Well it’s been a bit thin on new geek related stuff here lately. I haven’t stopped learning, I’ve just started completely over as I’ve been taking summer school and learning Java. So shortly here I’ll start a new java section as I hope to be doing more and more java development.
Also new I was given a new project at work today. I’ll be developing a web-based point of sale system for a retail outlet using heavy javascript, ajax, php, and the kitchen sink. This will be a pretty slick application with full credit card processing fail over and other neat yet painful to implement features. I’m still in the flow charting, requirements gathering, and hair pulling stage but I should begin developing later in the week and hopefully will have a nice new edition to my portfolio by the end of August.
Once school ends I’ll begin work on a web based application for a non-profit. I’m working with a team so hopefully we can bang out a lot of code in the 3 weeks before school starts up again for me. Summer semester sucks.
I found a decent tutorial on getting fixed positioning to somewhat operate in Internet Explorer 6 here http://www.felgall.com/cshow16.htm. It’s not 100% solid, but hopefully for the sake of web designers sanity IE 6 users become less and less each day.
I added a screen shot of one of the modules I’ve been working on here at work for an aesthetics school. Over the past few months I’ve been designing a complete back end system for managing prospective students, tours, student applications, grades, accounting etc… To manage this I’ve been developing in PHP 5 with a MySQL 5 backend utilizing the InnoDB engine. For the front-end I’m using XHTML, CSS, MooTools, and Mocha UI.
Working with Mocha UI has probably been the coolest part of this experience. What has also been very rewarding is working with InnoDB which is leaps and bounds beyond MyISAM in terms of database normalization. I’ve also been able to develop a very unique access control system based somewhat off of Microsoft’s Active Directory. I used a system of rules (each page has a rule associated with it) and those rules can then be applied to groups. A user is then a member of one or more groups. When a user logs in the application determines what pages a user can access based on these rules, the IDs of these pages are then stored in the users session. This array of page IDs is then used to build a unique navigation menu for each user. Each time a user accesses a page the system verifies the page id of that page is in the users session.
I fixed the downloader for all the widgets in the projects folder. I’m also going to be rewriting text fader, most likely using mootools and maybe eventually text scroller. The DataGrid project is still under development and is sitting at about 1000 lines of code, which I am trying to get down and working on making it more efficient and less bloated.
For the blog, I’m still slowly working on the layout, but have been stuck on client projects and free one I am doing for a non-profit agency which will be open sourced once completed. Not to mention school, work, and umm….social life?