Introducing Achernar Solutions

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Hi! Welcome to the personal blog of Jason Stirk (Griffin) - a curious young web application developer currently living in Lismore, NSW (yes, that's in Australia). I currently run my own busness - Achernar Solutions. You can hire me if you like.

These days I tend to work mainly with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, although I've also also done my fair share of work with PHP, and administrating various flavours of Linux servers.

Development Services

See more about what I do at Achernar Solutions.

Recently, On The Blog

Maybe I Should Be a Plumber? 04Apr2008
SwitchPipe for Fun and Profit 06Mar2008
RadiantCMS Extensions Load Order GOTCHA 04Feb2008
Every Era Has an End 01Feb2008
Scaremongering About Australia's Proposed Filters 09Jan2008
Australia's Proposed World Class Broadband? 02Jan2008
Musings on Pure Democracy After the Election 27Nov2007
My Late Night Productivity Myth 26Nov2007

or, view the full archive of posts.

Pieces of Me

Seems I'm spread all over the net these days...

Current Projects

These are some of the projects that I'm currently involved with - either as a business venture, or as a freelancer.

Link Love

Here are a few trendy folks that I know, or have worked with.

Syndicate

It was an awesome game, but that's not what I meant! I meant FEEDS! Of the RSS and ATOM flavours! Get them while they're still meaty!

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:00:04 GMT | Permalink

Things have changed a little since I last posted. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise – it was about 9 months ago, and that’s a long time. So just what has changed?

I’m no longer living in Perth, but I’ve moved to Lismore, NSW. This was due to wanting a change, and a certain female shaped person who lives there. Yup – chasing skirt rocks!
I’m not supposed to trade as Griffin Multimedia over in NSW (as it’s a WA business name) so I’ve just registered a new one – Achernar Solutions. Griffin Multimedia is still alive, and I’m still involved heavily – it’s just that for any freelance work in NSW it’s now under the new name. New website to follow soon!
New blog style. Whoah! This is part and parcel of my blog no longer running inside of my 3+ year old recipe of PHP, XML and Makefiles. It now lives, eats and breathes via the Ruby powered Radiant CMS . It’s sexy – go check it out!
With moving, I’m no longer working with local schools to provide them with IT support – Danny’s taken that over.

But some things stay the same as usual :

Still doing a heap of freelance Ruby, Ruby on Rails and other web-development type work;
Still doing a heap of Linux server support – both for GMM, and my other clients;
Still working on a variety of projects, all web related.

I can’t promise that my blog will be updated much more than it used to, but I’ve already got about 4 posts waiting to be posted, and a bunch of code that needs to see the light of day! Hopefully soon!

Coming soon:

New release of pal, including mongrel_cluster support;
Ruby code to help with working with Net::HTTP and Content-Encoding (compressed content);
Musings about some of my recent projects;
Hopefully some project launches too!

So what’s with the name?

For a long time, I’ve loved the Southern Cross – there’s something about it as a constellation that’s just elegant. I also totally dig the fact that you can use it to find the south celestial pole (and therefore south) – To me it’s an elegant hack that gives good results, and is very simple.

However, much lesser known is that the star Achernar sits just about opposite the cross and the pointers . As Achernar sits just on the other side of the celestial pole, using Achernar and the pointers you can easily find the south celestial pole without using the Southern Cross. I really dig the fact the one star that is Achernar is effectively as useful as the whole constellation of Crux. How’s that for simplicity!

So, lots of new things happening!

Comments are gone until I sort them out, sorry!

Griffin::blog()