My blog. Personal thoughts, anecdotes, and musings.
This conference is awesome. The presentations on Fair Use and application security were well worth my time. Dale Grady, presenter for the application security presentation, has developed a great code scanner that can pinpoint possible vulnerabilities in code so that it won’t be deployed. I’m really interested in developing something like this for UW-Eau Claire so if anyone wants to collaborate with me, I’d love the help.
We’re getting ready to head out to the science museum and planetarium, I’ll take lots of pictures although I don’t know how well that would work out.
I’m writing this on my WordPress blog while sitting in a great presentation about WordPress. I started out the morning watching a really well-done presentation on optimizing pages for search engines. The presenter made some excellent points and I’ll be changing how I do some of my optimization from now on.
This presentation is great. It has confirmed the things I already knew and has taught me some things as well, such as the search engine on this site is only good for searching posts and not pages.
The first day was great. Some of the big things of the day were
Shooting and producing videos using Vegas Video and Flash Our Ruby on Rails presenation Giving effective presentations A great presentation on the FieldSet Really good presentation about Apache configuration. After the conference, several of us traveled to Dinosaur BBQ and had a ton of food. We had to wait about 90 minutes for a table but in the end it was well worth the wait.
Our presentation went very well. We had a packed room of over 50 people. I’ve been getting lots of interesting questions and i’ve been doing my best to answer as many as possible.
I’m not sure how much I’ll get to write during the conference but I’ll try to keep up because there are lots of neat things going on.
Just saw a great presentation about using Fieldsets to semantically mark up web forms. The examples I saw were so much nicer than table-based or list-based forms. I’d recommend looking into this further. I know I will.
I hate flying.
The trip started off with a long wait at the Chippewa Valley Regional Airport where I checked my luggage and waited for security.
Our plane came in and I immediately noticed that it was one of those propeller-driven planes from the 60s which had been demoted to a shuttle. That didn’t give me a good feeling.
I felt even worse at security. I removed my shoes, laptop, cell phone, and PDA, only to have the metal clip from my leather PDA case set off the metal detector.
Lillian and I are presenting at HighEdWebDev this year about Ruby on Rails and how developers can use it to be more productive. I’m hoping for a good turnout so I can generate more interest. It’s neat to see how far the community has come in the last year. There are well over 200 unofficial plugins for the framework that people can use. There are tons of new books coming out, and I am seeing developers do some really amazing <a target="_blank href=“http://www.
Book progress
Published October 19, 2006
I’ve been busy working on the book. I’ve got about four chapters done and the rest all mapped out. It’s a really interesting process that will take longer than I had expected. Pragmatic Bookshelf has a really neat production system; I get to see how my book will look as I write it.
The most difficult part of this whole process is just finding the time to write. I’m hoping to make some progress over the next two weeks.
IT Jobs
Published September 13, 2006
Getting a job in the IT field can be really difficult unless you know people or know how to market yourself. It’s not enough just to know your stuff. The people who get the jobs are the ones who either know someone who can get them a gig or are really good at promoting themselves.
You might think that promoting yourself means being a big egomaniac and bullshitting people into hiring you.
Book
Published August 28, 2006
I signed the contract for my new book. It’ll be around 250 pages and I hope to have it done by January. The book will show programmers how to make things look pretty. I’m hoping to make it as easy to follow as possible for people who don’t have a formal design background so this process will be pretty interesting.
I’ve got a pretty large outline done and I’ve started working on the excercises for the tutorial sections of the book.