Time is Money
I have noticed that life is a series of phases, in each of which you think you have no time to spare and it is only in a latter phase that you realize how much free time you had to squander. I suspect this trend will reverse, but alas, such is not yet the case.
So for starters, my estimate regarding the time I had to spend on becoming fabulously wealthy online was greatly exaggerated. Family holiday season starts early November, so more quality time spent with the family means less geeking; work at my current client site is getting busy as the mad rush to hit end of year deadlines looms; and plus (a shout out to any Junie B. Jones readers out there) future growth of the small consulting company I work for is looking good, so I have been focusing time and energy on that.
I have found a wee bit of time to make progress on my top secret web application, which I hope to launch by end of November. I also rebuilt my laptop. You remember cleaning your dorm room because it was critical that it be spotless before you could study for the big exam? That’s me rebuilding my laptop. 
Seriously, it was running slow.
To refresh my development environment round up:
- I am sticking with Komodo for my IDE and it is working our splendidly.
- I have toyed with System Architect, a UML modeling tool (read about my obsession with UML here) several times in the past and a colleague is quite happy with it as well. It seems to be a fantastic price point for such a tool. Anyway, I bit the bullet and have been using it for data model design initially. I also checked out DatabaseSpy, due to my great experiences with Altova’s XML tools in the past, but ran into a few hiccups and stuck, for now, with System Architect’s Data Modeling and DDL generation capabilities.
- I have gone with CakePHP “stable” release as my web application framework. I reminded myself through my own tomfoolery how it always seems easy enough to roll your own but as the pages mount, the value of “someone else figured it out already” kicks in. So far it seems pretty useful, but the limited documentation makes for a steep learning curve.
- Ant. Ant. Ant. Ant. I had forgotten how much I like automated build and deploy in general and this tool specifically. I downloaded the MySQL drivers, as well as the Apache commons FTP classes and “poof” - in less than an hour I have automated file deployment and database builds to my hosted DEV environment from my local development configuration. I added this as a “command” in Komodo and every time I click I save more time!!!
- Screwed around with configuring Apache and MySQL, swore a bit, then found this - AppServ. One click later I was coding my web site!!!!
Anyway, I have made some progress on the application - I can now register, handle an activation email, logon/off, get a password reminder, edit my account profile, and change my password. I also probably spent too much time tweaking CSS, but I read Bulletproof Web Design and was a bit obsessed.
Anyway, I just spent my 12 minutes for today - so, over and out.
