🏷️ work

I am so glad I bought a house near work. Somehow Roswell lost its contract with the trico building parking lot and is moving the additional employee parking over to the HBSC arena at the very southern edge of downtown. That is like a half hour walk away. Seriously, I would never even consider that. I would drive somewhere along the subway route and subway in.

Supposedly, there is a shuttle that goes every 7 minutes, but who believes that. I have waited for shuttles way to many times to believe in that.

winbind
I got to work with my fav guy to work with at work today. Whenever I work with him I learn a ton of new stuff.

We finally got all the linux servers we need to obey the reality of the Windows domain accounts and groups and keep the freakin uid across each server. This makes getting all my programmers onto the internal dev boxes in their proper groups and managing who has access a breeze. It is now all tied into their actual employee account.



New Shifts
They also are talking about moving to 4 ten hour days. Or 4 8 hour days plus one 8 hour work from home day. Not sure how I feel about either. When I was at Canisius I worked 10 hour days and while they make the week fly by, they are long.

For me I think the ideal would be four 8 hour days at work with 2 hour after dinner/gym work times from home. I mean I already do that most days anyways.

dancing
Today at the gym I found myself thinking I would have rather been dancing.

Squiddy The Kitty
Just sits at the door crying for us all day. I threw him some squid. It was the nicest thing I ever did for a cat.



Work
At work today I had to work with a person that someone refered to as the "obstructionist." It was really irritating experience. To start off they just forgot about our scheduled meeting to get the task done that I have waited since January for and lots of people depend on. After showing up 15 minutes late, they then spent like 15 minutes huffing and puffing and berating everything non-windows - calling Unix based server amateur operating systems. Eventually, I just left their cube as it was not worth my time arguing with them as it was getting nowhere.

I am so sick of hearing it from this small group of fundamentalist microsoftees - we made the decision to use PHP and CentOS Linux with MySQL for internal web dev - its over. We bought the hardware, the developers have bought into it - its saving us a ton of time - its rebust, speedy and secure and its making everything auditable, its basically working out awsome and we are expanding it.

Its really funny that some people are so Microsoft but they don't even use the latest stuff or get under the hood much. I mean they use Windows server 2003. Doesn't that sound pre-fuc%ing-historic at this point. I am not syaing that everythign microsft sucks. I am just saying it is totally unprofessional to pretend there is nothing outside of it and not to look into more feature filled, more secure, cheaper and more robust alternative when they exist and were created for 2008. We are talking an operating system made 5 years ago vs one made this year.

Luckily, my linux hero co-worker was there and everything worked out. We basically just computed around him and now the same goal is reached.

I never even ended up eating lunch today which I am sure is not a good thing. Instead I ate two dinners, one before and one after the gym.

work
Well, I got the new job. I am offically the Programming Standards Architect at Roswell which is a much better job than my old one althought the duties kind of overlap. Today, however, was a very challenging and stressful day. I hope that doesn't last, lol. Not good for the Crohn's.

The Gym
I sucessfully went tot he gym anothher five days this week. At this rate I will be buffer than @terry in no time. Unfortuantely, the Crohn's makes the massive eating plan not doable but I am gaining weight and eating lots of yummy sea things.

I started using the sauna. It really makes your muscles feel better afterwards and seems to make my skin pretty nice, however, it is really damn hot. Like 200+ degreees hot.

Getting Our Photos Taken
@matthew saw this ad in Craigslist about a photographer named Scott Pasfiled doing a photo book of gay couple and was looking for some in Buffalo. I thought we would make an interesting story so I wrote to him and he is coming to take our pics tommorow. Seemed like an honest guy, has an nice portfolio and blog.

I am willing to try and find out - then again I got this weird email from some random stranger:

Hi u should know that some NY City photographer guy is forwarding emails you apparently sent to him. The guys seems like a flake. Thank you Jim

The strange part is that I have not shared anything personal that is not on my blog in public with him - so I have no idea what that stranger is talking about.

So today I had a three panel interview for a new job at Roswell. Right now, I have a 5 minute pause. It is nerve wracking. I wore a tie.

What is the dollar value of four months of freetime? This is the question I keep asking myself for the last hour.

I was so busy with a million and a half projects at work this week. I am just quitting for today right now. I planned on leaving early today to make up for the 106 million hours I work at home on stuff but then something else came up. Luckily, it was a really fun project. Let me just re-iterate my love for Actionscript 3 and for Flex 3. I completed two projects today that would have otherwise taken a lot longer.

I have been going crazy thinking about a solution for our new intranet which I am in charge of. I am definitely the biggest proponent of AJAX/DHTML front end, PHP/Apache/Mysql backend for most web design but with the intranet we are going to need a lot of mashup like functionality and have many different programmers working on modules that may often reside on the same page. At the same time we are being told we are never going to move past IE 6, at least not any time in the near future. But I can't base the entire intranet on IE6's capability (its so 2001) and I know eventually it will go away. Hopefully, before the intranet requires redesign.

