It seems that since I got hooked on Evernote (Do they put crack in there somewhere?!) I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to this blog...  Fear not, for I will be back-posting all of my missing "notes" as blog posts over the next few weeks...  Perhaps an Evernote -> Joomla plugin should be in the works?

Lately I've been:

• checking out 0MQ
• Heavily customizing VirtueMart, with things like product serialization, and lots of dynamic/complex automated order handling
• integrating PHP based systems with "legacy" operational .Net v2.0 systems with SOAP web services (hoping to replace with RESTful in the near future)
• coding up some sweet sweet CodeIgniter magic for a side project
• learning the "ins" and "outs" of Python (namely for Django) - stumbling my way through the Django CMS source to get a feel for the room
• researching hosting infrastructure: things like AppScale (Google App engine's open source alternative) for Django madness, 0MQ, Mule ESB, Couch DB, Cassandra (DataStax), ZFS on OpenIndiana, Joyent's SmartOS KVM hypervisor + ZFS support, Amazon's AWS vs Eucalyptus vs OpenStack, Mongrel2as a possible Apache/Nginx replacement, etc.)
  • all these things are extremely heated/interesting and it's only getting warmer...

RTFM'ing the Python docs...

http://docs.python.org/tutorial/modules.html

At work, we've opted to utilize Joomla and it's various (non-)commercial plugins to support our web presence; including VirtueMart for our e-commerce backend.  I'm almost done with some VirtueMart customizations, that will allow us to assign serial numbers to products sold in an automated fashion directly in the e-store site via web services.

I've spent a lot of time over the past 2 weeks implementing custom application integration with existing registration and sales systems, so it's great to see this thing taking shape.  We're almost all set to start testing in the middle of next week! 

It was neat seeing this project from the perspective of development versus testing today.  Some friends and I were joking about how much like a game this development and testing cycle is.  You code and then users test to tear it to pieces.  It's really close to games where you build up your castle (or your defenses) and wait for the horde to come and tear it all apart.  :)

We'll see how I do next week!

I'm getting ready to setup an OpenVPN server for my home network, so I've been checking out clients for all my remote devices.  I found a Mac client called tunnelblick.

It doesn't look as good as some of the commercial alternatives (namely Viscosity), but as long as it gets the job done!  :)

TunnelBlick: http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick/