Another round of security updates were sucessfull as of February 8th, 2010.  All hosted sites are up to date.

We recently had the opportunity to contribute a Wordpress theme to Sandy's Ankeny thanks to Slash Web Studios.  Sandy's Ankeny is a new blog maintained by, well, Sandy, who has previously worked at the Register and the Ankeny Press Citizen.  Congratulations to Sandy on the new project!

I recently installed Windows 7 via VirtualBox for some cross browser testing.  While in development I needed to map localhost from the Windows 7 Guest OS to my Apache server in Ubuntu.  Some quick searching around turned up the following ip address.  All I had to do was update the current localhost line in my Windows 7 hosts file.

10.0.2.2    localhost

I've found the cleanest way to upgrade Ubuntu is to do a fresh install.  Here is a list of steps that I take to upgrade.

I have a friend who recently informed me of their venture into the world of Linux.  I started to build up a good set of links and thought I would share.  Here you go.
 
The Ubuntu Guide - A Wiki for common setup and configuration tasks in Ubuntu.
 
Ubuntu Tweak - Simplifies some Ubuntu configuration tasks as well as application and driver installation.
 

1. Install tomcat6 via synaptic.

sudo apt-get tomcat6 tomcat6-admin

There may be some tweaks that you need to do after install.  I didn't need to change anything, but you can find help from the ubuntu help page for tomcat.

My development environment varies based on the project that I'm working with.  For my latest project I'm creating a Flex media player and though I started using Gedit, I've moved to Eclipse + Flex Builder so as to take advantage of Flex's Builders code completion feature.  Other features that I needed for this project were support for FTP, Bazaar, PHP, and JQuery.  Here are the steps I took to build the IDE for this project. 

Whenever I start to get overwhelmed with development tasks it is best for me to make a list so that I can see what needs done.  From there I can prioritize and execute.  On my current project I've been using Tasque for simple development task management.  I've found it helpful to prefix my tasks with the language it pertains to.  Tasque sorts tasks alphabetically so it naturally groups tasks of the same sort.  Happy developing!

Balanced Scale Media is proud to announce the the integration of Piwik Web Analytic software as a free feature to existing and future clients.  Existing clients will recieve login information as soon as there is a sufficient amount of data to work with.  Enjoy! 

The newly redesigned Loftus Heating and AC website is now up and running.  This site was redone from the ground up from their initial static html site.  They now have a database driven website complete with the integration of the Lennox Product API!  It is my hope that they and their customers find it to be an improvement.