Jeremy Stallard's Site
Home Page
You have reached the home page of Jeremy Stallard. The site is a little bit sparse on content at the moment given a recent server crash, so many links pointing to this site are no longer functioning. These and other links will be going up as I get some time. First, if you are looking for the Jeremy Stallard that lived in Conneaut Lake, PA, San Simon, AZ, Cotton City, AZ, Playas, NM, San Manuel, AZ, Oracle, AZ, Tucson, AZ, Juneau, AK, Sapporo, Asahikawa, Iwamizawa, Ebetsu, Takikawa, Abashiri, Japan, or Provo, UT, you’ve found me. While I moved quite a bit growing up, and the plan was to come to Provo, get a bachelors degree and move someplace else, life is always full of surprises and I’ve found myself living in the same city since 1993. For those that knew me in school and how my time was limited, yes, I did eventually get my Bachelor’s Degree, even with the run-around I was given when I went to apply for graduation at Utah Valley State College in Computer Science and Information Systems (now Utah Valley University). Let those of you who transfer learn from something I learned the hard way,…
Webmaster Blogs
AJAX u0026#8211; Asynchronous Javascript and XML
While testing out different web architectures to keep on top of what is available and often used, I found that AJAX was being used much more than I had previously realized. Google uses it for the new GMail and Google Maps. Quite a few online MMORPG games use it to a certain extent, and there are examples of it found all over the Internet. It has a nice advantage over static and dynamic web pages which are created and displayed to the user and then not updated until the user refreshes the page or navigates away. Using javascript and the XMLHttpRequest object a web developer can update portions of a displayed page without needing to navigate away from the current page. While this doesn’t offer the server side “push” capabilities of BlazeDS and Adobe Flex, it is significantly less complex than the other architecture. Using a javascript timer, a webpage can periodically request updated information from the server and then update the webpage. This is useful for web based chat applications which update once a second or so. It is also useful for the purpose that Google used it with GMail in which notifications are received when new email is…
Online Collaboration u0026#8211; Remote Techsupport
Techsupport has come a long way when the support person had to rely on the end user to explain what they were seeing on their screen over a remote conference call. If at all possible, sneakernet was the best possible way (and in some cases, the only possible way) to get an actual description of what the person having the issue was seeing. The feelings found in the old addage recorded on Snopes at http://www.snopes.com/humor/business/wordperfect.asp seemed all too common. Nowdays, remote desktop sharing has become one of the normal “first step” methods of actually seeing the problem for yourself. Netmeeting from Microsoft worked alright for a while. It came installed on a lot of systems, or could be downloaded. Then along came Windows 7 and that went away. Microsoft has other solutions, but when you’re working with users of varying degrees of skills with the computer, and IT departments which limit what can be installed and executed, Netmeeting was not a reliable solution. My next experience with remote assistance was using “LogMeIn” from http://www.logmein.com. It was nice and fast over slow connections, could be installed quickly, but once again, it involved installing an executable on another computer, giving full remote…
LAMP u0026#8211; Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (or Perl, or Python)
Back in the early 1990′s when the world wide web was first being developped, and the first spam message was retaliated against by email-bombing the senders ISP’s mail server, the web pages were mainly static content written in straight HTML files. There was a variety of web servers to choose from, but all of them did basically the same thing.. Listen on port 80 for incoming connections, receive the request, and respond with the static file. Things have changed. Many of the web pages and on-line commerce sites are no longer static HTML files, but are LAMP driven, relying on session information and cookies, as well as the server side processing capabilities of PHP. LAMP is an acronym for one of the most popular configurations of web server setup in use today. Actual statistics on the percentage of Apache webservers in use compared to Microsoft IIS web servers seems to vary from day to day.. My favorite quote regarding these statistics is “Never trust a statistic that you didn’t forge yourself (http://4sysops.com/archives/iis-vs-apache-can-statistics-provide-an-argument/)”. In general, however, it is accepted that Linux running Apache is the platform of choice for most web hosting services. Add in MySQL as the database to use…
Utah County Water Polo
Technical Blogs
Different tidbits of the technology industry that I’ve found interesting.