AJ Tarachanowicz

Most of us have left GRPS within the last decade, still attending and/or have brothers and sisters attending GRPS. We know the inside of the school system better than anyone. Why? Because we are a product of it. Use your knowledge and MAKE a change. Today is the GRPS School Board Election. Get out and VOTE!

There is already an overwhelming turn out because our school systems need change.

Voter turnout higher than expected!

Candidate Info:

League of Women Voters Grand Rapids Voters - Candidate Guide

Candidates Discuss Issues Facing GRPS at Board of Education Forum

outside.in Grand Rapids Election News (The first couple articles)

Union role stirs Grand Rapids school board race

Polling Information:

Grand Rapids Election Information - ALL Polls will be open until 7PM, some will be open until 8PM

We’re building the school system for the children of tomorrow, TODAY! Spare 30 minutes of your life to change the life of thousands for a life time!

Best Regards,

AJ

For the past month I’ve been getting up early and jogging almost every morning. Well this morning was a bit different because it was thundering and lightening outside. I took this opportunity to use my gym membership which has been frozen since just after the winter thaw. I have no desire to work out inside when it’s so beautiful outside. I jumped in the car, drove down across the river, feed the parking meter, and walked inside. Only to find that my gym went out of business, thankfully it was only this location. When I purchased my membership I was wise enough to make sure they had other locations because I knew gyms have a tendency to go out of business without warning.

It looks like tomorrow I’ll be wandering across town to check out the other location which has been in business for as long as I can literally remember. As for today it looks like I’ll have to wait until the rain stops to go for my daily jog. Which doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon and when it does it’s projected to be about 85 degrees out. Not the greatest weather to jog in but I’ll survive.

It’s been a couple few weeks since I’ve been back from California and figured I better write a post about my adventures in San Francisco while they are still vivid in my mind. Let’s step back in time to the beginning of March. I arrived in San Fran on March 8th an hour or so after sunset. Originally I had planned on taking Amtrak up from Santa Clara but after discovring 511.org I decided to take the Lightrail to Mountain View. While in Mountain View I stopped for dinner at the Tied House (recommended by someone at EclipseCON) where I had the Brewers Burger and a pint of their New World Wheat. Both were amazing and I plan on returning next time I’m that neck of the woods. Oddly enough I ran into Ben Konrath from Red Hat who was also at EclipseCON. Figured once I left Santa Clara I wouldn’t see anyone I knew until I returned home, guess I was wrong.

After dinner I grabbed the next CalTrain up to San Francisco on which I met someone else playing their PSP. Sadly, I had left all my games back home because I accediently grabbed the wrong case on my rush to get out the door. I would of rocked to do some fragging on a train. Roughly an hour or so later I was in downtown San Francisco. I left the CalTrain station and jumped on the BART which dropped me off about 2 blocks from my hotel. Upon rising to the surface I encountered a colorful character who politely gave me directions and a free map. Man what more did I need to look like a tourist, wasn’t the winter coat, luggage and camera a big enough hint. Anyway, since this was his main source of income I kindly gave him a tip and went on my way.

I strolled down Market St and hung a right on Mason. Not paying enough attention to the direction I had recieved (He said on the right not take a right) I wandered up Mason a couple blocks. Knowing I had gone to far or the wrong way I asked the Bellhop at the Nikko Hotel. He pointed behind me at the building with the gigantic stop sign. As I walked away he asked, “Why don’t you bomb the hill on your board?” I replyed, “The luggage wheels couldn’t handle it.” Headed back down Mason I found my hotel. The outside didn’t do this place justic at all. Upon entry it all was redemed, the walls & ceiling were lined with beautiful woodwork and a floating waterfall on the wall. I checked in and went upstairs to my room. Which was your average room aside from the 42″ (my guess) HD TV. Nice little touch aside from the fact I don’t normally watch TV.

