. They also claim to be focusing on DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and elegant simplicity. There are specific focuses on AJAX related technologies (HTTP request handlers, JSON classes, etc).

I would like to make a sample web application with this framework and see how it feels. If I can scrape together the time I will let you know how it goes.

I have been invited by some certified mental patients to be a contributor to a community blog which we named vis-à-vis democratic process “Pants Are Vetoed“. Be sure to stop by and marvel at our mad malevolent musings.

I have been tinkering with AJAX since shortly after Adaptive Path coined the phrase. Since I made the discovery I have watched dozens of libraries, frameworks and classes develop claiming to be *the* way to develop AJAX powered applications. To be honest I find it all a little overwhelming. Do you use the PHP AJAX libraries to generate the JavaScript for you, or do you use the JavaScript libraries to make the AJAX programming manageable? Answer that question, and then decide between 15 different available tools. Decide on the tool, get a couple days into development and find a limitation. Spend the rest of the afternoon second guessing all previous decisions.

I am about to create a software distribution system for my organization that will replace the need for installation technicians to carry around physical media with them. It will also leapfrog over certain licensing issues related to creating physical media for employees to use on their home machines and dramatically increase the accuracy of license tracking and reporting. I got pretty deep into it doing things the way I usually do, writing everything from scratch, but today I went to look at my code and, well, found myself depressed.

My road out of that depression was to find a new pseudo-framework for developing PHP applications that was AJAX friendly. After much research I think I have come up with an approach, which I will be using in my new application. Everything has to have a name these days, so I will call this pseudo-framework “Services With AJAX and PHP”, or “SWAP”.

Web Developers often get pigeon-holed as less serious or second class programmers. While the Web 2.0/AJAX revolution seems to be changing that somewhat, it is still present. I have recently been tinkering with Ruby on Rails and was discussing it with a Java Enterprise developer. When I mentioned my job title/position his response was a cautionary “Well, Ruby on Rails uses a lot of object oriented programming techniques”. Is burying your head in messy Java code all day a prerequisite to program intelligently and elegantly? I was thoroughly annoyed. The web developer is the Jack-of-all-trades of the computing industry. Here are the tasks I did on my last project:

• Created a visually appealing design for a website
• Converted that design into standards compliant, cross-browser friendly HTML and CSS
• Enhance the user interface with JavaScript via DHTML and AJAX
• Create a database schema to support the application data
• Created PHP classes to interface with the database and the application and implement business rules
• Acted as systems administrator for the project, maintaining and configuring the server and all required services.

Stack that up with the fact that usually you work all alone, with no one to bounce ideas off of or discuss problems, and I don’t really see how non-web developers have come to that conclusion. But they have. Let’s put an end to Web Developer oppression!

A quick Google search on “Apache2 PHP5 Oracle Instant Client” will yield a plethora of documents on how to install these packages to play well with one another. In fact, I even followed them when I built a recent server and everything went swimmingly. When I had to rebuild the server a couple of days later though, I couldnt get it to work, using the same approach. I spent almost a week tweaking environmental settings, modifying config files, etc. but nothing worked. Today I discovered the problem. Apparantly I was using PHP 5.1.1 the first time, and 5.1.2 the second time, and when I compiled PHP, the syntax for the switch to install Oracle changed. using the old syntax does not trigger an error or a warning, and it can be difficult to debug.

Old Syntax:

./configure –with-oci8-instant-client=/path/to/oracle

New Syntax:

./configure –with-oci8=instantclient,/path/to/oracle

The difference is subtle. One more migrain down!

Ferril Lake at City ParkToday Amy and I took the kids to Ferril Lake in City Park to feed the ducks. We had two very full bags of sliced baguettes that were starting to go moldy and so off we went. The first thing I noticed was that there were no ducks, only geese and seagulls. The seagulls came in first, quick and fast. They greedily gobbled up a good portion of the stuff before the geese moved in. The Geese were, and always seem to me, q bit scary. They moved in slow, like battleships, all at once. Within moments we were submerged in a cloud of deep rumbling quacks. All in all it was a good time.

