September 2007

Well it?s official I am no longer a consultant at infoUSA now I am the graphical user interface developer for SalesGenie. This of course keeps me extremely busy. I have also been busy learning all the ins and outs of .NET and C#. I have been busy reading numerous books on OOP (object oriented programming). I have also decided that I need to transition all my applications to my own CMS. I have decided that many of the open source solutions simply will not do what it is that I want them to do. So I have been spending much of my time using the CakePHP framework. It was a tough decision. I do like Ruby on Rails but I believe there are more benefits of using a PHP based framework. I love Drupal, Mambo, and Wordpress, you may wonder why I have chosen to spend time to create my own CMS, because all the current CMS are spaghetti code. I am tiered of trying to fix problems. I really like what CakePHP has to offer here are some of the numerous benefits of using CakePHP, Model View Controller, Scaffolding, Service Oriented Architecture is easy to setup, you can easily create RSS feeds, AMFPHP, SWX, just to mention a few. I have also been intrigued lately by IBM?s project QEDwiki. I believe by using CakePHP I will be able to accomplish my goals quicker. I have also been working on creating MashUPs.

It has been a good summer we recently hosted a German Foreign Exchange student and it was a blast. It was sad to see Stefe leave but Lisa and I plan on going to Germany to see her hopefully within the next year. I do believe we Americanized Stefe and we definitely showed here how cool Omaha is. While Stefe was here we took her camping in South Dakota (oh and the Corn Palace was a blast), Taco Riding, Bar hoping (Sullivan's and of course the Homey Inn), Henry Dourly Zoo, etc?. Please feel free to check out the German Period in my scrapbook.

In recent news Littleton Alston completed his ?On to the Wings of Angles? sculpture. I was very pleased to see it dedicated on September 11, 2007. I actually helped cast (small help in the project) many of the hands that were used to create the globe on the sculpture. It is a truly beautiful work of art and the public is of course overwhelmingly happy with it. I really enjoy Littletons work and it is obvious why he is one of the best sculptors in the Midwest. I am proud to be a part of the project and seeing the sculpture in Omaha is a constant reminder of hard work, dedication, community, a monument to the people who lost their lives..

Oh and by the way looks like apple iphone is going very well for them rumor has it apple will be releasing a mini-tablet, umpc, or you know Newton 2.0 who knows if it is true or not. I honestly could see more small devices from them working out well. They do seem to have a very good eco system developed around their products. I have recently switched to IBM's Lotus Symphony! You know they are joining the open source community. Once you use lotus you might not want to go back to office check out the interface:

It is a good stable product that will definetly help out the open source community.

Flash News: Have you seen Sandy 3.0? Check it out you can even import a .wrl file. I think Sandy 3d is an excelent library. Flash has been becoming a 3d boom town. There are numerous code examples of importing .wad files and quake maps just look around. I will go into more detail when I get a chance at stArcade9.com.