I am a software developer, web developer, entrepreneur, and an advocate of free/open source software, open standards, and open content. I am the technical director and co-founder of Found Line—a creative firm located in Burlington, Vermont—where I develop standards-based, accessible, and cross-browser compatible web applications.
I am happy to report that the new Found Line website has launched! This new version includes some much needed content and visual updates and is now running in Zend Framework (although there is very little functionality beyond static content). All of the visual effects use jQuery, there is no Flash to be found on […]
Richard M. Stallman (RMS), founder of the free software movement and the Free Software Foundation (FSF), gave a speech on Copyright vs. Community at Saint Michael’s College on Thursday evening, and then a speech on The Free Software Movement at Champlain College on Friday morning. While I don’t agree with all of his ideas, here […]
April 16, 2008 – 10:30 am
The first full review of the Asus Eee PC 900 is available. The Eee PC is an ultra-portable computer and this newest version sports the following features: 8.9 inch 1024×600 LCD 1 GB of RAM Linux or Windows XP 20 GB SSD (Linux version) or 12 GB SSD (Windows XP version) 900 MHz Intel Celeron […]
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article about the Dalai Lama’s comments during a panel discussion at the recent Seeds of Compassion conference. The audience was a group of business and policy leaders. The article takes a compassionate look at doing business. One interesting quote when asked about competition in business: “If your colleague (is a) […]
Google has just launched a preview release of the Google App Engine. Developers can now create web applications and run them on Google’s infrastructure. This gives developers access to a lot of the same tools that Google uses to build its own web applications including GFS and Bigtable. Unfortunately, it’s only available for Python and […]
In a previous post I talked about Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH). The POSH concept saved us a lot of time and frustration on a recent project. Our task was to create a cold water wash calculator for Seventh Generation’s Get Out of Hot Water for Earth Day promotion. The calculator takes four inputs: water […]
Web developers have many options to choose from when it comes to web services. These options include SOAP, XML-RPC, and REST. It is my opinion that REST will emerge as the primary web services “protocol.” The advantages and disadvantages of each protocol is a topic that has been discussed to great length online. Here are […]
Magento 1.0 has just been announced. Magento is an open source eCommerce platform based on Zend Framework. I’ve used several shopping cart applications in the past and have been very disappointed with all of them. Magento looks promising and I hope to demo it soon.
Artima has an older (but still relevant and interesting) interview with Josh Bloch, a Sun Microsystems Architect. While the interview focuses on Java, Josh Bloch has some interesting things to say about software design in general. The main topic is thinking about design in terms of APIs instead of monolithic software construction. Reuse is extremely […]
Cal Evans has a post talking about his experience at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). Just like many small businesses, especially web development shops, open source software is a critical tool for us at Found Line. However, I’d like us to be more then just consumers of open source software. It seems like most […]