I remember in Fort Collins there were signs all over the place threatening to fine people who feed the ducks/geese/birds/etc. I saw no such signs around Ferril lake, or I would have thought twice about doing it. I have mixed feelings about all that though. On one hand you don’t want to increase the bird population that is dependant on human support and it probably messes up migration patterns. On the other hand it’s a lot of fun. I can’t really think that giving some food to some birds is going to tip the ecological balance all that much, especially when it’s been going on for centuries. Anyway, all this is just an excuse to link to my gallery so I can show off the photos I took today. My new camera (Kodak EasyShare Z760) is proving to be a far better tool than our last one (Kodak EasyShare DX6340). Enjoy!

Blizzo Gallery: Feeding the Birds

Last night while playing games at a friends house we started talking about web comics. I’ve always loved comics, and web comics provide a forum for niche audiences that are too offensive, surreal or non-traditional for general consumption. I agreed to post the list of web comics that I read daily, so here it is:

• PvPOnline
  You have to be living in a hole to have missed this one. It follows the day to day lives of a group of people that work for a gaming magazine. It has quality art and really great storylines.
• Wigu
  Back from the dead! The second comic by Jeffrey Rowland, a follow-up to his successful “When I Grow Up”. It follows the adventures of a boy named Wigu and his family. Have you seen my “I am made of poison!” T-Shirt? This is where it came from
• Diesel Sweeties
  Diesel Sweeties is mostly one-liner type comics with occasional short story arcs. The writing is witty and unique, and the art is all old school pixel style.
• Sinfest
  Sinfest is a comic about Slick and Monique, two young urban hipsters and their friends. Regular guest appearances by god and the devil. Very good stuff.
• Wapsi Square
  How do I begin to describe this? It’s a character comic that revolves around a short, busty Latin girl with lots of spunk that works for a museum. Very unique storylines and interesting characters that sometimes pull from ancient central american legends.
• Chugworth Acadaemy
  Chugworth Academy has beautiful art, leaning towards the anime/manga style. It contains quite a few adult themes and the authors comments are sometimes totally non-sensical, but I have crushes on the whole cast
• Alien Loves Predator
  What would it be like if an alien (you know, the snake-like critters from Aliens) and a Predator shared an apartment together in Manhattan? Pretty much what you would expect. Unique artistically in that the whole thing is done with digital pictures of action figures (with a lot of Photoshop touching up). Quite hilarious.
• Sore Thumbs
  Sore Thumbs is the first totally political gamer comic. A dorky conservative guy and her uber-hot anime style liberal sister run a video game store together. Lots of interesting characters and an emphasis on longer story-arcs.
• Penny Arcade
  Like PvP Online, Penny Arcade is a widely known comic. It’s about two roommates and mostly focuses on gaming themes, with some hilarious deviations. Quality.
• Rob and Elliot
  What can I say about Rob and Elliot? It has to be one of the funniest comics of all time. It never ceases to surprise me with plot twists as predictable as the weather in Colorado and great art. I absolutely adore this comic!
• Mac Hall
  Mac Hall has absolutely beautiful art, and the writing isn’t bad either. This comic is about to get cut from my daily list though, as updates are incredibly sporadic, sometimes going weeks between postings.
• Real Life
  This comic is about a guy named Greg, and it is loosely based on his real life. Real life events drive the major storyline, but the day to day stuff is much more interesting than anyone’s life could actually be. Unless you happen to have time machines and be involved in international conspiracies.
• Dinosaur Comics
  I just added this into my daily routine and it is hilarious. The comic itself is the same six panels of art everyday with only dialogue changes. It is very surreal humor with a lot of philosophy and over thinking of everyday events. Be sure to hover on the image to read the alt text after you read each comic, two punch lines for the price of one!

There are several comics I have enjoyed in the past and have stopped reading. I used to really like MegaTokyo, but got turned off by inconsistent updates and too many stick figure art days (which I never found interesting at all). One of my all time favorites was Bobbins, but sadly it came to an end. Scary-go-round, the follow-up project to bobbins was good, but it failed to hold my interest. Sheldon is a good comic about a boy, his grandfather and a duck. I stopped reading it when they started recycling strips. Greystone Inn was interesting, I can’t remember why I stopped reading it. Maybe I’ll start again!

Post comments, let me know what you’re reading!