On the Inside

Well... and now I post.

I've been dealing with rebuilding the Ubercart site for the last week at work. Unfortunately, we had an embarrassing backup solution (read, none) that led to us losing our website's database when our RAID system went yonkers. This means all our forum posts, contributions, live site listings, documentation, users, etc... the whole shebang... went the way of the dodo. This has given me a good opportunity to rebuild everything "in the know" so to speak. I've been able to avoid some of the failures of our previous systems with the benefit of a year's worth of hindsight. So it has been all bad... just mostly.

Oh! I finally got a closing date. This means I'll be moving into 528 Camp St. early next week before heading down to Greenville, SC for the wedding. Talk about cutting it close... closing on the house not even a week before getting married! But at least I'll have a house to bring my lovely bride to be home to (even if our bed won't have any sheets and the shower curtain won't be up!). I formally invite you all to come help with the moving and sprucing up of the property.

Finally, this evening I was reading the gift I got one of my groomsmen. (I hope he'll be alright with a slightly used copy of The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell.) It's sort of a collection of apologetics outlines by McDowell that touches on any and every subject you might want to read about. Well, I started by reading an essay included in it by C.S. Lewis which was stellar. Feeling like I was cheating a little I turned to a chapter written by McDowell and read a bit about defenses for the deity of Christ... and I realized it was an approach I'd never read before. I found it to be quite encouraging!

Woohoo! I finally rolled out the initial release of Ubercart today. It took a few extra hours after everyone had gone home and the phones stopped ringing for me to finalize everything, but it's up! It's wonderful to be at this first milestone in development... It's taken us 6 months of development (with vacations and many sales calls in the mix) to get this out the door, but we've finally arrived.

Now, I am tired. And my butt hurts from sitting at my desk from 8 AM to 8 PM. (To be fair, I did have an hour break to head to Fazoli's for some lunch and a bit of reading in this week's Time and Children of Dune.) I look forward to a pleasant little conversation with my fiancee and a night of sweet, ubercartish dreams.

http://www.ubercart.org/news/mar-19-2007/initial_ubercart_release

I've been working on an old IBM System 36 at work lately... that's a computer for those of you who don't know. But even now, you might be picturing a normal computer, and that might cause you to think, "What's the big deal?" Well, the System 36 debuted in 1983 and could easily swallow 2 of my computers whole. It is a ruthless, indefatigable beast of microcomputer awareness. Seriously, it's been running for 20 years non-stop, and it's still got spunk. Click here to see a picture of my charge. The only thing wrong with it is the monitor being a little warped... and the 20 year old software.

I wanted to post a quick entry about a work project that has finally been completed and deployed. Much of the module development at work has been long term, so it's hard to see "completed" results. However, I just finished the TAPIr module, an integral part of the Übercart system. It defines a Tables API for use by module developers to create configurable, extensible tables and print them to a page in much the same fashion as the Forms API handles forms.