Sports, Spoke, and WebWork
It has been forever since I've written anything up here. Good news is: I'm not dead. Bad news is: no one missed me. Ha!
Anyway, here's what I've been up to:
At work, we released version 1.8 and 1.9 of our product. The stuff I was part of includes support for co-branded sites for associations, like a school alumni for instance. Spoke Associations lets you leverge your association to identify leads that are in or around the members of your various associations. Check out http://associations.spoke.com if you think you might be interested in getting one for yourself (it's free if you quality).
Another little thing I did was allow for your profiles to be public. Mine is at http://center.spoke.com/profiles/Pat. You can use it to be your official resume and provide for a simple way for people you email to find other people with similar interests, work history, etc.
So what about non-work? Let's see...
"WebWork in Action" is coming along nicely. We're about two-thirds done and we're really picking up steam. Matt, Jason, and Kris have all been doing an excellent job.
Spaking of WebWork, I have been busy getting WebWork 2.1 and XWork 1.0.1 ready for release. They are pretty much ready to go, but once again documentation is our downfall. We got a new wiki that I plan to use to write/organize/export documentation for each release, but I don't want to make any more releases until that area is cleaned up. On the mailing list there has been some excitement about helping out with documentation, so if you're interested, please get involved!
I also started work on a WebWork plugin for IDEA. No matter what Hani says, a plugin (or console) is a good thing for WebWork. It won't be for managing configuration (though I may add that just for good measure), but rather for the other stuff that the "masters of effeciency" forget to put in to the equation when claiming how easy technology X is that it doesn't need an editor. That is, I intend to find all the repeatable processes I see myself doing when building (ie: internationalizing text by cutting and pasting mindlessly) and write tools to help with it. So far the plugin does nothing -- I don't know Swing and so it might be a while before something useful comes from this.
In the sports world I was lucky enough to be at the game when Barry Bonds hit #661. The ball flew RIGHT over my head in to the bay. It was awesome. Not so awesome was the idiot who jumped from the stadium trying to get the ball. He fell 30 feet on to his head and forced me to believe that a guy just died right in front of my eyes. Thankfully new reports later said he'd be OK. Unfortunately, the Giants haven't been doing so hot this season, but I have faith they will turn it around.
The 49ers were rated the second worst team of the league today by ESPN. Good thing I have season tickets. Or not. It's too early to tell, so I'm not going to state any opinions yet.
The Sharks are making San Jose history and moving on to round three. I'm going to try to get tickets if at all possible (constant reloading of the browser on TicketMaster.com sometimes works!). I really think they are going all the way.
OK, that's all I got. Come help us write WebWork docs!