Derek Gallo

After more than 3 months of being out of commission, I have finally got my blog back up and running! My domain name had expired. I had it grouped in with all of the domains we own under the NFi Studios account at Host Department. What a piece of junk for a domain company. Repeatedly, we have had domains expire even though they were set to auto-renew. They have also had the worst customer service and reliability. We have since moved all of our domains to GoDaddy.

Host Department was less than cooperative with moving derekgallo.com though, go figure. Every time I tried to initiate the transfer to GoDaddy, it would never work and they could never give a reason why. Anyway, I finally have it back in my control and back up and running.

I am up and running on my new SliceHost server. I have just started with them but so far so good. Bringing a slice online is quick and extremely simple. They offer a wide variety of slice “sizes” so you don’t have to spend more than is necessary. Their prices are great too. I got a slice large enough to run this blog at a price only a little higher than a shared hosting environment BUT I have complete control of my server Now its time to upgrade to Wordpres 2.7 and maybe get a new theme, ahem Derek Bender.

Its going to be a busy week because the following day, Saturday the 5th of April starts the second BarcampOrlando. The first day is geared towards developers and the second towards media. Don’t miss the official after party GeekOut ‘08! It should be a great day of learning and meeting fellow geeks in Orlando. I will be meeting Gregg early on dev day to help pickup the chairs for the event. If you would like to help unload or setup other aspects please come by.

Last, I would like to mention another geek meetup I along with some help from others am trying to revive/startup. OrlandoPHP will be a monthly meetup to discuss and learn everything PHP. If you dabble in PHP development or are interested in picking up more knowledge, stop on by! Our first meeting is scheduled for April 22nd at Devry from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. We are currently planning on reviewing the the available frameworks for php and discussing their pros and cons. If you have any questions or want to help get this going contact me.

The Future of Web Apps in Miami has past. I found the event a great opportunity to learn from some of the industry tops as well as socialize and network with industry peers. I attend many conferences but usually I am working at them, providing kiosk technology for their attendees. They are usually not conferences for my profession, so to go to this one as an actual attendee was great.

Besides just the main Future of Web Apps conference, the Miami community hosted BarcampMiami. Barcamp is a community driven un-conference where anyone can choose to give a presentation or talk on whatever they feel and contribute to the overall knowledge of the community. BarcampMiami was held on the day before the main conference day and was a free alternative to the FOWA workshops.

Don’t miss our own second BarcampOrlando in April! Registration is already open.

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Being a Mac OSX user but managing several Windows based servers, I find myself using the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac quite a bit. Until version 2.0 Beta of the RDC software this was quite cumbersome. The older version would not let you have a connection to more than one Windows computer at a time. The new version does however and if you combine the power of Quicksilver you can greatly increase your efficiency in launching your most common connections.

The key is in the RDC client’s ability to save connection settings. You can save a .rdp file into a location indexed by Quicksilver and then quickly launch that connection in just a few keystrokes from that point on. Here is how to set up a connection to a computer located at mydomain.com:
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The team at NFi has been working hard the last couple of months on our upcoming professional networking product for associations. We have just released the Memberfuse Website now and I would like to say that Bender our creative director has done an excellent job. I really love the overall look and theme, especially the new themes inside of the product (see glimpses).

Look for an official release of the first version of the product in the next couple of months. Until then I would like to thank everyone on the team for their hard work in getting us this far.

The first barCamp Orlando was great. All of the people who spoke prepared good presentations and all of them gave something to learn. I even picked up some good information from the topics I was already familiar with. Many thanks to Gregg and Jason and everyone else who helped as well as all of the presenters.

I was originally hoping most of the presentations would be more code based examples of programming techniques, but I am glad they were higher level as I am sure that would have become pretty boring after a couple presentations. Next year I hope to have a presentation of my own. I thought about presenting something this year, but everything I thought of presenting on I kinda just figured with all the geeks in the audience they would already know it. After seeing the variety of presentations this year, I am sure I can find something to present on next year.

Some of the presentations I particularly enjoyed:

Designing Apps for the iPhone

(mostly because I just bought one and I am ready to start writing apps for it)

Staying on Track (Project Management) by Robert Dempsey.

