Update

It’s been a long month and a half or so. A bunch of new projects at work (and interviewing for a full-time position) and lots of school stuff, all on top of having my truck stolen, dealing with insurance and the police, and then recovering it, and dealing with insurance again. It’s a long long story, which I posted as a Note on facebook.

PHP EMS Tools is due for a major revision, and hopefully this will include, among other things, the following new features:

1. Support for i18n.
2. Install-time choice of using MySQL or LDAP as a roster and authentication storage system.
3. Some vastly more efficient changes to the database schema, specifically dealing with scheduling.

I’m still working on some other big projects, namely the migration of this blog to WordPress, the migration of JasonAntman.com to some real CMS (Joomla, Drupal, etc.), and migration of my home internet connection from residential FiOS to “business-grade” Optimum Online (cable) - which will probably see a slight decrease in reliability from the amazing levels of FiOS, but will give me five static IPs and no ports blocked.

On the other hand, there’s been a wrench thrown into all of my plans for big projects (not even mentioning the projects that have been cast aside - TuxTruck, tuxOstat which is now down, and a bunch of others. That wrench is the T-Mobile G1, the GooglePhone finally come to fruition. I was psyched about Android when I first heard about it, and the idea of finally having a phone that I can develop for without learning a new language sounds amazing. I’ll admit that at $180 with a 2-year contract, plus $80/month for service (split about 50/50 between the voice plan and the unlimited data plan) it doesn’t make the best financial sense for someone whose car was stolen and now has 2 vehicles - only one of which I can afford - but I’m really excited. I’ve heard some not-so-good things about the quality of the GPS, and some of the apps currently available, but within a few months, I’d assume that the effects of open development will cause it to greatly surpass the functionality of my current Treo 700p, running my beloved Palm OS (which I’ve been dedicated to for the better part of seven years).

While the all-around flexibility of Android and its’ apps is definitely one of the biggest selling points, my own interest is mainly in the ability to quickly develop Java apps that bring my already-existing web-based forms and data to the desktop of my phone. It’s the simplicity that is my biggest interest - even for simple purposes, like converting the web-based fuel log I keep for my car(s) to a dedicated Java-based form on my phone.

Stay tuned…