http://www.thisthatandthecode.com A Techie Blog Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:53:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Wyatt (my 2 1/2 year old son) was putting on his boots and I was surprised to see that he'd lined them up the right way (with the arches toward each other). My first, pessimistic, thought was that he had a 50% chance of getting it right but I praised ... http://www.thisthatandthecode.com/2008/04/15/a-lesson-in-interaction-design-from-my-son-wyatt/ Facebook applications is to OpenSocial  as Amazon's EC2 is to ...... Google App Engine. Google ftw! Some things I like about it:  It's free to start... the startup bar just got lower again Scales up well (from the reading I've done)... you just pay more. The data is backed up better than a home ... http://www.thisthatandthecode.com/2008/04/09/google-app-engine/ Just a thought... Has anyone ever applied the ideas of Extreme Programming to Business Development. I wonder what applying them in the business context would do, or if it makes sense for projects in general? The following is culled from the XP practices guide and changed to apply to business where possible. ... http://www.thisthatandthecode.com/2008/03/24/iterative-business-development/ Here's a screen shot: What the hell is the point.  You can do this in flash and have more interactive graphs.  Granted it's pretty, but so would any custom flash chart, or if you're not the custom kind, there's Open Flash Chart. Seriously people.  jQuery is great for making the client side ... http://www.thisthatandthecode.com/2008/03/20/jquery-graph-plugin-sweet/ I just installed the Mint Desktop Linux and I've got to say it's pretty slick.Seamless so far.  Better UI than Ubuntu and so far it doesn't have the annoying temporary lockup that Ubuntu and gOS had for me (every 5mins or so the system would look solid for about 5 ... http://www.thisthatandthecode.com/2008/02/22/mint-desktop-linux/ I just disabled my Facebook account. It'd been a long time coming, but I now think Facebook is mainly a voluntary spam service. You sign up. You get spammed (App Invitations). The sleazy thing about it is that rather than being spammed by some faceless salesperson, you're getting ... http://www.thisthatandthecode.com/2008/02/21/die-facebook-die/ Without given too much away... I recently inherited a website written in PHP that uses the CodeIgniter Framework (Which I like).  The problem is that the people who used it to develop the website didn't appreciate the MVC pattern. Let me boil it down for you.  The project consists of: 1 Controller0 Model ... http://www.thisthatandthecode.com/2008/01/23/baby-steps-to-great-software/ Piccolo is a Java and .NET library written to allow the construction of arbitrary 2D GUIs; most notably it provides great support for rotation and scaling. I think it's seen as a toy project right now by most developers in the business realm (even though it's a mature library) , but ... http://www.thisthatandthecode.com/2008/01/15/play-the-business-piccolo/ I'd love to never see that dialog box again. Can we make that happen? Would it be worth it? Abstractly, you can treat all user actions as transformations on an application's state. Undo is then implemented by either remembering the state before the action, or by knowing how to do ... http://www.thisthatandthecode.com/2008/01/14/improving-undo/ One big problem with using JavaScript as the basis for your application is that if a hacker gets clever they can insert their own JavaScript into your trusted page and execute it as though it were yours (XSS). You could curtail a hacker by modifying the DOM so that the objects ... http://www.thisthatandthecode.com/2007/11/12/securing-javascript-applications/