Project Management has always been a strong topic for me. While I don’t particularly enjoy it, doing it correctly can decrease my headaches and let me do what I love more effectively, development. Robert’s presentation pointed out many great points, some of which we pretty much know and a couple of other good tips. I hope to see a presentation next year on applying the principles. Many of us “know” what goes into it, but effectively executing on those principles is usually the deciding factor.

Why Ruby on Rails by Gregg Pollack

I am not a RoR activist and I have never even written an application in Ruby. I have always been skeptical of it because of all of the scaling problem rumors and the fact that there is sort of an elitist attitude among many RoR developers, kinda like Mac enthusiasts vs. Windows. I have eventually made the switch to Mac also but I like to make informed decisions on what to use instead of just following the herd and I can say that Mac is pretty good but using it doesn’t necessarily make you better at everything.


Gregg’s presentation was good though and showed some real reasons for considering RoR. We already use a custom MVC php framework but I want to really do a couple of RoR projects to try it out. At the very least I picked up a couple of ideas to possibly include on our own framework.

I really look forward to next year. I am sure we can double the attendance so we will need a bigger venue for sure. Oh, and let’s do it on a Sat. so we can watch football on Sun.

Help Me Pay My Loans is a little experiment by Derek Bender (no it is not my alter ego and yes that is really his last name). Bender, as we like to call him, is an excellent designer but to gain his skill level he has racked up a substantial amount of debt from student loans. He has put up a little sight to see just how much money he can generate through donations from the online community.

If you have some change to spare and feel like helping him out check it out

I was talking about Object Oriented Design with someone the other day and the topic of making an object’s member variable read only came up. This is normally a simple task, simply define the member variable as protected or private within the class definition. That essentially makes it inaccessible to any code outside of the class it is a member of. One would then typically define an access function that allows outside code to read the variable. Here is an example:

class readOnly
{
    private $readOnlyVar;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->readOnlyVar  = 'This is read only';
    }

    public function getReadOnlyVar()
    {
        return $this->readOnlyVar;
    }
}

$readOnly = new readOnly();
echo $readOnly->getReadOnlyVar();

$readOnly->readOnlyVar = 'Trying to change this';

Running that code would produce the following output:

This is read only
Fatal error: Cannot access private property readOnly::$readOnlyVar

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Donna Dowless came in and spoke to the NFi team on friday. Donna has lead an interesting and successful life in the entertainment industry. She has worked directly with The Beatles, James Brown, Prince and many other legendary people. She has served as the director of many top venues. She was also a Senior Vice President of Ticketmaster and helped build and grow it starting from working off of her kitchen table in the beginning. Donna Dowless has received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Entertainment Industry and she is the only woman ever to receive one.

Donna told us the story of her life and the various lessons she has learned along the way. The basic moral was to work hard and don’t reject change. When it is challenging just know that you will figure it out. I usually don’t go for motivational speaking but I particularly enjoyed Donna’s story because it was just that, a story. She just told us about her experiences and the various setbacks she had along the way and how she persevered. I enjoyed her story because it made me remember more about how far I have come instead of where I am not. Listening to the problems she faced made me remember similar problems I have faced and how I have figured it out.

Thank you Donna. I enjoyed meeting you and hope to see more of you in the future.

The Lehman Associates have released a study on the use and satisfaction of AMS systems among large associations in North America. iMis ranked at the top among the available solutions out there. iMis holds a 37 percent market share and ranked at the top in implementation experience and product satisfaction. The study was done using national and international associations in North America with budgets greater than $2 million. iMis rated higher than others in stability/reliability, cost and ease of implementation, time, upgrade path options and performance.

Personally, from a developer’s point of view, I think iMis has plenty of room for improvement but I am probably inserting opinions based on areas I view as more important being a developer (like structure, simplicity, etc.) and not on how it is actually used by an association. All in all, it actually provides a pretty strong back-end to a CMS for an association’s website. Since it contains all the data for an association’s events, members, products and finances, and it provides a decent COM API into that data we can setup websites to be administered directly from iMis for the most part. We are actually in the process of integrating the ACTE Website directly into their iMis system. Integrated features include, membership management and registrations as well as registration for events and conferences. Check out more that NFi can do with iMIS