Tom Hempel’s Blog

I'm entrepreneur, author and investor living in Silcon valley. You can also find me at:
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August 2009
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Art in Action website is done!

We did it! It’s always a great feeling to launch a new product.  The new Art in Action online program has been a very interesting project, not only allowing me to try out different technologies like Symfony, but for the interesting management challenges the project has posed. In particular, using our team of high [...]

Plasser Dynamic Track Stabilizer

Today an almost new Plasser dynamic track stabilizer (built 2008) showed up at our place. Update 8/27: The Caltrain folks have been hard at work on the vehicle today. There seems to be a problem with the helper wheels outboard of the truck on one end.

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GM on electric cars

The other days I heard an interesting lecture at Xerox Parc by Dr. John Hsu of GM’s Advanced Programs office in Palo Alto on GM’s ideas about electric cars. He presented quite a bit of interesting material, a lot of which I hadn’t heard presented before in this form. First of all he distinguished between [...]

Caltrain work train

Today we had a new visitor, the 503 and the 504 with two side dumpers, two flat cars, and a couple of loaded gravel cars parked on our track. Unlike the archaic gravel cars, some of these flat cars, built in the late 70′s, almost seem modern!

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Too many plugins

One of the strengths of the symfony application framework are all the useful plugins you can get to extend it. I’ve used quite a few on the Art in Action project. However, as I observe the symfony web site from day to day I notice an interesting phenomenon. Developers love creating plugins. Almost every day [...]

Most useful HTML Tool

I’ve found that for doing web development of any kind an absolutely indispensable tool is CSE HTML Validator Pro. This is an amazingly versatile tool. Basically, you take the source for your web pages, run it through the tool, and it tells you what’s wrong in immense detail.  It does this page by page, [...]