VoxBlog

Watching Life on Mars the other day got me thinking: If I suddenly ended up back in the 1970s what would I do?

The obvious answer is to use my knowledge of future events as a primary source of income.  Stock trading and sports betting would be a great source of income, but since I only have a big-picture view of 1970s markets and I know next to nothing about sports, they would be more long-term investments.  So, while I am waiting for those investments to go up, what would I do?  Would I get a job as a … Continue Reading

Looking to impress the boss before the upcoming holiday Bonus time? Looking to improve learning across your organization? Did you recently delete valuable data and need to make up for it?

The answer to all these problems is simple: introduce RSS. A recent Forrester report shows that only only 11% of people use an RSS reader, which means that there is a very good chance that the vast majority of people in your company are not RSS users.

To make things easy for you, I have created a sample email you can send to anyone and everyone in … Continue Reading

If you haven’t read Robert Martin’s Design Prinicpals and Design Patterns PDF before, go read it!

If have read it before, I read it again!

It is very dense, but has a ton of great information that should be in the front of your mind continually as you code.

• Five signs of bad code (Rigidity, Fragility, Immobility, Viscosity)
• Four class design principles (Open Closed, Liskov Substitution, Dependency Inversion, Interface Segregation)
• Three package design principles (Release Reuse Equivalency, Common Closure, Common Reuse)
• Three package coupling principles (Acyclic Dependencies, Stable Dependencies, Stable Abstractions)
• Five common architecture patterns (Abstract Server, Adapter, Observer, Bridge, Abstract Factory)

Once you have read … Continue Reading

For the last year I have been a big Flex proponent.  There are a lot of things I really like about it, I have come to the realization that it should only play a minor role in favor of standard HTML and AJAX.

Pros Of Flex compared to AJAX

• Cross-browser compatibility
• Naively Object Oriented
• Data binding
• Nice built-in controls (tables, trees, tabs, charts)
• Ability to write modular controls

What I am starting to find

• Debugging sucks.  I don’t think there is going to be a way around it for our application.  In both Flex Builder and InteliJ, the debugger expects to be given a .swf file to run, … Continue Reading
  

Have I mentioned how that I love my iPod Touch? Probably not, this is a new blog…

I see the iPod Touch as not a music player, but an instant-on computer that you can carry with you all the time.  What is not to love about that?  What makes it a computer and not a PDA is having a real web browser.  I have carried a PDA with me since the Palm III and have always loved having pre-downloaded news (remember AvantGo?), ebooks, music, applications, and games with me at all time, but without the Internet it is just a … Continue Reading

As a younger person, I always enjoyed Calvin and Hobbes.   Recently I started reading them again and noticed that as an adult, my point of view has shifted.  I remember seeing myself in much of what Calvin did, but now that I am a father, I see myself as his parents more than him.

It is a strange and unsettling feeling.

Congratulations on version 8 of the best IDE ever!

I was at the local home improvement store the other day and saw a “talking smoke detector”. The idea behind it is that instead of a loud beeping alarm when it senses smoke, it actually says “Fire! Fire!”.

My In-Store Reaction

It reminded me of many user interface decisions I see: something that is done because you can and because it is fun to do, but in the end is a waste of time and effort. My guess was that someone at the smoke detector manufacturer said “hey, … Continue Reading

Like many Americans, I went to the polls yesterday to vote.  While we do not have the oft-maligned electronic voting machines and all the problems that go with them, security is still definitely an issue that needs to be addressed.  Maybe it is just here in the trusting Midwest, but voting required no authentication process.  Although I needed to provide proof of residence several years ago to initially register, authentication since then consists simply of signing next to my name on their list.

While this is obviously bad security, it got me thinking of how they would recover from a security … Continue Reading

Welcome to VoxBlog! My goal with this blog is to both record and work through thoughts I have on software development and other tech-related topics.

I’ve been a developer long enough to delude myself into thinking I know enough to start a blog others find useful. If I’m wrong, at least it will be of value to me and that makes it a worthwhile effort.  Plus, with any luck, it will give me more control over what hits Google gives when searching for me.

I hope you find something of value here. If you have any questions or suggestions be sure … Continue Reading