I have no issues with the backend part. In fact now that all our new servers arrived and have been set up, I cannot be happier with that. But with IE6 being the main output mechanism for the data, I am definitely unhappy with the front end.

Not only that but it al works slightly slightly different in each browser and that I have to use a rather large javascript library to deal with those inconsistencies.

We also have the need for some desktop applications that should be build cross platform and tie in with the intranet data. Those could be developed in java but it would be ideal to have a solution that is develop once deploy in multiple formats and apple and java are doing so well together right now.

Flex 3
So this weekend I am evaluating Adobe Flex (web/air app) front end with PHP backend and it seems like a possible solution. As Zend calls it "Party in the front, business in the back."

I am not suggesting the entire intranet reside inside flash, only that modules/mini apps which are embedded in it are. The two major drawbacks that usually are with flash are slow download times and lack of the latest flash player - both not an issue at all in the context of our intranet at work.

The Flex IDE is based on eclipse which has tons of free mods for it. So is the new Zend studio neon, so is Aptana - so it will be nicce to have one development environment for evertything.

With Flex/Flash I can ouput to swf for in browser embedding or I can output to native desktop apps. Even the native desktop apps exported to adobe air have the ability to use HTML/javascript/actionscript/flash. The inbuilt browser is based on webkit, the parent of safari which means no matter what platform I targeted the code would be the same.

Here is a skeleton of what it will look like. On the right are three tabs that will load in different flash/flex based modules based on who you are. Right now I have repeating flash based vector clocks loading just to test if they were memory leaking at all and how fast it loads them. It all seems pretty good right now. Mind ou the deign will be much more refined this is just layout the areas for content. The rest of the page is DHTML/ajax


I will keep testing it this weekend but here are my feelings now:

Pros
0. I do not have to worry about the other programmer's javascript colliding in any way when multiple modules are on the page at the same time. This is huge - in the other approach with only DHTML/ajax we would have to test every single modules with every single other module of which there could easily be hundreds. I mean we would use namespacing etc, but al lot of the people developing this stuff are new to javascript and the potential for messing up is huge.

1. Flex has a 60 day trial for the pro version so we can test it out extensively with no overhead, although I am sure I want it.

2. Flex builder is amazing. It is like visual studio which would be a familiar interface for the other teams who would be makng modules for this but is based on eclipse and is multiplatform.

3. Because it is based on eclipse, skills used for zend studio neon could transfer. It is definitely made for programmers.

4. We would be losing nothing in terms of backend development as flex/flash is totally front end solution independent of a backend, meaning we could use php. This article calls it "Flex and PHP - Party in the Front, Business in the Back"

5. Web modules work the same in every freakin browser. Who cares if they upgrade to IE6 or not then. This is a huge bonus.

6. Applications can exported as web swf, mobile apps, or as native system apps using adobe air. They work as native apps the same on every platform. Beats visuals studios windows only output.

7. It can be visually flashy without trashing the CPU the way javascript does.

8. It uses vectors.

9. The front end is scripted in actionsript which is essentially the same language as javascript with more robust options. The major advantage is there is no need for different scripts in different browsers.

11. It can even work with .NET as a backend. Is this a bonus, lol?

12. Linux Apahce is the best for doing this and that is what we are going with so it fits perfect with our current architecture.

13. If we want to do video/audio manipulation or capture, we already own flash media server!

14. With air you can use html/javascript or actionscript/mxml in it.

15. Adobe's MXML which makes widgeting a breeze. It has data grids, accordians, etc built in meaning we don't have to redevelop them in javascript.

16. Easy socket communication for real time data push (COMET) instead of pull (AJAX)

17. If the modules need to interact with the main app they can through ExternalInterface calls, the way surebert does.

Cons
0. Flex builder is $241 for gov't pricing - not very much compared to the retail price of like $700.

1. I am master of cross browser DHTML/AJAX and know the ins and out of every browsers. I even developed my own extensive library for dealing with this - not so masterful of Flex as I am new to it. I doubt, however, that I will have much trouble.

2. Flash modules wouldn't work on the iphone. Boo, fucking boo hoo. I think that Adobe is going to address this at some point. If not I really don't care as we are using Windows Mobile at work and there is a flash 7 client already and a flash lite 3 client for that coming out. Because the backend is agnostic of the fron end, we could always make special apps for the iphone.

I decided to just come up with a way to deal with this. I will just post more about it later.

My dream come true, Linux server two of four is installed by my co-worker Tim and I got to customize and compile extensions as required this afternoon. Getting Oracle 11g to work with SElinux and then to compile the PDO extension for oracle 11g to talk with PHP via mod_apache was a little nerve wracking but it all worked out. I had planned it all out previously on a virtual machine in VMware so i knew it could work. - I was just having some SE linux configuration snafus. Tomorrow, I build a custom apache module for server/user validation and we are set to go!

I think this will be the beginning of something big and cost worthy at Roswell. Having my co-worker Tim around really help. Thanks Tim. It is an exciting time for Roswell.

Apparently, this room is a death camp for computers, poor guys ;(