http://www.gregwhitescarver.com/blog ./a_nerds_life | egrep "useful|worth remembering" Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:30:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The last six weeks have been pretty insane! I will stay relatively cryptic about the details, but, as my friends already know, I have changed jobs twice in that time period. The job for which I left HUGE seemed like a great opportunity, but I found myself highly ... http://www.gregwhitescarver.com/blog/2008/06/11/my-new-pocket-technology-stack-verizon-motorola-q-9c-bluetooth-headset-plaxo-premium-yahoo-go-opera-mobile-gmailimap/ I'm very pleased and humbled to announce my new job as Web Development Lead at Practice Technologies (aka PTI). PTI has been around for several years, providing extremely powerful document management software for law firms. Lately, they've been pushing some of their rich data services online, such as ... http://www.gregwhitescarver.com/blog/2008/06/06/new-job-web-development-lead-at-practice-technologies/ Back in November, Family Travel relaunched with a ton of new content, a completely new look & feel, and great Google Maps integration. I'm the dummy who told the client that animated markers and infoboxes would be OK, and I'm the dummy who had to code it (the javascript) in under ... http://www.gregwhitescarver.com/blog/2008/02/28/google-maps-mashup-with-animated-dhtml-markers-and-infoboxes-yui-contributes/ HTML/CSS developers, and, really, many developers, don't spend their time at the command line these days. In a Java world, build scripts are usually run from the command line or automatically from Eclipse. In my experience, most front-end developers don't like Eclipse, preferring IDEs like Dreamweaver, Coda, and ... http://www.gregwhitescarver.com/blog/2008/02/22/front-end-development-in-a-java-world-part-3-ant-shortcuts/ The Java project for which we're doing front-end development uses JSP Tiles. These clever little guys allow HTML output to be broken into pieces that can be reused in many places by the application. As development begins on a new phase, I meet with one or more back-end developers to ... http://www.gregwhitescarver.com/blog/2007/12/18/front-end-development-in-a-java-world-part-2-using-server-side-includes-to-deliver-html-appropriately-for-jsp-tiles/ Over the last several months, I've worked hard to make it as easy as possible for our front-end developers (including me) to perform front-end development in a Java environment (on Windows). Here are some of the preconditions I am dealing with: The Java application (via Tomcat) outputs absolute references to static assets. Tomcat ... http://www.gregwhitescarver.com/blog/2007/12/14/front-end-development-in-a-java-world-part-1-serving-tomcat-and-apache-web-server-from-the-same-domain-port-locally/ This post is mostly for my own benefit, and may be edited in the future. Since I'm a shell guy stuck (at least for now) in a Windows world, I find myself installing Cygwin on machines on a regular basis. I still don't really understand how anyone gets ... http://www.gregwhitescarver.com/blog/2007/12/12/optional-packages-i-choose-when-i-install-cygwin-cygwin-my-hero/ HUGE was kind enough to send me to the Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose earlier this month. Overall, I give the conference high marks. It's a pricey conference, but they included three meals a day (which weren't bad) and the conference was a 12+ hour experience ... http://www.gregwhitescarver.com/blog/2007/09/16/notes-on-rich-web-experience-2007-san-jose-ca/ Using Yahoo Pipes, I've combined my blog, my Google Reader 'shared' items, and my del.icio.us 'share' tag into a single RSS feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=0Pj34kFB3BGbj9QKJxOy0Q&_render=rss (rss | html) I don't always write in this blog as frequently as I'd like, but I read quite a bit each day to keep up with the latest ... http://www.gregwhitescarver.com/blog/2007/08/03/a-better-rss-feed-from-yours-truly-using-yahoo-pipes/ After my 6 weeks of free company car ran out here in Los Angeles, I opted not to buy a car. Instead, I saved up the cash to spend 10 days in Europe. I got back last Monday. Here are some pictures. So you might want to know ... http://www.gregwhitescarver.com/blog/2007/07/30/surviving-without-a-car-in-los-angeles/