By Nick Fox on Thursday, February 14, 2008 2:37 AM

The first time I heard someone begin a conversation with the word "so" was in the year 2000. I was working for a software company in Los Angeles. The person who used the word was a fellow software engineer. Usually it was in the context of explaining something. And it was always with an air of great knowledge as if it were a pronouncement from on high. It always began as a one word sentence. So. It did several things. It got your attention. It let you know that you were about to receive important information. It gave you the feeling that you were listening to someone who was really intelligent. My fellow engineer was very smart and people listened to what he said. I think he was the person who started this movement.

Pretty soon, I began to hear other engineers in the office use the word "so" to start off explanations and conversations. It made them look a little smarter too. You had to say the word "so" just right, as a ... Read More »

By Nick Fox on Saturday, February 09, 2008 5:44 AM

All I've been doing lately is sitting in front of my computer writing software. I've been dealing with difficult stressful software problems and I just needed to take a break. Netflix now lets you watch unlimited videos on thier website and slipping into a movie takes me away. I needed to do something a little different for a couple of days so I decided to record a song. Recently NASA transmitted "Across the Universe" by the Beatles into outer space so I decided to record that song. You can see and hear it here on YouTube.

By Nick Fox on Thursday, January 10, 2008 1:40 AM

This project allows someone to track a GPS enabled cell phone using Google maps. For this project we used a Motorola i355 cell phone on the Sprint/Nextel network. The software will run on any Java Me enabled phone that has GPS. You need to have a data plan so that you can make updates to your website from the cellphone. Please read the ReadMe.txt file in the download for installation instructions. I hope you enjoy the project. If you have any questions, feel free ask them in the forum on sourceforge. Click here to go directly to the tutorial.

By Nick Fox on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 6:15 AM

The pictures that are at the top of each page were painted  by Utagawa Hiroshige about 200 years ago. I love his art. Especially the way he contrasts his use of blues and reds. Edo was what is now called Tokyo.

You can read more about him at Wikipedia.

By Nick Fox on Saturday, November 24, 2007 12:30 PM

Welcome to websmithing! Here you'll find the most comprehensive tutorials and code samples explaining how to connect real world devices to the internet. There are many books and online tutorials that explain single programming languages and platforms. But to integrate devices like cell phones with websites, it requires the use of many languages and platforms. Here you learn how to put together all those languages to come up with cool applications. Not only will you learn how to put together the software, but you can download proven open source code from sourceforge that we have written. We show you different ways of integrating software, one using Microsoft technologies such as C#, .NET and SQL Server and the other using the LAMP stack, which is Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.