"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying."
— Woody Allen, Film Director |
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KeenerTech is my blog
covering Internet technologies, web design, database design and other technical topics. |
David Keener at RubyNation 2008: Many thanks to Gray Herter, who snapped some nice photos of me speaking at the RubyNation 2008 Conference in August. Click here to see the full set of photos from my talk.
 | | October 2, 2008 | | | | Introduction to RubyGems: RubyGems is a package manager for Ruby code, where each package is referred to as a "gem." All of the Ruby books show users how to install gems, but almost nobody explains how to use the many other features of RubyGems. | | August 5, 2008 | | | | Practical Tips for Rails Migrations: Migrations are one of the neatest features provided by the Rails framework. The thing to remember, though, is that migrations are still code. Even migrations can get out-of-control after a while, unless you follow some practical tips for keeping them useful and relevant. | | July 20, 2008 | | | | 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 |
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David Keener |
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| Voxant Merges With Anystream: The official announcement went out over the wires today. My company, Voxant Media, just merged with Anystream. Voxant Media specializes in building an advertiser-supported distribution network for monetizing content such as video, images and text. Anystream produces products that process video, transcribe video as needed and generally make it available for distribution. Their most notable recent activity is streaming all of the content from the Beijing Olympics. Check out the official press release. | | September 22, 2008 | | | Reactions on the Voxant-Anystream Merger: Some more reactions to the merger:
| | September 22, 2008 | | | | WorldCon 66: Dave Keener attended the 66th World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, Colorado, from August 7 to 11. As per usual, there were lots of great events, good food and many, many SF books. The convention center was also nice, with an interesting statue, as shown below: | | August 14, 2008 | | | | RubyNation 2008!!!: The RubyNation 2008 Conference was a stunning success on August 1 - 2, easily at the upper end of what the organizers were hoping for. The CIT venue was excellent, with plenty of parking, a really nice auditorium and good electronics capabilities. The catering was first-rate. Finally, the array of speakers and the mix of topics went over very well with the audience. Rest assured, there will be a RubyNation 2009. | | August 4, 2008 |
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