My name is Derek Berner. Welcome to my personal site.

This used to be a website for my "official" computer/technical consulting business based in Carol Stream, IL. I am now available in the evening and on weekends for private, small-scale consulting in the Franklin and Nashville areas. Email me at derek@bernerbits.com for information. (Yes, that email address was broken for a while. It's working again though I don't check it as regularly as my main address, which I am not listing here because spammers are vigilant.)

I used to be up to the task of regularly maintaining a static HTML website. However, since there are so many wonderful content management and professional networking tools out there nowadays, I find it easier to use existing packages. This site is not likely to change frequently, so I've decided to make it a sort of portal site. You can check out my online presence using the "On The Web" links below.

The above logo was made in GIMP using a pilfered graphic of a motherboard whose source I no longer remember. I copied it over here from my old site 'cause I like it.

• On The Web:
  • Blog - a real hodgepodge.
  • Twitter - sometimes I even update my status.
  • Slashdot - because I have to get my news somewhere.
  • MySpace - we were all young and foolish once.
  • Facebook - requires a free account to view.
• Sites I Maintain: These sites were developed by me and are hosted on hardware I maintain. Currently I host everything on Apache 2.2.
  • This Site
  • randallpatti.com Personal website for my dad and his wife. Runs Ruby on Rails and has a bare-bones media management system.
  • quodlibetsingers.org Quodlibet is an a cappella group I used to be a part of. I experimented with a static XSLT generation engine called XM for this site, which is why it looks like a lot of repetitive HTML. The site is terribly out of date and I am working on negotiating an ownership transfer, but I haven't heard from them in several months.
  • lesliehopeweb.com Website for Leslie Kinnunen, my fiancée. Just a placeholder right now.
• Sites I Have Worked On: Seeing as I've been writing web pages since I was 15, I wish I had more stuff to put here. Unfortunately, you'd be surprised how many sites I've worked on have gone away, are private intranet sites, or have simply just never seen the light of day.
  • WebMT3 - Web-based medical transcription software (really a generic file-based workflow system). This is the company I currently work for. I have been involved heavily in the design and development process. It is being developed chiefly in Ruby on Rails, and includes tightly-integrated subsystems written in pure ruby, including Gtk-Ruby desktop applications we have "compiled" into executables.
  • Artabase - Worked on this while I was contracting through Blue Paw. I developed the credit card payment subsystem using the ActiveMerchant plugin over the eway payment gateway.
  • Friendly Table - Social Networking site in New York with a twist: they arrange group dinners based on common interests and food likes and dislikes. I developed the selection and grouping logic for this site while contracting through Blue Paw.
  • Lovetastic - Men's personals site I also worked on while contracting through Blue Paw. I developed a message board and a very interesting photograph approval "crowdsourcing" system utilizing Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service.
  • iWATERS - Web database query and reporting engine for tracking water permit transactions for the New Mexico State Engineer's Office. Java Servlet application running on WebLogic 8 (last I checked). This was the "minor" project I was also responsible for (in addition to the primary project, which was, of course, internal) while working for the State of New Mexico. I added a few reports, implemented bug fixes, and tweaked some formulas per user requests.
  • NMOSE Web Site - While I worked for the State of New Mexico, we overhauled my agency's website. This was contracted out to a design company but I handled most of the QA on code we received back from them. Like the Quodlibet site, this site was also produced with the XM engine.
• Ruby On Rails Plugins - You can get these by running "

  script/source http://svn.bernerbits.com/

  " from the Rails root.
  • guestbook_plugin - A plugin to generate a generic guestbook for a website. Still needs work; potential for AJAXification, maybe? You can see it in action at randallpatti.com using the link above.
• Other Stuff:
  • I suppose I should have a résumé here or something. I haven't updated it in over a year though and I'm not really looking for work at this moment.
  • Last year I did some work with ruby-libnotify bindings that is quickly becoming the de facto standard for RSpec Autotest programming on Linux. You can read my original posts here and here. Several people have picked up from these and helped improve on my original work.
  • remote-ruby - A tool I wrote in Ruby that uses TCP/IP and YAML to register ordinary ruby objects to accept method calls over the internet. Pretty rudimentary and in need of some cleanup before it's ready for primetime... and the abundance of RPC libraries already out there means this is probably no more than a fun toy. At least I enjoyed writing it.
  • Document Directory - No rhyme or reason. Just a place for me to stash files online for easy access. Feel free to browse; there's nothing private here.
  • Subversion Repository - Personal SVN repository. Has anonymous viewing, so if you have voyeur tendencies...