armtuk

I'm here in San Francisco for some training. Doing some work for a company who needs me to understand Mark Logic, which is an XML database. The hotel room is nice enough, but the high speed internet is not so high speed getting a pathetic 30kB/sec download speed for my AspectJ install which apparently I forgot to install before leaving. I'm doing a bit of work on my own Consultant Helper aplication which is based all on libraries that I wrote, JSAM the Java Simple Authentication module, PDF-Jam which is a PDF library that is still under development, but does work at reading and writing PDFs so far with just text, and Hermes which is a database abstraction layer that was originaly designed for back-end usage, but I have updated to be able to be used in a more web-centric environment. So far I can create clients, services and employees, and I enter details of work done. I am in the process of being able to create invoices and then generate a PDF to send to the client for billing. This is all open source, and I'm hoping to run the whole thing as an online application that I can offer to the general public. It's pretty low load, and anyone who does anything more sophisticated is probably already subscribed to Quick Books, maybe one day my functionality will rival theirs, they certainly seem to be moving at a snails pace right now, but there is a great deal of ground to catch up. For now I just need to be able to send companies a status report, and a invoice and a statement, so thats what I'm focused on.

Whilst I'm in SF, I hope to at least see the Golden Gate Bridge, and to sample the local sushi which I've heard is divine. I'm only here for a few days, and I don't have much free time, so I probably won't get to do too much sight-seeing, but it's always exciting to be some place new.