chris.fontenot's blog

Wil Wheaton’s Geek in Review: Five Books Every Geek Should Read

chrisfontenot — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 20:16:13 +0000

I found a list of books that Wil Wheaton suggested every geek should read. Unfortunately the list was posted at a site that I don’t feel comfortable linking to nor referencing so I copied the condensed version here in the case that I actually remember when it comes time to read something new. I guess I could include a link to digg where I actually found the original link.

The list:

I, Robot
Author: Isaac Asimov
Published: 1950

Neuromancer
Author: William Gibson
Published: 1984

Ringworld
Author: Larry Niven
Published: 1970

The Hacker Crackdown
Author: Bruce Sterling
Published: 1992

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Author: Douglas Adams
Published: 1979

Eclipse Europa coming June 29th

chrisfontenot — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 21:09:48 +0000

Earlier I mentioned a blog I found that is marketing the Eclipse project. Today, I was catching up on articles there and found a post about Europa and the upcoming release. A little late to the game but I found this graphic for the new release and wanted to share. Evidently, the release is scheduled for the same day as the iPhone… hmm, coincidence? Or, is it planned so that people can develop their AJAX apps in Eclipse to be distributed through the iPhone? This could only be made better if I could find a way to connect Google…

Apple “stacks” OSX 5 Leopard Against the Competition

chrisfontenot — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 22:04:25 +0000

Today started the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA. I kept up with the news by refreshing engadget’s blog postings. And, I thought the announcements were pretty exciting… or at least most of them.

Stacks looks like a really cool UI feature. It isn’t necessarily revolutionary nor is it something that couldn’t kinda be implemented with already existing technology but I still like it. Having cool things like this built-in to the OS makes me happy.

The new UI features of Finder look really interesting, too. I like the modified “sidebar” (can’t remember if that is the right term) and the new categories listed there. Coverflow also looks very slick for a file explorer app. I can imagine that being very cool to use and potentially dangerous for some folks Thumbnails and previews have a tendency to embarrass.

I guess the other WOW news is the introduction of Safari for Windows. There are many things I like about Safari but there are a few things that keep me from using it as my main browser on the Mac. I know there are plug-ins and whatnot but the ones I seem to want most cost money which I don’t want to spend on enhancing my browser especially when I can use Firefox and its add-ons for free. Safari does seem to surf faster and be an all-around good built-in browser but I just can’t make the switch. I’ve tried. And failed.

Some things that weren’t as exciting for me necessarily include the “announcement” that developers could create rich AJAX web apps for the iPhone. I suppose I just presumed that would be the case because they had earlier said that Safari would be a fully functioning version of the browser. While that is great and cool and everything I just think it is a cop out to providing some sort of SDK. I applaud that AJAX will be supported and wish more “web enabled devices” did so too.

All-in-all I’m looking forward to watching the video of the keynote with all the whirl and dash of a Steve Jobs presentation.

Load Balancing Database Connections and the end of RAID

chrisfontenot — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:18:10 +0000

I just read a posting at FeedBlog about MySQL and the end of RAID. It reminded me of some earlier articles I read somewhere about Google’s use of a database to provide redundancy and failover for their systems. I believe this is a very attractive idea while not necessarily believing that it spells the end for RAID.

The writer of the blog posting linked to a project about pooling DB connections with a load balancing JDBC driver which looks very cool and I am totally interested in reading more about that. I believe this could resolve several issues that we constantly run into at the University. Trying to balance funds for server systems, storage space, enterprise software, and time to develop hearty solutions is always a difficult task within our environment seems like.

Thanks, Kevin, for writing on the tubes.

Eclipse Packaging Project

chrisfontenot — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:01:01 +0000

The Eclipse organization is trying out a new way to package downloads for Eclipse which I definitely favor. While I never found it too difficult to download what I needed from the Eclipse web site it has always taken longer than I feel like it should.

When I setup a new machine or have wiped and reinstalled a system I always go back to eclipse.org to grab the latest builds and start over again on deciding what I need for whatever type of development I’m doing on that particular system. Recently, I was awarded a new laptop at work but hadn’t downloaded eclipse prior to a weekend trip I was about to make. So, I went to the web site and started looking for the downloads. Knowing I probably wouldn’t have time to install and update all the required packages before I had to get in the car I just started downloading all the packages I thought I needed and hoped I grabbed all the requirements too. Of course eclipse tends to make this easier if you download and start with the SDK then get packages through their download manager but I just didn’t feel like I had the time to go through all that. I ended up with what I needed but felt a little uneasy as I drove away from Internet access.

This project is new to me and evidently a beta system but I look forward to trying it out to see if it satisfies my particular needs. Thanks to the foundation.

Btw, I found out about the project from this blog –> Marketing at Eclipse

Need to learn more about CVS

chrisfontenot — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 04:07:40 +0000

Something I’ve been putting off for a long time is learning more about CVS. I always wanted something like a CVS when I was doing web development professionally. Then when I started programming I really knew I wanted a CVS or something like it.

Now that I’m getting involved with more development projects I really need to put some time into it. I’ve started this evening by setting up a CVS environment on my laptop. I am following the instructions at Apple’s Developer site. I’m not comfortable with the instructions though. They are assuming my account is part of the wheel group. Mine is not. So modified my membership to be included in that group. But I want to follow up by reading the documentation for CVS and see if there is a different setup that I’ll be more comfortable with. I’m sure there is I just need to make a point of looking it up.

Consider this my reminder.

Fireworks Extension – Filler Text

chrisfontenot — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 21:54:20 +0000

This post is mostly for my students in the Web Authoring class. Last night I was trying to explain the use of extensions in Dreamweaver and Fireworks and wanted to show as an example the extension that will auto-insert some filler text into a text object of Fireworks. But, during class I couldn’t find on the Macromedia Exchange site so instead I showed them the extension that does the same basic thing but inside Dreamweaver instead.

This extension will insert three different kinds of filler text: Lorem Ipsum (or traditional latin filler text), Blah Blahs, or Designer Copy. Its very cool and comes in real handy when designing mockups.

Anyhow, I found the extension today and have created a tinyurl to link to the search results page -> http://tinyurl.com/ajm8e so they/you could find it easier next time. If for any reason the search result page doesn’t work correctly then just search again for filler text on the exchange. That should do it for you.

Way to win browny points

chrisfontenot — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 16:17:03 +0000

Several of my students sent me a sitemap of how they intend to layout their web site for the class project via email. One of them sent it to me as an Open Office file… He deserves extra points.

I have a Aquestion about Akismet

chrisfontenot — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 01:46:46 +0000

How do I go about using Akismet as a WordPress.com account holder. My blog lives on wordpress.com and i’m not allowed to upload/install/activate any plug-ins that i know of. Surely they’ve implemented Akismet on wordpress.com by default which is cool but since i don’t have another wordpress blog installed of my own I’m guessing that the api key doesn’t do me any good? and i really shouldn’t get too worked up about it except to report that it seems to be working well here on my blog if it is already enabled?

Ok, so i have several questions… Could this web service be utilized in a desktop email client? or even a web based email client? that would be cool…

Google SMS

chrisfontenot — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:09:43 +0000

Google SMS

This is too good not to pass on to someone. Everyone needs to know that they can search google by sending text messages from their cell phones. you can search for just about everything I can think of that you would need while away from an actual internet browser but still need to know… look it up – try it – fall in love with it…