MATTly

Yeah, I know, I’m bad about updates and I only have the same damn excuse. Well, I can tell you that I have spent some evenings of the past week updating this site. Can you tell? It’s a LOT faster, which was the primary goal of the upgrade, and it received a new skin. I’ve [...]

I’ve recently been tasked with developing a new application for our sales executives. It will be a project estimating tool, and it will replace the Excel spreadsheet they currently use. Actually, the concept of this application, named Moxie, has evolved to become a central web portal for all employees where they will find all sorts [...]

Today, we bought a new grill! I’ve owned a gas grill since my birthday in 2007 (see the story here) and since that time, I’ve learned a lot about cooking outside. Well, maybe not a lot, but enough to get a good dinner without disappointment anyway. And while I was very happy to have it, [...]

I recently had to write an application which requires authentication, so naturally I decided to use our existing Active Directory infrastructure. Also, the application has it’s own users table, so I had to be careful that database operations were performed for the correct user (since usernames can be changed in Active Directory).

I decided to use the

attribute, but unfortunately, it’s not a string. So, the example below shows how to convert it to a string, as well as insert the hyphens in the appropriate places.

This is a function I found in an article by Douglas Lovell at LinuxJournal.com which will take an email address and return true or false on whether it’s valid. I was in search of a good regex, but ultimately decided that a one-liner would just be too messy. Douglas explains (very well) why the function [...]

Since October, I’ve been working hard on a new project sponsored by my employer, Ener-Tel. It’s called freeWAVE™, and it’s a free Wi-Fi service that we are deploying all over town.

This Objective-C class for iOS will help you get a better handle on when to show and hide the NetworkActivityIndicator. In a threaded environment, you could have multiple operations, each showing and hiding the network activity indicator. This could result in showing or hiding when you don’t want it. This simple class will let you [...]

After a month of development, the freeWAVE™ Locator app is complete! You can get it for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad for free, right now! freeWAVE™ is San Angelo’s only free Wi-Fi hotspot network, providing free wireless Internet access at many popular locations throughout the city with more added every week. Learn more here.

Benjamin Clark was born today at around 11 am EST (waiting on Jonathan to send me accurate info), and everyone is doing very well! What’s been said is true: you never really know the feeling until you have your own. Of course, I still don’t know that feeling, but knowing I have a nephew is [...]

I’ve been working hard on a huge update of my weather app for iPhone since the beginning of December, and I’m happy to say that it is now available in the App Store! This new version includes a drastically new user interface, using tabs to navigate through the different views. Also, while hacking my way [...]