After unpacking I went downstairs and got the key for the Business Center. I spent a few minutes checking email and double checked my flight details. Next I headed upstairs to do some running in the cardio room. I put a half hour run on the books. While in Cali I’ve ran pretty much every day. I headed back down to my room where I watched some TV (how could I not it was sitting there taungthing me) and crashed out early. I wanted to get a start on things ASAP.

Today marks the end of EclispeCON and man was it a blast. With over 1,300 people in attendance and a alcohol tab of just under $3,000 how could it not be. I meet a good handful of people and learn a lot as well. I’m looking forward to next years EclispeCON. I figured while I was on this side of the country I might as well do the tourist thing and head up to San Fran. While I’m here I plan to visit Alcatraz, Fishermans Wharf, Chinatown, Golden Gate Bridge, The Bay Bridge and what ever else I can find. I’ll probably visit some museums and what not as well. There is a wine tour that goes up to Napa Valley that I might end up taking. It’s 9 hours long so the only prerequisite is that you have to be hard core wine consiour. Might be a bit out of my league tho. Who am I kidding, it sounds like a blast. I’ll let you know if I end up going or not. If anyone knows of anything else I should do while I’m out here please leave a comment.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit in on the “PHP Development Tools (PDT)” talk here at EclipseCON. I haven’t used PDT since it’s inital release last year so it was great to see what they’ve been doing. Yossi Leon the Project Leader provided an overview of the PHP perspective and the various views. Then he went on to demonstrate the debugger which currently only supports Zend’s close sourced debugger protocol. However he did mention that there is a patch for Xdebug support if you’re feeling brave and want to compile PDT. For the most part PHPEclipse provides all the features that PDT does but there are a good handful of features not in PDT that PHPEclipse currently supplies. However, there were a couple neat features that I’d like to see make their way into PHPEclipse. Personally, I attened this talk because I’ve had one question on my mind since Zend proposed a PHP plugin for Eclipse. That question being, “Will Zend be releasing a commerical version of PDT?” Come to find out PDT is NOT a plugin itself but a framework which a plugin can be build upon. After learning this I had to reword my question to, “Will Zend be releaseing a commercial IDE based on PDT?” Which of course the answer to is yes. I was unable to find out when but Yossi did say it should be surfacing soon.

Now knowing this raises another question, “Should PHPEclipse switch to PDT as it’s underlying framework or do we continuing developing the current framework.” This is a question that only can be answered by the PHPEclipse developers and community. I personally wouldn’t have an issue with the switch because Yossi informed me that they will be creating a generic debugger interface to support multiple debuggers. This is something that the PHPEclipse developers have been discussing for quite some time since we have support for both DBG and Xdebug. The only concern left is what influence will Zend have upon PDT because of their interest in developing a commercial IDE upon it. Having a 100% open source project such as PHPEclipse involved in the development of PDT might be a good idea. What do you think should PHPEclipse switch to PDT?

Scott Adams was the Keynote Speaker to kick off EclipseCON. He started off with a story on how he became an cartoonist and the evolution of Dilbert. Then went into how to be successful and briefly talked about his past. Afterwards he showed some comics and shared a story behind each of the comics on why they didn’t quite make the cut. It was an amusing morning that started off with a ton of laughs.

Next I attended a talk on the AJAX Toolkit Framework. I’ve been meaning to check this out for quite some time but never got around to it because the Firebug plugin for Firefox did everything I needed, or so I thought. I have now come to the conclusion that I was wrong and since have installed ATF. It has all the benefites of Firebug plus so much more. If you’ve never had a chance to check out AFT I strongly encourage you to do so. It just so happens that as I finished writing this paragraph a gentleman came over to the table and set down a handful of CDs from Backbase titled “AJAX Starter Kit.” Quite ironic if you ask me. Looks like I have yet another AJAX pluging for Eclipse to give whirl.

