savan thongvanh

UrbanDictionary.com has a 10 year attachment to their logo and they have been around for a long time. But, this dog has a new trick, or at least a new meme. It seems that one of the latest memes, one started on facebook is searching for your name on UrbanDictionary.com.

So what/s the big deal?

If you're a java person this list is a biggie. Ever wondered why some things happen in Java and where it's going? Maybe you get some insight by getting into the heads of Sun staff by following them in twitter.

Here's a directory of all the Sun twitter users!
http://tinyurl.com/d6y7cx

Enjoy!

As a semi professional photographer I'm a huge fan of DIY photography and it's crafty cleverness. I've done my best to replicate things like all the cool stuff you see David Hobby do and talk about on strobist.com and other sites like it. DIY snoots, ringlights, softboxes, tabletop setups, and of course wireless setups.

Nothing I've seen yet, however, matches the magnitude of this hack, and that's a compliment.

One thing great about consulting is that you frequently get to work with different technologies and, as with many other things, you pick up great nuggets along the way.

Often I forget these nuggets. Enter this blog post.

I came across a couple of great articles that reminded me of something about portlets. In general if you're starting to work with Portlet and Springframework I'd recommend reading both of these articles for a quick and dirty. The examples couldn't be simpler and the sample code is good so download it!

Enjoy,

Well, I learned yesterday that you can do translation in drupal with the locale module but the posts don't show up correctly unless you have the internationalization module.

Without the internationalization module every blog entry I made was posted once for each language in which it was translated. When I enabled the content translation in the internationalization module everything was kosher.

One thing I wanted that I didn't see was for the language to be automatically detected when the someone used the url es.savanthongvanh.com. I'm still working on that.

Sounds pretty good eh?

In two weeks I'll be starting a new adventure. I'll be hopping over from my position as system architect for Nationwide Insurance and returning to my good ol' consulting firm QCI.

Yep, that's right. I'm leaving a high profile position at one of the country's top insurance companies to get back into consulting. Why? See this, then read on.

@tonybibbs (blog) recently tweeted asking what are three common problems in IT jobs that suck? From the perspective of an architect from a top Fortune company, here's my list:

• working on huge platforms in stagnant technology (does that count as two?)
• getting stuck on projects for a long time that you don't like or grow tired of
• dealing with the demeanor of "lifers"

First steps to ramping up on Drupal.

1. Set up a site.
2. Add all relevant blogs to Bloglines
3. Listen to back podcasts & blog entries from Lullabot and Dries
4. Start contributing to a module

I'm trying to decide now which module to contribute to. I think it's going to be an easy one, possibly fixing the compatibility issue w/ the Blogroll module.

It should be a fun adventure!

Here's a quick snippet for detecting the major mobile cilents:

<?php
$isIphone=strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPhone');
$isRIM=strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'BlackBerry');
$isCE=strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'Windows CE');

$isNotIphone=(false==$isIphone);
$isNotRIM=(false==$isRIM);
$isNotCE=(false==$isCE);

$isFullBrowser = ($isNotIphone && $isNotRIM && $isNotCE);
?>

So today I stood up another Drupal site. It's been a while since I'd done so. Everything was still pretty straight forward but I do want to note one thing.

I ignorantly disabled the login block. Ignorantly, not unknowingly or unwittingly, intentionally disabled it because I'm the only on that's going to be updating the site. The idea was to discourage people to attempt to sign up for a Drupal account. Great idea, I'll just disable the login block. Done!