My blog has grown a little stale, but I now have something exciting to post! During the past couple of months, I’ve been working on building a Mac OS X version of the DigitalMe identity selector. This has been an interesting experience because I’ve learned a lot about CMake, Objective-C, Cocoa, Xcode, Interface Builder, Universal Binaries, and Mac application packaging. I have to admit that I was a little hesitant to dive into the world of Mac GUI programming, mostly because I felt that learning another language (Objective-C) was overkill to facilitate bringing a Mac UI to DigitalMe. However, it turns out that Objective-C is really interesting, very easy to learn, and makes UI development a breeze.

Although it is still very much a “work-in-progress,” I’d would encourage anyone interested in using information cards on the Mac to install DigitalMe and the Firefox plug-in. Feedback and suggestions for enhancements are always welcome.

I finally broke down and decided to start a weblog.  I have these scraps of paper and post-it notes all over my office with info on cool sites and stuff that I have stumbled across on the web.  I think that this weblog will be a good place to post and organize all of this miscellaneous information.

But first, let me introduce myself.  I'm a software engineer and have worked for Novell for the past 11 years.  For most of that time I have focused my efforts on the FLAIM database technology.  My brother-in-law once asked me, "Gee!  You've worked on FLAIM for a long time.  Isn't it done yet?"  That's the most amazing part of working on a fundamental technology like FLAIM … there are always new platforms, technologies, optimization techniques, query languages, programming languages, and so forth that need to be supported.  FLAIM continues to provide new challenges and opportunities.  Now that FLAIM has been released as an open-source component of the Novell-sponsored Bandit project (www.bandit-project.org) I expect the technology to continue to evolve with the participation of new developers in the open-source community.