elofson.ca

Ever since I was a kid I have loved hiking and camping gear. Backpacks, ropes, tents, knives and all that great stuff that goes along with camping. Since being a “grown up” with responsibilities, that addiction was replaced with other important things. This summer, however, the gear addiction was somewhat rekindled.

During my week off in the Summer, I spent the majority of my time in the outdoors, taking pictures, and doing fun things like making bows and arrows for my kids (well kind of mostly for me), and watching a lot of Survivorman (I love that Survivorman (Les Stroud) is a Canuck). I became more and more enthusiastic about the outdoors, survival and general camping. I took the family camping a couple of times – once to Jasper and once to Elk Island National Park. Great fun, even though it was terribly cold and rainy in Jasper. In the last several weeks I have pretty much worn out my MEC catalog and visited their web site countless times. I haven’t really even purchased anything (just a tent). I just spend all my time looking and drooling over all the gear. And it’s not that I need much in the way of gear. I just like to look at it! For example, I hate heights and will never really do any climbing, but I am fascinated by climbing gear. My older daughter is starting a climbing class this fall and I think it’s so great. What a cool thing for a 5 year-old to do! Anyway, I think I will stop now and go look at new sleeping bags. Mine is getting pretty worn out.

After about a year, Solar has moved from version 1.0.0alpha2 to 1.0.0alpha3. Yes, it’s been a while, but when you realize that only one person really works on the project in his spare time, that’s a pretty good achievement. This whole spare time thing is also changing. Solar is about to get a whole lot more attention now that the developer’s employer (OmniTI) has agreed to let him use up to 40% of his paid work time to further develop Solar. Obviously, OmniTI knows a good thing when they see it.

As of writing this, Paul hasn’t had time to update the Solar site with the latest download, but that will likely happen tomorrow. Additionally, there will be a nice post about what has changed. I will add some links when they are available.

Anyone who has used a PHP web framework before, or those who just wants to try one out, should give Solar a whirl. It is the most well-thought-out framework I have had the pleasure of using. What’s next for me? Time to checkout the latest from SVN and give it a work out. The faster we test it and iron out bugs, the sooner there will be a beta release. On that note, a beta release is actually not far off and (hopefully) by the end of the year, the official stable release will be available.