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Leaving on a Jet Plane…actually, not really

For any of you who know me (and probably some of you who really don’t), you know that I’ve threatened for the last few years that I was going to leave Helena.  Well, your wish has finally come true; You don’t have to listen to me bitch about it any longer.  On Friday, June 18th I’m packing up my *super sweet* 1994 Honda Accord and heading south…and a little bit east…to Boulder, Colorado where I’ve recently accepted (Who am I kidding? I basically begged them for a shot) a position at SimpleGeo as an engineer. At SimpleGeo, I’ll be working with some of the smartest people I could’ve ever hoped to work with. They’ve worked at great web companies like Digg and AOL, sold companies before they were 25, worked at prestigious research facilities like Lawrence Livermore Labs and went to school at places like Johns Hopkins. Needless to say, I have a lot to live up to. Read: I will be busting my ass for at least the first 6 months just to try to understand what these guys and girls eat for breakfast. With that said, I have a ton to look forward to…but, there’s a lot of things I’m going to miss from my past.

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Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of people in the know saying that “Github is the new resume” or “Don’t send me your resume, send me a pull request”. So, I decided to get myself a Github account and start up a pretty simple project.

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To start off, let me say I really had no reason/need to upgrade Ubuntu from Jaunty Jackalope. It was running just fine and you know what they say…don’t fix it if it ain’t broken. However, I’m sort of obsessive when it comes to being completely up to date on everything. So, I had a little time to burn and decided to dive in.

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One thing I was really missing after my switch to Chromium from Firefox was XMarks, a handy little plugin that allows you to sync bookmarks and passwords and such online so they can be used by other Firefox instances.  Well, I simply couldn’t live without it anymore so I went about figuring out how to sync my Chromium bookmarks between two computers on my own.

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The Firefox Letdown

When Firefox 3.5 came out I was as excited as everyone else, maybe even more excited. So, I looked the other way when it crashed and exited 7 times in a row trying to open up a bookmark. I said it wasn’t that big of a deal when it locked up trying to open up a 3rd tab. However, I was dying more and more inside with each encountered problem. The web browser that had really turned me on to the internet was getting away from its roots and becoming a intolerable bloated monster like so many past their prime pop stars.

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It seems like all the PHP web service examples are using the nusoap package, which will generate the WSDL for you…which is super nice, let me tell you. But, what the hell are you supposed to do if you don’t have nusoap installed and you’re not able to add new PHP modules in a timely fashion or at all? Luckily, PHP 5 has built in the ability to create your own SOAP web services with the SoapServer module…and it’s really quite simple.

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Welcome to caseycrites.com!  Let’s talk about the direction I’d like this blog to head in.

I’m a software engineer by trade, writing J2EE applications, but I do a lot of coding/poking around with different technologies in my free time as well.  In my attempts to learn these things for the first time, I often turn to Google and other sites as my research basis only to be left dissappointed by the lack of info on what I want to do or the confusing nature in which it’s presented.  It never seems to me like I’m doing anything groundbreaking, but I still can’t seem to come up with solid examples of exactly what it is that I want to do.  This is extremely frustrating and a complete waste of time, especially when it’s something as simple as constructing a login page using PHP (I mean…really?).  Anyway, my hope is to post simple solutions to these frustrations as I come upon them in my own work.  So, if you’re looking for a site with basic examples of simple concepts when you’re trying to learn a new technology, this will be the place.  However, I don’t plan on pidgeon holing my self into just that…there will also be more advanced examples as well as possible improvements/enhancements to simple examples.  If this sounds like your kind of stuff, make sure and check back often for new posts.  Thanks and enjoy!