ClarkMatic

Since I will hopefully be starting Oracle 11g course in a couple of weeks I decided to begin playing around with the database. I managed to get the express version installed on Windows 2003 Server successfully, but have been really struggling to get it running on Linux. I spent half of Friday night trying to get it running on Oracle's Enterprise Linux (though VMWare) but ran into space/memory issues during the Oracle install. This afternoon I found a tutorial install 11g on Linux Ubuntu 7.10 Server.

Okay, I released FTM to a production server last week so that some of the partners in foreign lands could get a sneak peak. The url is http://beta.funnelthemoney.org but it's really not even beta quality yet. More like a pre-beta or pre-alpha or still very much in development. But, the way things work now we are using our users as QA and usability testers.

Since I'm moving projects there probably will be little progress on FTM after this week. So, enjoy.

The tools and tech I'm working or will be working with on various projects at projects...

• Drupal
• Google Earth
• CakePHP (Yum)
• MySQL
• Google Web Toolkit

A nice set of web design cheatsheets (HTML, Javascript, CSS):

http://sixrevisions.com/resources/cheat_sheets_web_developer/

Last weekend we got Verizon FiOS setup in the house. I haven't had a change to use it much with work and class, but I'm sure with speeds up to 15mbps I'll do some more Drupaling at home on the weekends. Maybe. For a couple projects until I realize I should be doing better things outside. =)

Don't you hate it when your application tells you that you don't have permission to speak English?

"You are not granted the permission to use English language."

I'm speechless...

Over the past month I've been reminded of the value of actually designing a system before implementing it. It sounds silly to need to be reminded of such a thing, but I must admit that I made the mistake of jumping right in with a project (actually a continuation of a project in progress) without stepping back and thinking through the design implications. Due to a lack of planning I'm pretty sure we are using the wrong tool for the job and that makes life a bit more difficult (yet, luckily in this case, still doable).

Not having Internet at home, I've been a bit slow on keeping up with the news lately. Today I found out that Dreamhost allows you to integrate with Google Apps (mail, calendar, etc), which makes me really happy. I setup mail.dev.clarkmatic.com to use Google mail and less than five minutes later I was emailing from a nice mail interface instead of Squirrel Mail. I'm continually impressed with Google and all of the neat tools they come out with. Now if I only had more time to investigate all of the tools better.

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/user_features.html

While working on FTM, I decided to add some page tracking to see how many people are currently using the tool and from where. I discovered Google Analytics and was, yet again, impressed by another great tool from Google. It was so easy to implement on FTM that I decided to add it to my personal sites as well.

As I work on designing an updated database structure for a project, I'm thinking long and hard about database design, remembering back to the good ol' days at WR where we were forced to deal in creative and kludgy ways with an outdated and overloaded codebase. I found a good article referring to this issue: