Joe Junkin

I have been working on a project to pull information from a local MLS service, reil.com. They provide MLS data for the San francisco Bay area such as Palo Alto and Menlo Park. I am building websites for some local Real Estate Agents that display current MLS properties in a google map. The data will be pulled from reil.com to a local database and syncronized at various periods throughout the day. The information will be displayed on a googlemap. The data will appear based on the current proximity of the map. So when the user drags the map the system will re-search the database give the new boundries.

We recently completed a website that displays property estimates using the data from http://zillow.com:

http://www.estimatepropertyvalues.com

Zillow provides excellent documentation on how to utilize their API’s which made is easy to configure. This application pulls zillow data in real time and displays it alongside and within a google map. Each plot on the map holds a tabbed view of information including property details and charts. The application is designed to operate using mostly ajax calls for faster responses. The main challenge here was how to display a large quantity of data in a clean, uncluttered fasion.

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We recently completed a geocoding-caching system that geocodes (determines Latitude and Logitude) a user’s location input. This means that the user can type in a zip code, city/state or complete address/city/state/zip and the system will determine a Longitude and Latitude of the centerpoint of the area requested. In this case the result will be used to place a location on a google map. The process I developed performs initial location lookups using the google map geocode API and employs a good/bad caching system that retains the lookups locally.
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For this new project we decided to work with the YUI (Yahoo User Interface) Javascript library. For the widgets provided, the YUI makes javascript development extremely fast and bug free. The documentation was extremly clear and contained plenty of examples.
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We have been evaluating both Wordpress and Wordpress MU (multiuser). Wordpress MU allows us to setup a domain (or sub domian) and then provide users the ability to create their own blogs instantly. Using Apache wildcard virtualhosts in conjunction with DNS wildcards allows the system to provide users with instant sub-domain hosts of their own which is pretty cool. But is Wordpress MU the answer for a single point install for all blogs that we host? Short answer is not at this time.
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Downloading and configuring wordpress on fedora core 6 (FC6) is fairly straightforward. Some questions I had were: what is the best installation and configuration process for setting up multiple blogs, and how easy is it to back up and update each blog?
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I am getting married on September 8th 2007 in the Adirondacks in New York.

Please check out the wedding site at:

http://pisani.junkin.com/

Thanks!

I have been using Perl for about 10 years now and I have always wanted to work with a nice Perl based framework. Catalyst is gathering momentum so I will be building some projects utilizing this new framework.

I configured the CVS server on a remote fedora 6 (FC6) server today. It was a bit of a pain but only because of the lack of clear documentation. I needed a remote server to run CVS so that any client could checkout a project and then checking/update to a central server. The first thing I neeed to do was ensure that ssh between the client and server required no password. Otherwise it would be prompting me for a password at each ‘cvs’ command.
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One of the biggest differences between Postfix and qmail is that Postfix comes out of the box (more readily) configured for anti-spam functionality. A big feature (for us) is that Postfix will immediately reject messages targeted at accounts that do not exist. It appears to immediately disconnect and short circuit the connection.
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