After the AFT talk, I attended “Task-focused programming with Mylar” presented by the Project Maintainer Mik Kersten. I’ve been using Mylar for roughly the last 6 months and it has completely changed the way I work. I have never been so orginized or more productive. Mylar allows you to build a context related to the current task (bug, feature enhancement, etc) at hand and forget about everything else. Thus making it so that when you switch between tasks all the files that are related to that task are reopened, bringing you back to exactly where you left off. No more trying to remember what files, classes, or methods are related to the specific task, Mylar handles it all for you. Tasks are imported from your bug tracking software (Bugzilla, Trac, and a few others) or you can add personal task locally. Task context can also be shared between developers which is an incredible feature. You can also see incoming and outgoing changes to tasks from within Eclipse. Since ATF provides a Mozilla implementation I no longer have a reason to have Firefox open. Now that I can update tickets in Trac and view what I’m working on from within Eclipse. Mik provide a detailed look at what can be done with Mylar and what to expect in the upcoming 2.0 release. He also annouce a new partnership with Tasktop which extends Mylar bringing it’s functionality to desktop applications such as your email client, web browser, word processor and web services. Which will allow you to add context outside of Eclispe related to a task. This plugin is a must have for every programmer.

This talk was followed up with a long awaited lunch which. After I attended a talk on the Data Tools Platform Project (DTP) which was very interesting and I learned a good deal on the internal workings of the plugin. Including how to create my own dialect for a RDBMS. I wish I could of stayed for the entire talk but my presence was required at the Open Source Pavilion causing me to have to leave about a half hour early.

In the Open Source Pavilion I had the opportunity to demo PHPEclipse for roughly 6 hours. No sooner did I sit down and setup the laptop did someone show up for a demo. Just as I was in the final moments of my first demo John Ward (presented the tutorial I attended on Monday) stopped by. I was expecting him because on Monday I had mentioned to him that I would be doing demos of PHPEclipse on Tuesday. It just so happened that he was working on a PHP project and was looking for a PHP plugin with a functional debugger. All the ones he tried including PHPEclipse he couldn’t get the debugger to work properly. Being the debugger guru that I am from the past couple of years spent on IRC helping people setup PHPEclipses’ debugger. I had him well upon his way to debugging bliss after about a half hour, he couldn’t of been happier. I continued to demo PHPEclispe to several more people and finally the person I had been waiting for showed up. I knew eventually someone of the Zend would stop by and that someone did.

He admitted right off the bat that he had never looked at PHPEclipse and told me he was one of the QA people for PHP Development Tools (PDT). After which he asked if I’d be kind enough to give him a tour which I delightfully accepted. I started off with an overview of the workspace layout which he complimented on how intuitive it was. Next, I explained how the code completion and syntax highlight worked and finally I did an in depth demo of the debugger. The only thing he had to say as he left was PHPEclipse was very impressive. So far this has been the highlight of the conference for me. It’s always nice to demo a product for a competitor and them being blown away. Now I have no choice to return the favor, as I finish writing this I am on my way to the PDT talk.

Monday I had the pleasure of participating in the “Building Reports with BIRT” tutorial. I throughly enjoyed this tutorial, I learned a more than I could expected. It started off with an introduction how to build a basic report next followed by an introduction to charting. After which libraries were covered and finally templates. All in all it was a great experience. Many thanks to John Ward (Innovent Solutions) and Krishna Venkatraman (Actuate Corporation) for putting together such a great tutorials.

I am honered to be representing PHPEclipse at this years EclipseCON in Santa Clara, CA. Philippe Ombredame and I will be in the Exibit Hall from 2:15pm to 8pm on Tuesday, March 6th 2007. There will be a demo of PHPEclipse and we’ll be available to answer any questions you might have. If you’ve never had a chance to see PHPEclipse in action here’s your chance and if you have, stop by and introduce yourself. It’s always great to others from within the community.  I’ll see ya there.

Being your own boss isn’t always the easiest thing in the world. I know I personally don’t have time to figure out all the various ways to save time, money, energy and most importantly my sanity. That is why I’m always on the look out for sites that do that for me. One of these sites just happened to find it’s way into my RSS subscription list last Febuary. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what article first brought me to Web Worker Daily but I do remember that I got lost for about an hour reading post after post. This is where I also discovered Vitalist which is my new best friend. Hope you find it as useful as I have.