@rmanalan

So, Cindy and I celebrated our first year of marriage this weekend... woo-hoo! On Saturday night, we decided to go to Farallon -- an interesting seafood restaurant in San Francisco known for it's cool ambiance. Anyway, luckily, we were seated in probably the best table in the house (a small intimate booth upstairs). However, directly in front of us was a table with five very loud people... two couples and a daughter who was just so into herself. The tables weren't that close to each other, but we literally spent most of the dinner listening to these people. One of the ladies at the loud table had her legs crossed (indian style). Now, I'm not a big fan of Miss Manners or Emily Post but I do object to poor etiquete at a decently nice restaurant. Anyway, the food was ok... my dish (Atlantic cod) was so-so (a little on the bland side). Cindy liked her bass.

Since I've installed MoveableType, I've been impressed with its flexibility to be more than just a simple little blog tool. In many cases, MT can be extended to manage a complete website not just a weblog. For those who haven't figured out how to do this... you're in luck. Finally, someone has written a guide on how to extend MT beyond the blog. Matt Haughey, creator of MetaFilter, just published an article entitled "Beyond the Blog". This article delves into what it takes to build an entire non-blog website with MT. A very good read for MTers.

Right now (7:20PM PST), I'm sitting in my backyard enjoying a beer with my wife and dog nearby. The grill is fired up with some veggies cooking and a halibut fillet waiting on deck. The suckiest part about this is after I post this, I have to finish up my work... luckily I can do it from the convenience of my backyard supported by my wireless connection to work. I guess it doesn't suck that much. Update: might need a Centrino based laptop someday... battery life on my current Tecra sucks.

At O'Reilly's Open Source Convention last week, looks like there was a session on "Integrating SAP R/3 and Open Source Software and Open Protocols". This is an interesting look at how developers using open source languages (Perl, Python, Ruby) have integrated with SAP R/3. One of the speakers, Piers Harding, has contributed several SAP Perl modules to CPAN. I wonder if there are a lot of PeopleSoft customers that develop with open source languages. If so, it would a good project to create some Perl or PEAR modules that access PeopleSoft's Component Interfaces. Although, PeopleSoft does have native SOAP support... so creating a module to talk to a Component Interface is probably overkill.

This is a great use of blogging tools. I'm a big fan of Epicurious , but it's nice to have options from other sources.

[via Yahoo! Daily Wire] With the rise of blogging, the popularity of group weblogs has increased exponentially. [The Red Kithen] A place where members can contribute and comment, the group blog offers a diverse set of viewpoints and discussions. This yummy example mixes some intrepid cooks and a heaping helping of recipes. The resulting concoction is prepared to perfection.

Well... almost. Looks like I had some bad sectors which took the site down for a day. Why did I see this coming (and not do anything about it)? Time to pause and reflect on Murphy's Laws on Information Technology.

Law of Inconvenient Malfunction: A device will fail at the least opportune possible moment
Law of Bad Sectors: The probability that an untested disk will have bad sectors is directly proportional to the importance of the data written onto the diskette.

Now, I've got a choice to make... to fix or not to fix?

We're off to Homewood, California (Lake Tahoe's west shore, 15 minutes south of Tahoe City) for a week long R&R. Should be nice weather, although there is a possibility of "isolated" thunderstorms on Monday... hmmm. Hopefully, it doesn't happen while we're trying to find this geocache. Anyway, I probably won't be blogging at all for a week... try not to miss me too much. I'm hoping my server doesn't die from the extreme heat we've been having... I haven't backed anything up yet -- add that to the todo. Have a great week and a great 4th of July!

This is more of a note to self... this website (A List Apart) is a great design resource for web designers. This is one of Jeffrey Zeldman's creations. For those of you who don't know Jeffrey Zeldman, you can read his bio here. In a nutshell, he's a well known, respected, and successful web designer. He recently wrote a book called Designing With Web Standards which I have yet to read. Anyway, the latest issue on A List Apart is on Unlocking Hidden Navigation Access Keys. It's a good article on how to build a website for people with limited mobility -- just plain good sense for any website.

Mena Trott's (co-founder/creator of Moveable Type) post on Six Log today points to a movement to come up with a new syndication format that hopes to overcome the shortcomings of RSS. RSS has a long and somewhat embarrassing history (Mark Pilgrim has been writing about RSS quite a bit for a while now... lots of good posts at his website).

Simon's got me thinking a lot about caching schemes lately. PeopleSoft's applications has multiple levels of caching built in... a necessary thing for any enterprise application. It's got file and memory based application/business component metadata level caching on the appserver, portal data (registry tree and content) memory based cache on the webserver (for different users and roles), and also browser level cache directives (expire http headers). All in all, a pretty complex scheme. On top of that, http compression can be applied to pages and/or it's related assets (javascript, css, etc.)