A Fine Run, and Maybe A Little More

Posted by Kenny Katzgrau

November 23, 2009

It’s been almost a year since I mentioned the last version of wpSearch!

I owe many faithful users of wpSearch an explanation of my whereabouts. After all, the internet does not need yet another dead blog, especially when it had been fairly well read. Here’s a recap of the last year:

Figured out that I wasn’t going to figure out the wpSearch index corruption issue some users were having. I could duplicate it, but I couldn’t get to the root of it. Then Fall 2008 final exams took the rest of my time. I tend to be an extremely focused student.
I continued working at LTech, which was sold by GetTheJob to Matlen-Silver, a company in Bridgewater NJ, where our office was subsequently moved. Company focus shifted from consulting to developing products for the Google cloud.
I became infatuated with CodeIgniter, an MVC framework for PHP. I had used CakePHP and Zend with limited success, but CodeIgniter was light, fast, and had great documentation. It also lets me do things the way I want to (the forceful “best practice” nature of frameworks like Cake and Ruby on Rails can sometimes make things very difficult).
I was offered a job, and almost moved to San Diego to work at BAE Systems as a Software Engineer. Then “nature’s changing course” (thanks, Shakespeare) got in the way. It would have been great to work with the people I met there, and I was really excited. But in the short time I was at their facility, they taught me how important tested, reusable design patterns were to their business. Then I decided to buy the famous Design Patterns book by the “Gang of Four”.
I graduated from NJIT with a BS in Computer Science and a minor in Applied Math. Class rank? 12/858! Ye-uh! I’m not a bragger, but it’s a good feeling for a former apathetic high-schooler.
Amidst the excitement, I lost a close family member in April. You are still very missed, my friend. Btw, if you can read the innerwebs, this is awesome.
I left LTech (I was sad to go, but I had a mission) to work full time on my first entrepreneurial project, Teaches.it. Teaches.it is a service that helps teachers build websites via our own uber-easy-to-use content management system. I spent the majority of the summer working on, and launching that system. Teaches.it now has a small, but growing group of happy customers.
I went on a month-long road trip stopping at Wilmington NC, Savannah GA, Pensacola FL, Baton Rouge LA, Houston TX, Van Horn TX, Carlsbad NM, Scottsdale AZ, Grand Canyon AZ, Las Vegas NV, San Diego CA, Los Angeles CA, San Fransisco CA, Elko NV, Salt Lake City UT, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, and Kutztown, PA. Lessons learned during the trip? The best Mexi-Cali food is not in Cali. It’s at 10th Ave Burrito in Belmar, NJ. Yeah, I said it.

I have been receiving quite a volume of support requests for wpSearch. I try and do my best to get to all of them, but I am aware that some slip through the cracks. This usually occurs when I read the email on my iTouch, and decide I want to reply at a full-sized keyboard. Sometimes, I get caught up in something else and forget.

KLogger has been receiving more than its fair share of users. After all, it is only a small logging class. Then again, I wrote it because I needed something like it and I couldn’t find it elsewhere. I’m glad it is being put to good use. Here’s a shout out to the University of Iowa, where it is currently being used in an internal project.

So what’s ahead? The first task is to see if the newest version of Zend Lucene is any better than the last. The next step is to start using it in wpSearch.

I also want to keep doing what I was supposed to do on CodeFury — document fixes to problems I have come across while coding. One of my recent trials is figuring out how to use swfUploader with CodeIgniter’s upload class when an authenticated session is required to upload.

Anyway, the next post shouldn’t be too far behind. Thanks to everyone for the comments and support of the projects!

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