Content Is King

I was looking at the WORLD the other day.  🙂  And thinking about these groups that want a really cool site.  And I realized (after a few retail gigs) that these sites need copywriters — content makers — not more development. You ever run into one of these kind of sites — the start of […]

Implementors Are The Astronauts

So it’s down to the wire.  It’s launch day, your managers were barely able to control the unforeseen circumstances but got a launch window.  The operations crew has all of the release notes and their process, and you the developer are sitting there on site or on the phone, VPN’d in to execute the software […]

IP Agreements

Modern Intellectual Property Agreements just seem to be a waste of time.  In fact, I’ve seen some doozies in my lifetime I’ve refused to sign. The worst, by far, was for a consulting company that wanted to own ALL THE SOCIAL CONTACTS I made during a contract.  Phone numbers, Facebook listings, LinkedIn acceptances, Twitter watchings. […]

Mobile Tethering

Recently I just switched cell phone companies to get a lot more talk, text and data at a much reduced cost which is something I need right now.  (Side note: I was with the other provider maybe 15 years and they were *quite* curt with me on my departure.   Cringe . . . ) […]

Fibonacci Memoization

In this age its important for developers to understand  the use of  caching tools and no-sql databases to performance scale your applications. One such technique is a simple little idea called “memoization” — which is a heuristic of  remembering the result of a previous calculation in a recursive methodology so the calculation doesn’t have to […]

Mercurial Check In Process With Maven

Many projects I have been on have used Mercurial for repository control, so checking in is a two stage process: 1) commit to your local copy of the repository and 2) push to the central repository. Following the check in procedure before pushing code can help ensure the build does not break. Prerequisite All of […]

Wireless Repeater Setup

Here’s how I set up a wireless repeater with two wireless routers (also called a WDS or wireless distribution system).  The purpose was to add more hard wired connections and also extend the range of our wireless network.  Also, I can cut off my NAS from the outside world/Cylon attack by switching off the repeater […]

Displaying WordPress Post Parts

I switched this blog theme to “Photon” for a bit, very minimalist,  where I had 10 posts per page.  I just wanted to get some Google Analytic stats on specific article reads, and having full articles on a page doesn’t give that to me.  I needed the articles to display like this on the navigational pages: […]

Douchebag UX

The other day a coworker of mine said to me: “God I have Google, it tries to do too much when you start typing in the search.”  I have felt the same way about this for years; I’m sure we all have.  Especially when you have an Android phone and the dang browser starts completing […]

When All’s You Have Is A Job Title, Everything Looks Like Something To Be Managed

Let’s go back in time, to a famous Mythical Man Month lesson:  Nine women can’t have a baby in one month.  Translates to: Throwing more developers at a project will not get it done faster.  Also translate from my personal experience of being a developer for over 20 years: nothing demotivates a developer more than […]