Welcome to Mevyap.com

Important Note About Scripting

This site uses scripting for inserting common elements, such as menus and page footers. It also contains a small amount of dynamic content, which also requires that scripting be enabled. The scripting on this site is in no way malicious; it doesn't hijack your home page and it doesn't install anything.

Also, there are no ActiveX controls or Java Applets on this site.

To receive the full benefit of this site, it should be viewed in a browser capable of client-side processing of JavaScript. If using Internet Explorer, this is easily done by adding www.mevyap.com to your list of trusted sites.

What's New?

Lots of travel and long hours have kept me from adding as much new content to this site as I would have liked, but at least the Versions page is kept updated.

My job now has me writing PL/SQL for Oracle 9i, so check here some time early in 2005 for new reference material and links on this topic. And as always, I'll try to update the Version Watch page on a monthly basis, with other bits of new stuff when I can.

Recent Changes

October - December 2004
- Updated the Version Watch page (December 30). With the addition of XMLSpy Home Edition, the list now includes 19 wares.

Display old news items.

Historic Changes

July - September 2004
- Site rated as safe for all ages by SafeSurf.
- Added an RSS feed for site updates.
- Updated the Version Watch page (July 8). In addition to refreshing the current listings, the following wares were added:
  - FxCop - .NET code audit tool
  - Firefox - Internet browser
  - FeedReader - aggregator for RSS news feeds
  - Regulator - regular expression development tool
  - Sygate Personal Firewall - protection for the home office
  18 development tools and related products are now tracked on this site.
- Fixed several problems in the Towers of Hanoi game. The game worked fine, but there the History and Strategy pages displayed poorly due to changes in the global stylesheet.
April - June 2004
- Updated the Version Watch page.
  - Updated version numbers and links.
  - Replaced Slackware Linux with Mandrake Linux.
  - Dropped Venkman JavaScript debugger (never used it).
  - Dressed up the page with some graphics.
January - March 2004
- Resume updated. (Have you updated yours?)
- Updated version watch.
- Added a Links page for Linux. Not terribly well organized or complete, but it's a start.
November - December 2003
- Minor updates to resume.
- Updated version watch.
October 2003
- "Position Wanted" notices removed. Employment found.
- Added JRE, IE-SPYAD, and Venkman to the software version watch. Other items updated.
- Added article "Visual Studio Templates for NUnit" — a how-to article on adding file and project templates to the Visual Studio IDE.
- Added article "The Naming Scheme of Professor Poopypants" — a whimsical name generator based on a children's beginning reading book.
Setpember 2003
- Renamed "Portal" to "Links" and "Articles" to "Reference" as part of a small change in philosophy and the resulting reorganization of content. Sorry if you lost any bookmarks.
- Split author info out from the About page. I prefer atomic web pages. The new page is here.
- Added document, "DOS Variables".
- Split CSS links out from Portal > Web Development to a new page.
- Added Slackware Linux to the Version Watch page.
August 2003
- Added two new documents, "CVS Global Options" and "CVS Date Formats.
- Added a new document, "CVS Command Reference". It's incomplete, because I'm writing it as I learn how to work with CVS.
- Installed CVS on my development box and put this site under source control. Once you use it, you'll never go back to coding without a net.
- The Versions page was added. I found that I was two releases behind on Open Office and one on NDoc; don't know yet about the others. If I have to keep this page up-to-date, my tools will remain current too.
- Began keeping track of changes. I've gone through some wild swings in website design - some philosophical and some just to explore options. This should help to prevent repeating old mistakes (like the frameset farce).
- Converted entire site from frames to simple one-column pages. Allows pages to be made compliant with the strict DTD, facilitates indexing by search engines, and eliminates the need for redundant framesets (which is how you enable bookmarking on a frameset site).

What's Here?

Software Development Reference
I started this section because writing reinforces learning. If you find something in here that you can use, all the better. Check back weekly for updates.
Software Versions
This page provides the latest version number and download information for open source, freeware, and cottage industry software that I find useful.
Selected links
This is a list of sites, arranged by subject, that I've found useful at one time or another. They are split pretty evenly between software development, general reference, and personal interest websites.
Browser-Based Games
The goal of this section is to learn some new DHTML techniques and to find solutions to browser compatibility issues. Source code is provided.
General Information
A brief overview of this site and its author. Contact information privided.