So… what am I up to right now? I guess I’ll write a little newsy post about various stuff. I’ve just released a new version of tlavideo.com; that’s been taking a lot of my energy for the past six months. We’re also just coming out of the Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival season; I worked on their web site again this year. Because of various time factors, Pam and I didn’t get to see too many shows at the festivals, but we did make it out to see Quick Silver, a wonderful, quirky puppet-show theatrical musical directed by our friend Lisa-Jo Epstein.

I’m teaching in the University of the Arts Continuing Education Department again this semester. This time I’m teaching a course on server-side web development using PHP and MySQL. I’m hoping to blog about the teaching experience as I go; I’ll see if I’m able to make that happen.

So, if anyone is reading this, let me know. I’d love to know whether I have an audience; if I do, that will encourage me to post more. If I don’t have an audience, maybe I’ll post more anyway, and then I’ll have a reason to invite an audience.

By the way, I just moved a bunch of the older posts to the archive category.  I didn’t delete them, but this takes them off the front page.  I was just tired of seeing old boring posts on the front page.

“It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?”

– Alan Perlis

I don’t know who Alan Perlis is– a research project for later.

(The thought for the day list is the internet mailing list I’ve received for the longest time– since 1991 when I got my first email address. Although sometimes corny and sometimes political in ways I disagree with, the thoughts still make me smile more often than not. I’d link to the list, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have a web page. You subscribe the old-fashioned way: by sending email to listserv@listserv.tamu.edu with the text “sub tftd-l”)

My function uses Java to do DNS lookups from within a Coldfusion page, and it supports sites which have more than one DNS record for the same hostname. It works in Coldfusion 5 or higher. It’s a reworking of an earlier function written by Ben Forta.

getAllHostAddresses

My father says he took me to this playground when I was a small child, but I don’t remember. My kids had a fantastic time there today.

The playground is in Fairmount Park, but it seems that it is not run by the city– a nonprofit group maintains it.

Last week I read Weaving the Web, by Tim Berners-Lee. Tim Berners-Lee, of course, is the man who invented the world wide web.

As a programmer, I found the book incredibly inspiring. As reported by Berners-Lee, the first practical web application was actually an organizational phone directory for CERN! Berners-Lee saw that he could solve this problem– and others– with special-purpose code; but he also realized that by writing general-purpose code, using hypertext in a distributed, networked way, he could solve a much more general set of problems. This, of course, is what good programmers do every day, but it’s inspiring to realize that with a little bit of luck and a lot of persistence, you can take that programmer instinct and use it to change the world.

There was nothing revolutionary about either distributed applications or hypertext. The most interesting part of the “invention” was the URL– nobody had ever created a protocol-independent addressing scheme before. But once implemented and promoted, the concept of distributed global hypertext took the world by storm.

Although I don’t imagine I’ll be the next Berners-Lee, one thing I’ll be using this blog for is to explore some of my own ideas for generalization and distribution in computing. Blogs are, of course, one of many consequences of the web’s invention that I’m sure Tim Berners-Lee never envisioned. There are many others (some of which are mentioned in the book) which have not yet been realized. This is an exciting time to be involved with web programming, since the work we do can still change people’s lives.

I’m sure I’ll also post other things from time to time: the requisite goofy pictures of my kids, bitches about work, esoteric technical crap, and all of the other stuff we know and love in blogs. (Actually, I shouldn’t say I’m sure, since the most recent goofy pictures of my kids on the web are over two years old! Gotta do something about that soon).

Anyway, hello, whoever you are. Welcome to my blog.

This year we decided not to use the Theatre Manager box office software that we’ve been using the past few years. Although Theatre Manager is a nice program with many useful features, it runs on a fragile database architecture (we’ve lost data due to data corruption in the past), it doesn’t perform well on our slow WAN, and it uses a Modem-based credit card authorization system which causes many problems. It also suffers from over-complexity; it has so many features that it can be slow to complete a simple transaction. So my software development group set out to build a replacement in a two-month period. The challenge was increased by the fact that the Philadelphia Film Festival is a large event– last year over 61,000 tickets were sold.

My group mostly writes web (and intranet) applications. Although we occasionally write other kinds of code, this is where our greatest skill level is concentrated. Given the short development time, we didn’t want to learn a new platform or deal with unfamiliar bugs/issues.

For now, we’re busy maintaining the thing. No matter what the length of the development cycle is, every software project gets additional requirements once actual people start using it. With the film festival two and a half weeks away, we’re in the thick of that process now.

The good news is, the users seem to like the system a lot. My company is hoping to market this product to other organizations, and I think that has a good chance of success. It’s exciting!

Now, this is basically a bad idea– unless you need some kind of hardware or OS access in an intranet application.

However, if you’re doing this, there’s some fun learning involved in Marking your control “Safe for Scripting” and then signing it.

I learned most of what I needed to know from this page - the best tutorial I was able to find on the subject.