February 2007 Archives

The Space Access Society is holding it's annual conference March 22-24, at the Best Western Grace Inn in Phoenix, Arizona. I've never been to this conference but it does pique my curiosity as it appeals to my entrepreneurial side. They've assembled a good group of initial speakers with more to come I'm sure.

The conference appeals to what was once billed as the alt.space community but these days small space startup companies are finding it just a little easier to enter the market and with some innovative ideas are also getting noticed by the "established community". And as NASA struggles to fund it's Constellation program I see more small startups contributing and making a difference.

After two years of using the Blackberry 8700 I decided last week to switch to the Blackberry Pearl. Of course I had a little incentive from my wireless provider Rogers. I was eligible for an upgrade, it seems you can now upgrade every year. Anyway with the instant rebate and special promo discount and confirmation of extending my plan I was only charged $75 for the upgrade. I bought the 8700 outright a few years back so I don't have to return it, so I suppose I'll sell it on eBay.

After 1 day of use with the Pearl I am impressed so far. It weighs half as much as the 8700 and has some added functionality such as a camera, mp3 and video player. But how does it perform compared to the 8700?

Just a note for those into search engine marketing and backlinks. It seems that all the search engines don't really give you an accurate count of how many backlinks you have. For instance if you go to Google and type in the following code "link:www.spaceref.com" this will tell you how many backlinks your site has. For SpaceRef is says 7,830. This seems low to me considering we've been around for seven years and we're popular.

However if you have a Google webmaster account you can get the real number of backlinks. Just click the Links tab. BTW this is a relative new tool available to webmasters. Anyway in clicking on the link what do I find? I find 873,354 backlinks to SpaceRef. Now that's more like it.

So can you teach an early forty something programmer new languages? The answer is simple. If you want to stay at the top of your game, competitive and innovate, you must.

I'm a self-taught programmer and over the years I've had to learn many different programming languages, some more fluently than others. These days my primary scripting languages are CSS, HTML, PHP, and JavaScript. I use XML for moving data between applications and for clients. On the command line Perl is still at the top of my list. For my web crawlers I use Java.

None of the above languages is out of date, however to stay at the top of ones game you have to adapt. Hence why I've decided to dig deep into Ajax, a mainstay of the new net buzz "Web 2.0" and Ruby, an up and coming language. Ruby is not new, at least not to Asia and Japan in particular where it originated, but it is relatively new in North America.

I just checked and it's been nearly five and months since I posted on this blog other than one recent post which I removed as it's not relevant to this blog. So starting today I'm going to try and make an effort to post more often and share my ideas and comment on some of my favourite topics. And as you can see I've updated the look of the blog, giving it a cleaner look.

So what's kept me so busy that I've no time to blog?

As some of you know I spend most of time working on projects for the two companies and one organization I founded. So here's a rundown of what I've been doing for each.