Jason's Tech Blog

Last night someone stole 3 laptops from my vehicle as I was getting ready to make the trip back to Atlanta to go to work. I don’t have the ability to run out and get myself a new machine so that I can continue to work. Times are hard, really hard. I moved from Atlanta back to Pace, FL to try to reduce the amount of money I was spending on monthly bills. We (Shannon and I) are still picking up pieces from last night. Having to spend all of our time making calls and changing passwords to our accounts we have online.

To the people that took from us:

If the people who took the laptops are reading this, and I hope you do, I don’t hold anything against you. I forgive you. I only ask that you please consider what you have done and return what you took. See I am the type of person that if you had come and knocked on my door and asked for financial help I would have given you what I could to help out. We understand that you are possibly going through hard times and we have been there ourselves. I just ask that you find it in your heart to return what you took so I can continue to work and provide for my family. I don’t have insurance on the vehicle and we rent the home that the vehicle was parked in front of. I ask you to put yourself in my shoes and try to realize what the impact was from taking those machines. Please help me out and return what you took. If you do then I will drop the matter. If you come to me and talk to me I might be able to help you out. I give you my word that the police will not know who took or returned the items just that the matter has been resolved.

Please look deep into your heart and consider what you have done. The karma train is not something you want to mess with. The more bad decisions you make the worse the karma train runs you down. As well as, consider having to answer to your actions. Maybe not now but later when you are in front of your maker and trying to explain to him why you did it instead of putting your troubles in His hands. Letting him help you through whatever drove you to steal.

I hope you consider what I am saying here. I say to you God Bless you and I hope that whatever drove you to steal last night that you are able to work through it. Talk to Him as He loves you no matter what. All that he asks is that you ask Him to help you.

In closing:

If anyone reads this, I ask for your prayers as Shannon and I pick up the pieces to what has happened. If you would like to assist us in any way I have placed a donation page up for contributions towards the purchase of the tools that have been taken. If you can’t I fully understand. I just wanted to provide a way for people to help if they feel it in their heart that they want to.

Donations Page

God Bless

Jason L. West

WPExplorer.com Screen Shot

Best Premium WordPress Themes – WPExplorer

I found this site this morning and I have to admit that I am very impressed with the layouts that AJ puts together. WPExplorer.com is going to the top of my list of resources for finding exquisite WordPress layouts.

• Home
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JLW: This is great stuff if you’re looking to get into the mobile app market and can’t justify the huge expense for a Macbook for developing iPhone apps. You could start with this and when you become a BILLIONAIRE you can get the Macbook you always wanted. However, just remember where you got the idea. :-)

I will be producing articles on creating Flex apps for the Android in the upcoming months, but for now this is a great intro by Brian Rinaldi.

“Adobe Edge: Getting started with Adobe AIR for Android by Brian Rinaldi”

Mobile development is sexy — there’s no denying that. But for someone like me, who generally focuses on back-end development or behind-the-firewall Flex applications, building a mobile application sounds intimidating. I can’t pinpoint exactly why, but I also know I am not alone. However, with new Adobe AIR for Android (currently in developer prerelease on Adobe Labs) and the Adobe Flash IDE, mobile development for Google’s new Android 2.2 operating system (code-named Froyo) couldn’t be easier.

In this article, I discuss the essential tools you need to start developing for AIR for Android using Adobe Flash Professional CS5. I walk you through getting AIR installed on your Android phone and configuring Flash software to develop for that platform. Then I show you how to build and deploy your first application. While this application won’t be groundbreaking, it can serve as a solid launching point for your new future as a mobile applications developer. (Note: The details of this tutorial were tested against the AIR for Android release as of August 1, 2010, on a Google/HTC Nexus One running Android 2.2.)

Stumbled on this today, Sounds like a lot of fun. :-)

Dev Derby » About Dev Derby

The Dev Derby is one of the events taking place in Bloomington around The Combine (http://thecombine.org), the area’s first major technology conference, and at the start of the BFusion/BFlex conference (http://bflex.info). It is a day-long programming challenge where teams of developers work to create an application serving a real-world need.

Five teams will represent different programming languages—PHP, C#, Ruby, ColdFusion, and Java—to produce a demo application that will be released as open source software. Each application will be judged by knowledge leaders and representatives of the non-profit organizations benefiting from this work. Prizes will be awarded, following a panel discussion about the development process and the future of application programming.

Dev Derby is situated in The Combine along with other technology-related events, such as Tech Cocktail, Ignite Bloomington, and a variety of of other gatherings. It is hosted by the BFusion/BFlex conference, a two-day hands-on training event from the experts of Adobe Flex and ColdFusion. Dev Derby is inspired by our experience with Startup Weekend in 2008, but with a short day of coding and focused on a specific challenge.

Using WordPress for writing technical articles makes the process simpler when you have the right tools in place. For instance, for posting source code in my articles I use a plugin called “Syntax Highlighter for WordPress” (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/syntax-highlighter/).

The only trick on using this plugin is that I had to use the HTML view of my composer in order for the plugin to pickup the area(s) I wanted changed.

I stand corrected in what I had said earlier. I took the snippets of code [language]code here[/language] and wrapped it in <pre></pre> so that I could work with it in the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress and it seemed to print fine on the page.

Ruby Source Example:

class Example
  def example(arg1)
    return "Hello: " + arg1.to_s
  end
end

ColdFusion Source Example:

<cfset foo EQ bar />
<cfoutput>#foo#</cfoutput>
<cfbreak/>

This site is currently under development.  If you are looking for old posts they will be available after tonight (08/23/2010) as well as I have been working on a lot of articles about my experiences with development with the PEGA PRPC BPM system, Rails, Django, Railo, Amazon EC2/S3 Hosting and much much more…

So please check us out tomorrow for the old content and check back periodically for new publishings.

Thanks,

Jason L. West, Sr.
Senior Applications Architect & Developer