QWANtify is excited to announce, effective May 1, 2010, their purchase by Safe Bridge Solutions, Inc. of Madison, WI. Read More »
I got an iPad this weekend. I reserved one ahead of time thankfully. Still I showed up at 8:30 and had to wait inline to pick up my reserved iPad. WOW. This was the first Apple product I picked up on release day. I was really impressed with how Apple handled the release. Then knew there would be a line so the had staff on hand to check people in while they were in line. They handed out water and even bought everyone a free coffee from the coffee shop. The coffee show had an employee coming out letting everyone know about it and then bring them drinks so you didn’t have to leave the line. I have been at several releases and none have been this good. Also just before they opened up they had all the employees come out, run around the line cheering and giving people high fives. Kinda like a sports team coming out on the field. I know that sounds corny, but it was good. So then when you get to the front of the line someone greets your and has you wait for the next available person. The greeter introduces the two of you and then that person stays with you for the whole purchase. They know what they are selling and make it a fast and friendly process. Simply WOW! Way to go Apple. I hope Microsoft really gets how Apple makes the Apple store successful.
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I recently attended a free weatherization class provided by The Housing Center, which is a joint project of the Dane County Housing Authority (DCHA) and Project Home. This non-profit group assists first-time home buyers, as well as those who aren’t so new to the home-ownership arena, with things such as the home-buying process and home maintenance.
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I recently took on a home project of connecting several electronic devices up to the Internet. Unfortunately, none of these devices had built-in wireless connectivity, and my home router was nowhere near these devices. While there are multiple solutions to connecting these devices online (wiring up home, networking over power lines, expensive wireless bridges, etc.), they were all costly, and I wanted to see if I could accomplish this for little to no money.
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“Lets make it modular” has become one of my new most hated phrases.
1) Non-technical people say it to mean do what I want it to do in the future with out me knowing what that is now.
2) Genericises the design which often leads to solutions that don’t fit the problem.
3) Creates lots of unneeded code and tests. (You do test right)
* Overly complex design (more layers)
* More code to learn, understand, and test
* More test cases
*LOT more places for things to go wrong
* Each layer ends up having it’s ownDTOs (also known as VOs, DAO, etc) to call it which creates more code and tests
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One of the topics I have always found interesting is how people learn. I’ve read several books on the subject and really like what the Pragmatic Programmers says about learning. Their book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware does a great job of explaining this. I highly recommend reading that book and doing the exercises in it. While the book is writen by programmers, anyone can read it and get it. There are a few jokes and references that non programmers may not get, but those do not get in the way. My wife read the book and she loved it. I am always surprised that schools don’t teach kids how to learn. They just cram information into kids and expect them to figure out how to learn. I know I struggled in school until I read my first book on learning. I guess learning skills are not on a standardized test some where. Thus are not taught. Still that doesn’t seem right to me. How do you learn?
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While working at my current client, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a dynamic image generation tool from Adobe called Scene7. We had a need to put togther different elements of an image dynamically based on user input and render a final image to the user’s browser. I can’t believe how well and how fast the Scene7 software accomplishes this task. Granted, I have no prior experience with image generation software so I have no baseline with which to compare, but it seems really fast and easy to me. In order to make it all work, all the pieces used to generate the final image are uploaded to the Scene7 server ahead of time and processed (this is where the magic must happen). This processing takes a very long time, but it’s only done once, and it’s done ahead of time so the end user feels none of the pain. To have the Scene7 software generate the final image, we simply construct a URL with a number of parameters telling the system which pieces to pull together and how to put them together. The result is a final image file which is generated in a fraction of a second. As a bonus, it just works and when we’ve had some confusion about how it works, Adobe techincal support has been Johhny-on-the-spot with help. Is it open source? No. Is it expensive? Most likely yes. But it just might be worth the expense if you need the services it offers because it works damn well.
P.S. Just in case the FTC comes asking, I was in no way compensated for this article.
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Well I just spent several hours chasing down a stupid Mac / Apache / SSL update issue.
[error] Server should beSSL-aware but has no certificate configured [Hint: SSLCertificateFile]
So after a lot of bashing my head into the wall saying, but I didn’t change anything, I noticed the version of Apache was update by the last Apple security update. Apache is now version 2.2.13 which changes howSSL configuration works and finally allows separate SSL Configuration per virtual host. This means you have to put your SSL configuration each virtual host too. So I copied the virtual host config section from my /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf into all of my other virtual hosts that use SSL (aka port 443) and now they all work.
-Kevin Runde
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Having recently worked in two very different development environments (one being very complex, and the other being very simple), I noticed something about myself that really surprised me. I prefer the complex environment. As much as I dislike always having to overcome a challenge in a complex environment when I’m in the thick of things, I have found that I thrive on that challenge and actually NEED it in order to feel successful. It’s true, that I’ve been much more productive in the traditional sense of the word during the time I’ve been working in the simple environment, but I come down more on the quality side of the quantity vs. quality debate. I tend to get much less done in a complex environment, but what does get done, is (IMHO) of a higher quality and I think it has to do with constantly having to be at the top of my ‘game’ in order to overcome the challenges present in a complex environment.
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