Mike Brittain » Friends

Ladies and Gentlemen… John Goulah

Mike Brittain — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:31:17 +0000

John Goulah is a good friend of mine from Heavy where we worked together a couple years ago. John is one of the best developers I’ve worked with, and we always clicked as friends. He is an expert with LAMP environments, where the “P” stands for either Perl or PHP.

John kicked off his own blog this weekend which I wanted to promote. His first post is a good one on branching techniques using SVK or Git. Give it a read.

AJAX Photo Gallery using the SAJAX toolkit

Mike Brittain — Tue, 30 May 2006 20:12:56 +0000

Sean’s recent article about using SAJAX was published at IBM today. He constructs a simple photo viewer application using an XML file for meta data about each photo. PHP and the SAJAX (Simple AJAX) toolkit are used to present the images.

In my follow up article, part 2 in the series, I describe how you can use client-side JavaScript to implement a history cache for the application that mimics the history utility in web browser software. Many AJAX applications suffer from the lack of “undo” functionality, or history navigation, that normal web browsing employs. That’s what I will be addressing. However, the solution will not involve hijacking the back button as other developers have demonstrated. Instead, it shows how to track a history of events using JavaScript within a single browsing session.

Refresh NYC

Mike Brittain — Wed, 03 May 2006 23:18:48 +0000

Last week, I got together with a few co-workers (Sean, Wil, and Tim) for the inaugural meeting of Refresh NYC. As part of the Refreshing Cities movement (for lack of a better term), we’re simply trying to get some people in the web design and development industry here to get together to socialize, network, and talk a little shop.

We met up in Brooklyn for the first meeting, and immediately started discussing how we should not do that next time. Obviously, people who work in the metro area converge from CT, NJ, and NY. Holding a meeting in Brooklyn might put out those from Jersey who are going to have to schlep back across two rivers.

We also made a nearly unanimous decision that meeting any more frequently than once every three weeks will cut into everyone’s personal lives, so the next event will probably be sometime between May 15th and May 25th.

Finally, we’ll plan to give a little more heads up in the future.

We hope to get a few more people involved. If you’ve got thoughts or ideas, please post them at Refresh NYC.

360-to-Disaster

Mike Brittain — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 17:03:37 +0000

Last weekend I took my favorite jetBlue flight from New York to Denver over the weekend. I got two days of skiing in at Copper Mountain and Vail. One of the guys along with me was Josh, who displayed some incredible balls in trying to throw a 360 from a small lip that we found in the trees.

Oktoberfest Videos from Breckenridge

Mike Brittain — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 16:56:41 +0000

When I lived in Summit County, I attended the annual Oktoberfest party in Breckenridge. It’s a time honored tradition of German heritage, oompah music, and drinking large quantities of beer from mugs the size of your head.

Two years ago, there was one of those inflatable games where two people get strapped to large bungee cords and race down a track. Technically, I think it was there for the kids, but two of my buddies got into it after having a few rounds, and… well, the results were really enjoyable. Two of the races are linked below:

Chris is racing on the left, and Will is on the right.