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I thought that it might be time to give an update.  I have been very busy over with the agile evangelists at Integrum Technologies and have been loving every minute of all the things I’ve managed to absorb in the past few months.  My conversion to Rails has been drastically better than my past experience of learning other languages.  Within weeks I felt confident enough to start my own side projects and dive head-first into things that I used to wait months to fully understand how to do with previous conversions.

I have come to gain a very solid appreciation of AJAX, as long as it is done unobtrusively. I’ve also come to love the purpose and structure that a good MVC framework can provide.  I’ve come to swear by TextMate.  I can’t imagine managing a web project again without it.  I’ve found that pair programming provides amazing benefits that can never be guessed at until you’ve tried it yourself. I’ve found that my errors and refactoring due to pair programming have been exponentially improved and that my development style in general has become more efficent, more detailed, and more well-thought than in the past (in much less time).  I’ve also found that agile methodology as a method of software development just makes sense (for me at least).  Software (especially web based applications or sites) are constantly changing in their requirements, goals, needs, and acceptence criteria.  Agile methodology ties in perfectly with this dynamic lifestyle of software growth.

As to the other things that I’ve been up to, well I’ve started at least three side-projects Read the rest of this entry »

We all know how big an advocate of Plone I am.  And I’m sure this isn’t a huge deal, it just happens to coincide to the same time I’m trying to migrate a personal Plone site over to my new server.  In the process I wanted to upgrade to the most recent version of Plone (3.x) but avast, no upgrading tonight until Plone.org comes back online :(

I’ve only seen Plone exhibit a bug that was CSS related once in the past few years and I’ve never actually seen downtime for it so it’s kind of surprising to catch it during its one moment of failure.  If this is the only time it’s down in over two years though I’m still pretty darn impressed!

Thanks for the great product Plone - keep up the great work.

It’s been a long time coming, and I knew I couldn’t hold out for forever, but I finally broke down and got myself a decent dedicated server. I’ve done shared VPS and I’ve even done some good ol’ fashion home server management for the past year, but I came across a dedicated server deal I couldn’t resist and took the plunge. Look for (hopefully) better performance and page rendering out of my blog now that I’ve increased caching capabilities and minimized server overhead. Here’s some figures to compare my previous server (Mac Mini on my home network) to the new server (dedicated HiVelocity Server).

Read the rest of this entry »

Creating a post about webcheck with a link to a non existent page (404 error) and a link to a page that will hopefully timeout….

This video says it all. As I watched the list of applications come by with the theme music from one of Apple’s most well-known commercials I can’t help but wish that they would look back to their roots and open up the platform for those of us who always want to do more, just because we can.

I’ve installed Linux on my Xbox, PS3, tons of computers, and other pointless devices. I’ve installed Hackintosh (Mac OSX86) on my PCs just because I could. So of course, I am one of those who hacked my iPhone. What is my favorite application? Money. Yes, a simple program to track my receipts on the go so I don’t have to carry them in my wallet any more. Is that such a crime Apple? Is it really?

So again to all those who led the way in the iPhone hacking frontier I offer my thanks. Here’s to you, iPhone Hackers.

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