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What's New?

Tech Life604 words3 minutes to read

Well, for those who seem to be intrigued by what goes on in my life, here’s a little update on what’s been going on.

Dead Hard Drive

My 160 GB drive bit the dust last weekend. I’m still at a loss for why. The upshot is that it only took about 15 minutes to get a new 200 GB drive up and running in my system. The downside is that I’ve lost everything besides my boot drive, installed applications, and my music collection (which are all on other drives). The worse part is that any and all work I’ve done on my long-awaited redesign went up in smoke as well. Convenient excuse, I know. I just hope that my new code will be better than my old code.

sIFR

I’ve discovered how cool the Inman Flash Replacement technique is. Even cooler, I’ve discovered the Scalable Inman Flash Replacement Technique (or sIFR for short). This latest version of the groundbreaking technique really improves previous versions.

Firefox 1.0 PR

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Firefox 1.0 Preview Release. The PR release date has been pushed back 9 days from when it was scheduled (according to Planet Mozilla), and I’m trying to keep from biting my nails from excitement. Thunderbird 0.8 is also right around the corner, although I don’t know how close around the corner.

SimplePie

I’ve hit a roadblock in my SimplePie project. I need to figure out a regular expression that will grab self-closing tags (<description />, <tagline />, etc.), without also grabbing normal open-close style tags. I’ve done some tremendous work for v0.94, but I insist on holding back this release until I get the bug worked out. I know that this bug (combined with other elements of the code) effects Ben Hammersley and GoogleBlog, among others. If anyone cares to help me out with this regular expression, please let me know.

A New Church

After several months of looking for a good, solid, scripturally-sound church, we’ve found one. We’ll continue to visit for the next several weeks to really get a feel for the church, but it seems like what we’ve been looking for. I’ve been wanting to get back involved in music and children’s ministries, and this looks like the place for that.

SPG 1.1

Vaporware? That’s the feeling I’m starting to get about the update to Paul Griffin’s outstanding Simple PHP Gallery software. Let’s all go and ask him about it, so that he’ll feel the pressure to finish it. =)

Some Leafs

I’m totally diggin’ the photography in this new Zen Garden design.

Quick-and-Dirty Weather

Using the raw XML (not RSS) feeds from the United States National Weather Service, I was able to hack together my own simple weather RSS feeds. If you’re interested, check out Quick-and-Dirty Weather.

My Daughter

She’s growing up so fast, I can hardly believe it. She gets to be more and more fun as each day goes by. She’s just finishing up her potty training, and we’re going through tic-tacs like crazy. It was really warm when we got home this evening, and we couldn’t find any of her nightgown jammies, she I put her to bed wearing one of my old T-shirts. She was absolutely adorable. She misses us, my wife and I, when we’re gone all day at work, and she’s become vocal about it. It breaks my heart to be away from her all day long (although I’d probably go nuts otherwise), so I’m trying to find reasonable ways to remedy that. *sigh*

Anyways, that’s what’s been going on with me. What all has been going on with you?

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.