I’m proud to unveil a new feature here on the Wambooli web site: The Wambooli Technology Dictionary. It’s an on-line dictionary full of computer and high-tech terms.

I’ve been working on the Dictionary for about 4 months now. The idea originally came up almost 13 years ago.

When I contracted to do the Illustrated Computer Dictionary for Dummies, the publisher and I discussed keeping all the words in a text file. The idea was to eventually put the words into a database, and from there into a web site.

The Illustrated Computer Dictionary for Dummies was taken out of print years ago. I still had the text files on hand, so during a lull I decided to convert the files into a database format. That involved learning a database, of course. I chose MySQL.

It took quite a few months to learn MySQL, but I did it. It took even longer to convert the old text files. Sadly, they weren’t written with a database in mind. Not only that, the information was terribly dated; the book was last updated in 1998, I believe. So I had to add in at least 10 years of new technology. Plus I removed a lot of the childish humor.

Add in some more time to learn PhP, a web-page programming language. Then even more time to debug the thing, re-sort information, work on formatting, and add even more terms. Oh, I could mess with the thing forever, so rather than do that, I decided to throw it out in the open and finally present the Wambooli Technology Dictionary to the public.

Visit the Wambooli Technology Dictionary.