Peter Mentzer
I am currently the Director of Web Services at Dominican University of California. Prior, I ran a marketing and design firm, and taught courses in design, digital art, and 3d at the university level. I earned a Master of Education degree with an emphasis in Instructional Technology in 2005
Dominican Campus Google Map
2007 | DUC Project
An interactive campus map that taps into all of the functionality of the google maps api. What does it do? Right now it uses javascript to pull a ton of data out of an xml flat file and populate the markers and their corresponding "info bubbles".
It's extensible. I'm going to build v2 with mysql instead of straight xml, so the amount of data in the map is fairly limitless. Also, I figured out how to reference the javascript stuff from outside the map itself, so you can do things like look up a building by name, and see it displayed on the map. Looking forward to expanding what the map does even more down the road.
The big experimental thing I'm working on now is building an open source-powered, hosted, 3D environment. More on that later. For now, a few still-image studies for the world:
The Blue Gem
Abstractions of Pleasure Series (2006)
The Red Gem
Abstractions of Pleasure Series (2006)
Mega CheatSheet
The Mega Cheatsheet (Ongoing) | Ruby on Rails App
This Ruby on Rails App is something I use daily. I created it so I could store cheatnotes quickly online (and access them from both work and home.)
Currently, I looking into options for caching the html output so it's faster. Unfortunately, with Rails, this is a bit more complicated than I have time to tackle right now: every page contains authentication fragments that need to NOT be cached.
And, since it has a ton of content served up via pagination parameters, you've got to do some magic to make that cache as well. When you get into granular caching in rails, it takes some time to pull off correctly. I'll see when I get time to dive into it.
