Welcome, my name is Irvin, and I am a web developer living in the Bay Area, California. I am passionate about technology, especially where it concerns the web. This site serves many purposes for me, hopefully all related.

The first purpose of the Owens Performance site is to communicate my views on technology and the future of the Web. The second purpose is to communicate my expertise and share come code with those coming into the business after me, those who have come into the business before me, still may find something of interest. The final purpose of Owens Performance is to serve as a place where I can experiment with different languages, and frameworks.

As far as languages and methodologies go, My strongest language would have to be ColdFusion, as this is the language in which I have the most professional experience. I have become well versed in MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and Java along the way. My second strongest language is PHP simply because many of the clients I have picked up are choosing PHP and MySQL for the value and performance they provide.

Recently I have been doing a lot with Java and J2SE. If Java gets the ability to easily create processes that run as daemons in Linux, and as services in Windows, I can see it becoming a more major player with the advances in the Swing windowing framework.

Also, If you have not already, as a ColdFusion developer, as you probably are if you are reading this site, you should do yourself a favor and ditch Dreamweaver and use the CFEclipse plugin for the Eclipse IDE. Its much better.

While I am here yaking about stuff. I have been doing a lot of work with the JDK 1.5 and XML. I guess I always used XML as an alternative to a text file, but because of the flexible format and many libraries out there. It can sometimes be a good alternative for a full blown database, especially for little stuff.

About the robot and the design, etc... I did that. I do want to be standards compliant, so I have truly made a heavy effort throught the site. The pistions are there because I like cars and pistions seem like energy to me. So they are a part of my site. I like robots too, so I made it with Swift3D, which is an excellent 3D modelling package mainly for Flash, but as you can see it has other uses.

Check the products page for some of the things I work on just to stay fresh.

Anyway I hope you enjoy some of the articles within the site. If you know what you are looking for, try the "Search Blog" link in the upper right. It is probably faster than paging through the blog listing under "blog."