Monthly Archive for November, 2007

IntuiSite Becomes SwitchYard

In the last couple of weeks, I finally reached the point where I was ready to declare my IntuiSite web application framework to be stable and release it for public consumption. This past Thursday night, at the Chattanooga PHP Developer’s Meetup Group that I founded, I demoed the framework, and received a positive response. As a result, I resolved to go ahead and push forward with setting up a public Subversion repository, a Trac project web site, etc. for the project and let it loose in the real world.

Friday afternoon, I tried to register intuisite.org for the project page, and quickly made an unwelcome discovery.

It was already registered.

“A pernicious lie, invented by the devil himself!” I thought to myself. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Not only was it really registered, but it was registered to a company who was using my treasured name, IntuiSite, as the name of their web site builder/hosting product.

Bugger.

Oh well. It was back to the drawing board to generate a new name.

After some deliberation, I finally decided on “SwitchYard” … which plays off of the railroad-oriented name of my company. In the last few days, I’ve pretty much completed the name change within the code itself, and the Subversion repository is almost organized in a way that makes me happy. I’ve set up the Trac site and started to write documentation. In a few more days, I expect to open it up to the public and release the first stable release of the SwitchYard 2 branch (code named “Yellow Jacket,” which is a reference to a Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis 4-8-4 steam locomotive).

I’ve also started working on a Smarty plugin for SwitchYard. I hadn’t considered doing that previously, but at the PHP meetup last week, we talked about Smarty some, and I have realized that having such a plugin available might well hasten adoption of my platform by other developers. Thus far, I’ve used PHP as my templating engine, since I generally work both as designer and developer for my sites … so something like Smarty is, strictly speaking, unnecesary for me. However, since I’m determined to eat my own dog food, I’m going to start using this plugin to develop some of my upcoming web sites, and also use it for the templating engine for my in-progress e-commerce application (which I will write more about in the next few months).

Additionally, I’ve had some interest in the improved SOAP library I’ve written for REALbasic, so I’m going to be developing a Trac site for it as well, and set up a Subversion repository.

(*Note*: IntuiSite was a play on the name that I originally intended to register for my company, IntuiWorx, which unfortunately was a little too close to an existing company, InterWorx, for my own comfort. When I legally set up my company, I registered it as Four-Eight-Four Software Works, LLC.)

Office Zen

Over the weekend, I finally got myself in gear and bought a desk for my brother. It’s about time. The guy has been working for me here in town since July, and I’ve been making him work on an ancient typewriter stand that rattled when he typed.

Bringing the desk in on Monday touched off a weeks worth of re-arranging in the office. At some point on Tuesday, I made it my goal to rid the office of any sort of junk that I hadn’t used in months. Anything that I might possibly use was sent to the closet (which was emptied of pretty much anything not office-related).

I even managed to mount a ceiling fan on Tuesday, which really has improved the air circulation in here.

I’m not completely done yet, but I would guess that I’m 95% of the way there. Right now I have a very clean office that is a genuine joy to work in, and there is plenty of floor space, even with the two desks and umpteen computers. If somebody had told me two weeks ago if I could have gotten this much usable desk/table space in here and still been able to walk around, I would have laughed in their face.

Once upon a time, my father had a thingamajig that he kept on his desk that said “A cluttered desk is a sign of a genius” (or something like that). In the past few months, I’ve become a big believer in the idea that a cluttered desk is a sign of somebody who isn’t getting as much done as they could. I started trying to keep my workspace more clean a while back, but with this most recent cleanup, I really do feel more productive.

Some photos of my workplace zen:

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My Workspace

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Philip’s Workspace

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The Bookshelves and my Pipe and Cigar Stuff

Note: The rackmount server you see to the right of Philip’s workspace isn’t always going to live there … it’s just being prepped as my backup server, and will probably go live in the datacenter in the next week or so. It’s my fourth server! I never thought at the beginning of the year I would have gone from one server (running six virtual servers) to four servers (with two running ten virtual servers). Amazing!


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