I’ve got a basement finishing project going on which is really important as it gets my temporary office moved back downstairs so that we can have a proper nursery upstairs near our bedroom. In case you haven’t been watching my tweets, my unborn son is in an awful hurry to arrive, so—yikes!.

Anyway, one of the rooms in the basement is to be a media room. While I doubt I’ll have some nice equipment to put into it anytime soon, what with a new baby coming along, I do want to make sure I’ve got the wiring ready before the drywall goes up.

Here’s a rough sketch made with Google SketchUp (which rocks btw):

The plan is to have four satellite speakers (two of which are visible in this picture) in the corners, and then the rest of a 5.1 system located in typical spots around the TV.

I looked locally for the wall jack parts for the speakers but the only places which I found quickly (Lowe’s and Best Buy), really wanted to rip me off and didn’t have that great a selection. Not a big surprise. I asked on Twitter where else to go and I got a couple of great suggestions.  I ended up buying the parts from monoprice.com.

I’ll probably be running the wires and installing wiring boxes tomorrow or this weekend. The finishing parts should arrive mid-week.  I should probably be taking some pictures. 

Everybody put your hands together for JabberMaps! Before you say, “hey hasn’t this already been done?” let me answer.

No, it hasn’t. This is for servers, not jabber users! Created by CarlB of Jabberzilla fame, we have a new system for finding the fastest and most reliable Jabber server for YOU.

When choosing a Jabber server, what are the criteria?

• Location, for latency issues
• Uptime, for reliability issues

JabberMaps, by taking advantage of Google Maps (duh, isn’t everyone?), can help you pinpoint precisely where that server is located. Plus it obtains uptime data from the Public Jabbernet database so you don’t pick a dud.

Go there: JabberMaps

Carl has now gotten this app to a stable point and it works well. Now he needs your help. Please try it out. Tweak all of the buttons, take it for a drive. Then use the feedback link and please let him know what you think.

I myself have one comment so far. I’d like to see features, like we have on the location-challenged jabber.org server list. Other than that its just great.

In case you are curious for some more background, my part in this is that jabbermaps is hosted on my server. So don’t slashdot it please. Well, I don’t think we’ve had one before so it would be educational anyways. :/

Also, there has been some new developments since stpeter announced the XMPP Federation, which aims to be a definitive network resource for XMPP. I don’t actually know this, but I suspect it will replace the server list on jabber.org. Peter is also collectiong geolocation data, so there might be some sort of interaction between this database and JabberMaps in the future. We have discussed moving it to his server as well to keep the branding that our communiity would benefit from.

Anyway, please do check it out and and report back.

I’ve created a new page called “ideas” as you see on the top-right of the navbar on my site. What I’ve decided to to is to take any ideas that I have had and instead of just blogging about them, I will put up a static page so that they don’t disappear after some time goes by. That might prompt me to do further work on the ideas in the future, or at least remind me to write down my ideas so that somebody can benefit from them.

I came up with a new (non-jabber) idea today called Projective. You can read the page for the details, but the gist of it is to use the Flyspray bug tracking system as the database for a larger goal of managing a complex software development project.

I’ll move my other ideas (the jabber ones) over to static pages here shortly.

My wife’s company Brindy’s Giftables is starting to really ramp up. One of my first real projects as a web designer was to create a shopping cart system for her business. It proved to be very challenging, but very rewarding as well.

The company makes tags and titles and such for scrapbooking pages & photo albums. While I don’t actually get into scrapbooking, what she does is very cool and I respect the skill it takes. But I can get interested in the making of their website.

As I said, this was my first effort. I think it turned out well, even if I didn’t really do anything creative. Mechanically, it works well. After some hours of research, I settled on a popular open-source e-commerce package called osCommerce. Basically my search criteria were:

• Uses PHP as the scripting language
• Uses mySQL as the backend database
• Is easy enough for non-techies to maintain day-to-day
• Is attractive
• Has an active development community

So, osCommerce met all of these requirements very well. I don’t think that it will validate xhtml, but that was not important to me at the time. The site has stood up to the test of time, and that’s what counts.

I may post more here about their site here in the future if I end up doing cool new web thingies for you to look at.