Smarter Sheep

I’m really liking Ruby and Rails development. I have been working through some rails books the last few weeks along with evaluating various php frameworks and at this point I have to say that Rails kicks the snot out of anything else so far. phpCake is a close second. I also found Netbeans to be my editor of choice. Coming from a .net world where we have had some amazing editors that I often took for granted, I found it hard to find a good editor for php and rails, but Netbeans is amazing so far and I am quite impressed.

Windows 98 Blue Screen Launch

Windows 95 Promo Tape

I found this great example on the Ask the CSS Guy website for slightly rounded corners on css styled buttons. There are no background images used at all to achieve the rounded corners. It’s all done in css using a few nested tags. The conversation in the resulting comments ultimately came up with a great way to do this using negative margins without any extra html tags.

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I have been toying with CodeIgnitor for the last couple of days and have to say that I like it so far. There is another fork of it that I will look at next. I am also spending some time with Scripalicious for ajax functionality to see what combination for php development will give us the best bang for the buck in terms of performance and resources needed to crank out applications in a hurry.

So far the following frameworks look interesting:

CakePHP
Zend
Code Igniter

More to come

Most of our websites are currently on the .net platform and we have been quite happy with it for many things. One of the biggest issues that I face, is finding volunteers for my team that are proficient in the .net platform. In fact most of my volunteers are familiar with php but not with .net. Building a team of technical people to manage websites and networks can be a bit tougher than finding individuals to help with some of the other tasks around the church and ministry areas. I’ve decided to began evaluating php frameworks to find one that might be suitable for further development as well as an easy transition from .net for those of the team that are currently productive in the Microsoft technologies.

I started writing software and working on computers about 15 years ago. I remember my first Apple computer… the Mac Classic. I was thrilled to sell off the old 286 IBM and mock my friends who were running command line operating systems while I had a mouse! My Mac had 4MB of memory and a real hard disk. Sadly, the college I attended used macs for writing papers but the computer dept had only IBMs for us geeky types and I had to go back to using DOS which stands for “Desperation Only System”. Since those days I have been a Windows guy living recently in the .net world… but a year ago I made the leap back to Apple and have lived a dual identity between managing my day to day tasks in OSX and writing and maintaining software and websites in a virtual Windows environment. I now hate it. Apple OSX is so much more stable. I’m now laying awake at night dreaming of ways to leave Windows all together.

Wow, i’ve been playing with the recent RTM of Visual Studio 2008 and I have to say that I am quite impressed thus far.  The Visual Studio IDE seems much snappier, seems to load faster and generally feels more stable.  I’ve already moved a couple small projects over from VS2005 and they are running great. The new desinger is a nice change.  I have been getting aqainted with the new listview control and all the new LINQ possiblilites.

Well, my beautiful 3rd grade daughter managed to suprise me with another hand made sack lunch this morning. Her reckless abandon and apparent disgregard for calorie intake, carbs and protein value is both exciting and concerning at the same time. Lunch today includes a PB&J sandwich, Pringles chips, string cheese, green apple, chocolate cupcake and a Capri Sun juice…. I plan to settle down at some point to enjoy it along with a good book, which just so happens to be Asp.Net Ajax in action by Allesandro Gallo, David Barol and Rama Krishna Vavilala.. I’ll keep you updated on the book, and more importantly the lunch.