Some of the first new work in about a year.  I finished this last Fall, but never got around to having it scanned until recently.  This is part of the continuing vacuum tube project I started about 2 years ago or so.  You can see more on the still life gallery page.

The 3B28 is a xenon filled half wave rectifier.  The xenon offers distinct advantages over other gas tubes such as mercury vapor tubes, which makes the 3B28 better suited for radio and audio applications.  Plus they're big, and look cool.  Sort of like a barrel in a bottle.

I've been spending time with Jaxer, Aptana's JavaScript server.  I'm impressed.  I thought for a while that we'd see server side JavaScript eventually, especially given the popularity of Ajax, but it took until last month for a reasonable, implementation ready product to arrive.  And, thankfully, it works well.

Server side JavaScript is not new.  I used JavaScript...well...Microsoft's bastardized version called JScript, to build ASP pages in 2000 and 2001.  JScript's flexibility and extensibility made sense, but I never understood why it wasn't popular; why VBScript was the defacto standard for ASP.

After the demise of ASP, not willing to invest further in Microsoft technologies, PHP was really the only practical option, even with it's quirks and flaws.  But with Jaxer, the best of all worlds are available.  I can write all my scripting in a single language, use available, mature Ajax libraries, and reuse client side code on the server.  My first real project will be a gallery demo to see if I can replace my PHP galleries with Jaxer.