I’ve been taking on a lot of small projects lately, and have been noticing the same problems over and over.  I’ve seen these for years, but I’ve dealt with far more projects in a short time than I ever did in the past.
The checklist below wouldn’t necessarily determine if I’d take a project or not, [...]

Posted in Design, Development, PHP, Software, Testing, Web 4 Comments »

These deserves more than a twitter…
1. I just got my copy of Scott Davis’ “Groovy Recipes” book - I’ll be posting a review as soon as a I can. First impression is about a 8.5 out of 10.
2. Just came across this -> http://froth-and-java.blogspot.com/2007/06/html-screen-scraping-with-groovy.html <- didn’t know about [...]

Posted in Blogging, Book, Development, Flash/Flex, Grails, Groovy, Software, Testing, Web 1 Comment »

The codemash organizers have graciously donated a free pass to the upcoming Codemash conference to be given away to one lucky webdevradio.com listener.  To enter in to the drawing, listen to the codemash episode interview podcast on webdevradio with Jim Holmes, follow the instructions, and hope your name is drawn.
 Did you like this post? [...]

Posted in Codemash, Conferences, Database, Development, Microsoft, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Podcasts, Software, Testing, Web, linux, opensource No Comments »

I just got back from our new Refresh* meeting (”Refresh The Triangle”) - http://refreshthetriangle.org/. This was held at Viget Labs, and they were the initial organizers. We had a stab at a Refresh group a year ago, but it didn’t get off the ground. There were something like 30 people at tonight’s [...]

Posted in Design, Development, RefreshTheTriangle., Software, Testing, Web No Comments »

I put together a small utility to generate random user data several months back. I realized yesterday that I hadn’t released the source code - I thought I had. This generates plausible names, addresses, phone numbers and social security numbers. The phone number area codes don’t generally match up with the address, [...]

Posted in Database, Development, Ideas, MySQL, PHP, Software, Testing, Web, opensource 3 Comments »

Wow - the connection to my server from the convention center just died yesterday.  I could traceroute all the way to something internal to the data center, but it just stopped.  I need to determine if some iptables crap triggered to block me out (why would that have happened?)
So, yesterday afternoon was great.  I had [...]

Posted in Conferences, MySQL, PHP, SOLR, Software, Testing, Web, opensource, oscon, oscon07 No Comments »

This is one I wish I’d just recorded straight from the board.  This testing framework looks pretty awesome, and one that may have a big impact on how people do AJAX/web testing in the coming months.  While it’s been ‘out’ for awhile, this was basically a public launch here at OSCON.  I’m going to see [...]

Posted in Conferences, Software, Testing, Tools, Web, opensource, oscon, oscon07 No Comments »

I had a quick interview with Prashant Deva from Placid Systems, talking about the upcoming Virtual Ant product.  Hopefully I will have this up on webdevradio.com in the next week.  It was about 15 minutes, with a couple fluff/testing minutes at the beginning  :)  Prashant was a pretty cool guy, and I wish we’d had [...]

Posted in Development, Java, Microsoft, Podcasts, Software, Testing, Tools, Web, linux No Comments »

I received this from a podcast listener about 6 weeks ago.
Michael:  I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while.  I’m sad to see you turning toward MS.  Is it because of the influence of your present job?
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Thanks for writing (anoymous by request).  Let me address your comment about Microsoft on the webdevradio.com podcast.
I guess [...]

Posted in Microsoft, PHP, Politics, Software, Testing, Web, opensource No Comments »

This is a general question, but possibly aimed at the PHP crowd more because it’s often easier to cut corners when doing development than in other languages.
“Cutting corners” can mean almost anything from skipping unit tests to skipping documentation to lax variable names to almost anything that you know isn’t optimal but you skip for [...]

Posted in Design, Development, Microsoft, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Software, Testing, Tools, Web, opensource 2 Comments »