I’ve been working on my CFUnited presentation titled “Reviving the Lost Craft of Writing Specifications” and want to publish another teaser that might make it into the final version. This is raw, rough, uncut and unedited so beware. // What About Data-Centric Applications? Early in the project, you need to determine whether this is a data- centric [...]

I’ve been working on my CFUnited presentation titled “Reviving the Lost Craft of Writing Specifications” and thought I’d publish a teaser that might make it into the final version. This is raw, rough, uncut and unedited so beware. // Sometimes, a client knows what they want in the end, but really truly can’t tell you all the [...]

This Christmas, Webapper was kind enough to shower us each with a Nabaztag/tag wifi rabbit. If you haven’t seen these things yet, they’re pretty neat… It’s got an API (along with prebuilt services) that you can call to make it do various things, like move it’s ears, light up, and speak. Now, the API looks quite [...]

I used to hate version control. Visual Source Safe was slow, obnoxious, and all but unusable over a VPN. CVS was a pain to set up, and I wasn’t fond of the command line or GUI tools available at the time. Subversion seemed like a step in the right direction, but again as someone relatively [...]

I’ve been hammering on the Firefox 3 beta since it was released, and I can say that it’s definitely snappier than Firefox 2, and hasn’t crashed yet. I like that the UI hasn’t been drastically changed, but the subtle tweaks are well worth it. Pros: Snappier, more intuitive UI, no longer dog-slow on my Mac Mini, [...]

I’ve searched for months for an all-inclusive, low-cost backup solution. Here were my basic requirements: Off-site datacenter with it’s own backup system, so my backups are backed-up. Software that works, and can be easily scheduled. Incremental backups. Versioning. Multiple jobs. Support multiple machines… Servers, desktops and laptops. I looked into most of the online backup services, and while the pricing seemed nice, [...]

On frauds, chickens and Visio There’s a quasi-psychological disorder called “Impostor Syndrome” wherein the sufferer feels that, despite appearing to others as having mastered a particular skill and achieving numerous quantitative successes, he or she is not really “worthy” of the titles or benefits (or infamy) that goes along with those skills or successes. Sufferers are unable to internalize their accomplishments. It’s [...]

The Case for Functional Business Specification Documents FLiP is getting a little long in the tooth. When Jeff Peters and I codified Hal Helms’s development methodology theories in our Fusebox book and coined the name “Fusebox Lifecycle Process”, we were living very much in a “web 1.0″ world. Fusebox was developed as a page-centric controller framework and we all [...]

Last night I presented to the Central Oregon Web Professionals Usergroup (COWPU) on “Introduction to Eclipse”. It was a pretty hellacious trip – I left Portland at 3pm and pulled into the meeting room right at 6:30pm. And I drove back the same night! The presentation was aimed for Eclipse beginners, but some of the attendees [...]

http://www.webapper.net/enclosures/Flex-Builder-Project-Setup-in-a-CFEclipse-and-Subversion-Environment/ I am first and foremost, a ColdFusion developer. And I’m a little idiocyncratic as to how I organize my projects in directories and files. My “project root” is not web-accessible, but usually contains ALL the project assets, including CFCs, CFMs, etc. I got really annoyed that Flex Builder put everything in my workspace when creating a [...]