Dear Google,

Why you should hire me.

I’m smrt. Not as in “book” smart, but “dream up ways to hack things together and create new ideas” smart. This is what google is all about.

Some cool things I’d like to work on:

Maps. Your google mapping application is pretty cool, but I did it first. Back in ‘99 and 2000 while contracting for a GIS company we put together a pretty amazing Internet mapserver application with a javascript client that allowed one line includes to bring a map to any website. If we could have thrown a couple million at it I know we’d be serving to the masses today. I want my idea back. Where would I take it from here? Layers upon layers of extra point, poly and line data as optional add-ins. Give me a layer of all points matching “Home Depot”, or all of the local telephone COs or how about property assessment information for the entire US by county. I know I can do this now with my own data, but couldn’t you just store it all? Really, you’ve got the space. The ability to create thematic maps would be cool too.
 
VOIP. Seen Asterisk? This is a fantastic platform. Your new business listing feature that rings you and connects you to any of their validated business listings is pretty slick. We’ve put together lots of voice applications including a dial-in time clock and various automated scripts to reboot machines, check latency and the like. What about throwing some of google’s processing power at a speech to text interface behind a VOIP gateway that allows me to vocally search the google database (and more) while yapping on my Motorola. 411 be damned. “Spokane, Washington… directions from my phone’s GPS location to the nearest CompUSA”. Or what about “read me the latest slashdot RSS headlines”.

Big databases of “things”. How cool would it be to have a real authoritive UPC database available globally for every product in existence? You’ve counted and indexed all of the web information out there, how about all of the “things” in the world. Give me a couple hundred terrabytes of space on a few good PostgreSQL boxes in a tiny corner of one of your datacenters and I’d be dreaming up ways to index and serve massive amounts of useful information via SOAP or some such (GDATA style?) and drop in some friendly advertising.

I’ve got a lot more jumbling around…cause I’m *that* good.

Call me. Really. You’ve got the number. We’ll do lunch.

CakePHP is a MVC (Model-View-Controller pattern) framework that tries to mimic the way RoR (Ruby on Rails) does things. After developing a large web application on CakePHP platform, I decided to write a little bit about it and compare it the real thing. Haha, as you can tell, I am just a little bit slightly biased towards Ruby.

Being a ruby programmer, and having to make a web app that uses php+mysql I immediately started looking for something similar to Rails. There are many rails-like frameworks for php, and I ended up narrowing down my search to cakephp and symfony. Because my client specified php4 (symphony only works on php5), I went with Cake.

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Regular expressions (regex) let you search for a particular pattern. Regex consist of literal characters, and special characters, also called meta characters. Regex syntax has 2 modes, one inside of character classes, which is inside [ ] and one outsided of character classes.
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So, Friday afternoon/evening I was sitting at the office working on some issues with db connectivity in one of the .NET projects and water started dumping from the ceiling coming from one of the apartments above our office.

Turns out the breaker in a power strip failed, it overheated and started the whole apartment on fire. The place was trashed and we had a couple inches of water to sweep out the door after all was said and done. I’ll have more pictures at some point but here’s one published by the local newspaper and the story.

Some years ago (around 1996-97) while I was working at Directions Magazine we came up with the idea of writing “diaries” on the site to personalize the company and show a little about the people behind the scenes. “Blogs” certainly weren’t yet popular. We took the idea from the gaming industry (I used to play a lot of Quake) where people would often update their finger files on a daily, weekly or random time frame with their latest interests and random babble. It was often a fun read.

We’ve tried this at Limelyte a few times in the years past and it never really stuck. Maybe because there was a lack of interest in-house or we never really had much for readership. It was more like a “what’s new” page than anything else. Well, we’re going to try again. This time more informally using a fairly standard Wordpress installation.

We’ll see if it sticks.

HTTP Fetch Utility

We’ve created a small application that allows you to make an HTTP request to any valid server. The results are returned in text format with full header and document content. This is handy for testing header output on web applications and debugging any other information being sent from a webserver.

HTTP Fetch is currently available as a free download.

There is no installation required.