"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
— Albert Einstein |
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KeenerTech is my blog
covering Internet technologies, web design, database design and other technical topics. |
| Creating a Breadcrumb Trail in Rails: Lots of web sites have breadcrumb trails to show users the hierarchy of pages through which a user has navigated to reach their current page. In this article, I provide a simple set of generic methods that can be used to easily add a breadcrumb trail to a Rails web site. | | June 18, 2008 | | | If You Can't Find the Oracle: So, my friend, Jake Vanus, was trying to get Oracle running on a Windows laptop. After several installation/configuration cycles, he had to drop the task for a while. When he came back to it, he couldn't remember whether Oracle was still installed or not, so he asked me where to find the Oracle startup scripts. To which I responded gravely, "If you can't find the Oracle, you will have to seek out the Merovingean."
It's always helpful to slip in a Matrix joke when a buddy is having technical issues. | | June 10, 2008 | | | | AOL Exit Interview: Talk about surreal. I had my exit interview with AOL today — 41 days after I left the company. It seems that they want to know A) why people are leaving the company, and B) why they're having such a hard time hiring new people. In fact, this is so important to AOL's management that they outsourced my exit interview to a human resources consulting firm. | | May 5, 2008 | | | | Mac Office 2008 Product Key Issue Solved: There have been numerous reports on the web of installation issues with Office 2008 for the Mac. Most of the issues seemed to center around Office 2008 not recognizing the proper product key during a re-installation. As far as I can tell from my Internet research, nobody had come up with a solution for the problem. However, I was able to solve the problem when I encountered it. | | April 17, 2008 | | | | NovaJUG: Creating Dynamic Charts With JFreeChart: On April 9th, 2008, I presented on the topic of JFreeChart to the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group (NovaJUG). JFreeChart is an open source charting library implemented in Java. It provides the capability to dynamically create sophisticated charts and incorporate them into Java applications. This in-depth presentation illustrates how to effectively use JFreeChart to enhance your web sites. | | April 10, 2008 | | | | NovaRUG: Implementing OpenID for Your Social Networking Site: On March 19, 2008, I presented on OpenID and Rails to the NovaRUG. There are thousands of social networking sites, each with their own unique sign-on systems. How many user names and passwords do you really want to remember? Wouldn't it be nice if you could have a single sign-on that you could use on all of the sites that you frequent? OpenID is an open-source, decentralized sign-on technology that promises this and more. My PDF presentation on OpenID is available online. | | March 21, 2008 | | | | Graphic Designs for a Regional Ruby Conference: The Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group is planning to organize a new regional Ruby conference. They've asked for some ideas on graphic designs to promote this new conference. So here are some promotional concepts that I've come up with. | | March 16, 2008 | | | | Survival Tips for Technical Job Seekers: Looking for a new job is always a lot of work. Here are some survival tips to help technical professionals find a new job in today's volatile job market. | | March 15, 2008 | | | | Dilbert on Agile Programming: "Agile Programming" has become one those popular buzzwords. Fortunately, we have Dilbert cartoons to put things like this into their proper prespective. | | March 4, 2008 | | | | Embedding a Jelly Scripting Capability in Your Java Application: Jelly is an XML-based scripting language that was created under the umbrella of the Apache Commons initiative. Jelly has been successfully integrated into entreprise applications in order to make scripting capabilities available to users. Find out how to embed a Jelly scripting capability into your next Java application. | | February 26, 2008 |
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David Keener |
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| RubyNation Tickets Selling Nicely: Tickets for RubyNation 2008, a new regional Ruby conference that I'm helping to organize, are selling briskly. We're at about the 75% mark, with ticket prices due to increase by $25 on July 16th. By my calculations, we're already in the black based on ticket sales and sponsorships, which is always a vital milestone. My guess is that RubyNation will be sold out at least a week before the conference. | | July 1, 2008 | | | | RubyNation 2008 Registration Now Open: Registration for the 2008 RubyNation Conference just opened today. Join the nation! Get your ticket for the DC area's very own regional Ruby conference. | | May 26, 2008 | | | | RubyNation Progress Report: Plans for RubyNation, a new regional conference serving metropolitan DC and surrounding areas, is progressing nicely. The venue and budget have been finalized. The Call for Papers just closed earlier this week, and final selection of speakers will be done in a couple of days. Finally, registration will be opening shortly for this two-day conference, which will start on August 1, 2008. | | May 23, 2008 | | | Scotland Trip 2008: David and Sally Keener toured Scotland, Sally's homeland, from May 14th to May 27th. Highlights included a highland journey to scenic Loch Lomond, a guided tour of the Cruacha Power Station (a water-based electrical generating plant tunneled into a granite mountain), shopping in Glasgow and many pubs. The top restaurant for this trip was the River House, situated next to a small loch and literally within view of Stirling Castle.
| | May 27, 2008 |
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