Wednesday, January 07, 2004

John's Official 2003 Year in Review: 3 data warehousing/mentoring gigs in NYC, SF, SF ... including my first billion-row databases Successfully deployed a knowledge management/crm implementation where we had to orchestrate two enterprise apps with data(backend) and user interface integration. Though there are plenty of EAI, Portal, and User Provisioning/SSO vendors that would help connect two apps, this is one of those cases where in the time it takes to assemble and meet with vendor sales staff, we had managed to roll our own single-signon and portal solution using Apache+mod_perl+mod_rewrite. I'm now designing a similar solution for a different client, so I get to do a second version on middleware -- a rare opportunity for a consultant. BloggerCon was pretty fun. Met Carl, Gregor, Sooz, reconnected with Kim. Helped re-architect small .com from IIS/ASP/SQL Svr to more scalable LAMP architecture for their transactional web site. Performance enhancements included large(ish)ASP to Perlscript migration on their decision-support intranet. Perlscript is sooo great. Perl Modules That Rock: Template Toolkit, Log4Perl, YAML, PAR, WebMake, FCGI.pm/CGI/CGI::Fast, Carp::Assert, WWW:Webchat, Test::MockObject, Test::More, Win32::ASP Signed as an O'Reilly co-author. Details of the book are under NDA, but I'll definitely announce something when I can. Authoring for O'Reilly includes lots of nice swag (t-shirt, mug, calendar ...) Experienced the ~joy~ of bleeding a water cooled PC. For the second time. Anyone want to buy a slightly used water cooled pc? Worked on 2 FastCGI projects -- open source (openacs port), and one for a client. I'm always impressed with long-in-the-tooth technologies who's simplicity of design manages to keep them both useful and elegant. FastCGI fits the bill. Migrated old real-space workstation to virtual machine - the ability of not having to reinstall old crufty applications that you have to keep around 'just-in-case' a client needs them is just too cool to be true. Try it, you'll agree. Boldly shrugging off my preference for interpreted languages, I dug into C# and .NET once again ... yes the IDE is pretty great. yes they did learn quite a bit from their competition. 'nuff said. Pushed pure-tcl OpenACS project ('pnsd') further along - but got stuck on disconnect between adp parsing in nstcl and in aolserver binaries. Authored and sold commercial software application to UC Berkeley. More sales to follow (fingers crossed) Open Source Highlights: Work: LEO, UltraVNC, unison, emacs-wiki-mode, tramp-mode, cygwin sshd, Zoe, e-smith Play: gramps, phphygedcom, gallery Bought Roomba. Tried Roomba for 6 weeks. Sold Roomba on craigslist. Vicariously enjoyed process of friend selling his tiny software company after 8 grueling years to LARGE CO. Hurray friend. Blogged a lot. Tivo Daughter (!) 5:41:36 PM      comment []  trackback []