Dinamita is gone

We had lots of fun, we went to the local breweries

and we partied until late at night

   

It was really like the good old college days.

But we also had lots of healthy fun, we went to Timpanogos cave:

   

The stalactite and stalagmite below will meet in 300 years! And they are just about one inch apart.

We also went to the zoo:

to Temple Square (at the heart of downtown salt lake):

And after that, we went to a nice viewpoint of the valley where the city lies:

 

Good times. I don’t have lots of time so I’ll wrap it up here.

Dynamite is coming to town

So Juan Pablo, one of my best friends from Guatemala, is coming to visit this week. Juan Pablo’s nickname is Dynamite. Like most nicknames, I’m not really sure why he ended up with that. But the dude likes to party so I’m sure we’re going to have a blast and talk a lot about the good old high school and college days. Back when responsibilities were close to zero and you had way too much time in your hands.

Carol's Birthday was on Saturday

But she has tons of homework so we decided to take it easy. We had great food and went to the movies to watch the Mummy. Carol loves all the Mummy movies, I’m not sure why. I mean, they are good, but she thinks they are great.

Foodwise we went Friday night for some wine and garlik bread at  Buca di Beppo, they bake their own bread and they make the best mozzarella+garlick bread we have ever tried. It is awesome. It’s funny because the waitress was surprised when we told her we were only going to eat their bread =). We were really not that hungry so we just ordered their large size bread.

On Saturday we went to Tsunami, the best sushi place I know in SLC. Carol is not a sushi fan but it is also her favorite dining place, they serve something called a Lunch Box where you can choose two entrees.  Carol always chooses the teriyaki steak and the chicken with something that I can’t remember. The lunch boxes come with tempura vegetables and some other things. Everything in that lunch box is delicious. My two entrees are usually sushi and the teriyaki steak.

To finish the birthday night (Saturday), we went to see the latest Mummy movie. Carol thought it was good but was a bit disappointed because Brendan Fraiser’s wife was not the same actress as the previous two movies.

Ohh,, I almost forgot, we also went for a hike on Saturday morning. It was just an easy hike to a trail near home

 

Tcl no more?

At Neumont, we’re looking at Moodle (moodle.org) to replace the LMS I built in Guatemala with some friends. We decided on this mostly because our current LMS uses technologies that are not popular like AOLserver and Tcl. Moodle uses PHP, Apache, and MySQL. It suddenly hit me that I might no longer write Tcl code! I’ll surely miss it, Tcl was a really nice language.

So why did we decide on Moodle? Mostly because it is very popular and it uses popular technologies. Back in the day (in 2000?) when we decided to use the AOLserver and Tcl for our LMS in Guatemala, there were very few open source LMS’s so we chose the ACS LMS module called ACES (Arsdigita Community Educational System).

And why in the world did the ACS community go with AOLserver? Well, it was not entirely their fault. The web server was called Navi Server (or something like that), it was open source until it got bought by AOL. AOL kept it as an open source project and used (and maybe still does) for several of their websites like mapquest.com .

As I’m going through the O’Reilly Learning PHP5 book I’m surprised at how similar PHP it is to Tcl. Even from it’s origins. They are both wrappers around the C language, they are loosely typed, you use a $ sign before variable names, you don’t need to declare vars.

And before PHP4, PHP did not support objects, just like Tcl. But PHP’s popularity enabled it to move along and become object oriented with PHP4 and now PHP5. So maybe PHP took Tcl’s wings.

Well, the Moodle thing is still not a sealed deal but I even if that does not work out we’re not going with a Tcl solution. I’ll miss you Tcl!