After more than a year of patching, plugging, and constant hand-holding my Windows PC has died. It was a slow dying process and I did all that I could, but it was limping along so I did the humane thing and shot it in the head. Not really, but I did buy a new Macbook Pro which is sort of the same thing if you are Mr. Bill Gates.

So now I have the fun task of setting up everything that I need to be up-and-running. But luckily Mac OS X has all the main things I need already setup; Apache, PHP, Ruby. I just have to copy-and-paste a few configuration directives from my old server setup into my new server’s config file and everything should be ready to roll.

To be quite honest that old PC has always been a royal pain. No more than 3 months after I bought the thing I was reformatting the main hard drive. I swore back then that no matter how seemingly “cheap” Windows PC’s were I would never purchase another one for use as my main production machine. I won’t mention the manufacturer, but their name begins will the letter “D” and rhymes with “Hell,” which is much like the experience I had with their products.

Onward, forward, and back into the familiar realm of an Apple computer! :-)

That is a really good question, actually. Where have I been? Up to my eyeballs in work and musical endeavors plus raising two boys with my wife. It has been a busy, busy year to say the least. (more…)

In my daily routine I am increasingly asked to do things that are more complex in nature, are more creatively-challenging, and (often times) more rewarding. The Web offers the greatest possibility of reaching the most customers, but there is a price to be paid if the client wants things done appropriately. (more…)

Summer 2007

So it seems that summer is just around the corner again and that means many things to many people: beach vacations, bikinis, surfing, hiking trips, outdoor festivals, and generally more outdoor activity than winter usually allows. Summer is also the season for more vibrant colors in fashion and design.

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I recently found out that the charismatic leader and freak du jour from All Mighty Senators, Landis, is currently very ill and has been hospitalized due to renal (kidney) failure. AMS, a mainstay of the Washington DC/Baltimore area music scene, are one of my seminal music influences and I have been lucky enough to have shared the stage with them a couple of times in the past. They are also really cool cats who dissolve the line between bands and fans with booty-shakin’ goodness. (more…)

I must confess that I have only recently made the upgrade to IE7 on my development PC. The main reason was simple laziness (I am a programmer), but it was also due to an underlying apprehension with most Microsoft technologies in general. Basically I wanted to make sure that if I installed IE7 I would still be able to run multiple versions of IE for testing purposes and not botch-up my testing environment. (more…)

Just a quick note to wish everyone a happy holiday season. And if you celebrate the New Year this January 1st. I will see you next year!

I have finished writing an article named “Semantics and Accessibility Primer: Best practices to help you create accessible and semantically-rich Web pages” in which I discuss various techniques and methods to help those struggling with the concepts of semantically-rich, accessible web pages. The WCAG priorities can be easily misunderstood, even by experts and those intimately familiar with them. The article aims to help those new to these concepts become better-acquainted with the basics and to help them simply get some work done.

I would have loved to have posted the article here, but WordPress really choked on all the additional markup in the article. So I decided to simply post the article in a different section of the site and allow for comments and suggestions here. Enjoy!

Update: Sadly, this venture did not work out as I had planned. In fact, Accessible Computing currently owes me more than $5,000 for work completed that was not paid for. Word of caution to developers who may try and get work from this company: DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER IT! You will be sorry that you did. (more…)

Editor— Yeah, I know I used the non-word “ain’t” in the title, but if I had used “isn’t” in its place then it would still read WYSIWYG and this is different. Different, indeed.

Way back in the days before the Web Standards were a hit, a great deal of so-called “professional” Web designers utilized tools called “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editors. These tools allowed the designer to create Web page layouts by simply dragging, dropping, and editing items on the page à la Microsoft Word® or another word processor. (more…)