March 2004 Blog Posts
Just noticed that Perryn Fowler blogged about my paper which finally explains the jump in hits its been getting. He somewhat agrees with me but still believes it's better to capture requirements using code. He may be right in that I recognise that a procedural language has way more expressive power than a declarative language. However, I have no idea how you would build a code generation engine that could interpret requirements expressed that way.
My solution for complex requirements is to write their implementation in a component and then declare to the code generation engine the conditions under which that...
Last week, I managed to do my first ever install of Mambo Server on behalf of a charity I'm doing some work for. Remember, this is a Microsoft guy installing LAMP stuff. Had a few minor problems with getting permissions right but overall, the install was simple.
I really think Microsoft is missing a trick here.
Microsoft should be giving a content management system away for free (or at least dirt cheap).
Absolutely! Just something very simple and easy to use which is usually one of Microsoft's strengths. Nothing that competes with Microsoft Content Management Server. They can keep that aimed at the...
Very nice article on where the software industry is heading with business process modelling. Frames it very clearly.
To build a code generator, it would need to integrate with these business processing languages but would probably best tackle the area of user tasks first.
A less visible battle is happening in parallel at the level of user "tasks". The process-oriented logic can be divided in two broad categories: a) tasks, which represent the interactions between a user and a given unit of work and b) business processes, which represent the compositions of tasks, systems interactions and B2B transactions.
I've just finished reading this book subtitled "A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability". It's only 191 pages with lots of illustrations and a visual treat to read. Well worth picking up if you have any influence of web designs. It's a topic I've been interested in ever since I was a Mac developer fifteen years ago. Good design was a jihad back then. I still drift back to UI design literature now and again.
Unfortunately, now I'm painfully aware of some of the bad points of this website. It needs surgery! The utility functions are too prominent. The visual...
I got the source code for FlexWiki to compile. Yippee! Just had a little struggle with the source code control and one of the subprojects but I just removed it from the solution and everything was fine. As part of the compile, I had to installed Nunit.
I was a little wary that any testing framework would be a pain to work with but I was really impressed with how easy Nunit installed and just worked. Ran the test suite without a hitch. It's a great example of using Attributes in .Net. I fully believe test-driven development is a great way...
Solved my CSS problem; it was a background:inherit attribute on an a:link that it choked on for some reason. Then I found this example from silver orange and used it instead. Works fine.
Lots of nicely designed sights. Haven't got around to reading any of them yet. Goes on the To Do list.
I've been reading a great book on web design (more on that later) and am now completely dissatisfied with this webblog design. So I've been looking at a few .Text skins and figuring out how they work. I've never done a lot of ASP .NET programming but I'm learning fast.
I've been trying to get a tab bar working using a pure CSS design and while it works all right in a test page, when I integrate it into a .Text skin, it stops working. Arrrggghh! This has got me stumped at the moment and rather frustrated.
I tend to handcode HTML but...
Hmmm. You can get a dedicated Windows 2003 Server box hosted on the Internet for £65 per month over here. That's 40Gb data transfer and a 40Gb hard disk. Split that between four people to make it £17 a month for 10Gb transfer and 10Gb disk space. Put any software you want on it. Cool. I'd go for it.
Nice idea. QueryDOM is a .Net object model for manipulating and using SQL. Haven't tried it out yet but it could be a good building block.
I finally flashed my motherboard BIOS, got the latest chipset drivers but all to no avail. It turns out there is an incompatibility between the motherboard and the graphics card I chose. Of all the cards, it's like I chose one that isn't compatible: Radeon 9500 and 9700 before a certain date. It's on the ASUS knowlege base. Theoretically, mine should work since the part number is after the sequence they say has the problem but it doesn't and I've run out of any ideas to try.
So I swapped cards with my old machine and they're both working fine. I'm waiting to...
I've spent most of the day putting my new machine together. Had it all assembled in four hours and it all seemed to be going really well as I installed Windows XP. But then I installed the latest driver for the Radeon 9700 Pro and booted to a blank screen. Arrrgghh! It's been a frustrating evening since then.
After trying numerous things, I decided I needed to flash my Asus P4P800 Deluxe BIOS up to the latest version (current is v16 but my BIOS is v12) in the hope that will help. At then if I contact a support group I...
Some good points by Irate Scotsman. Also noticed someone put the two together and called it a Bloki.
Got FlexWiki installed and working! You can now check it out. I've broken up my old "Writing Code Is Stupid" paper and added it to the Wiki as a starter.
FlexWiki has a very interesting concept of a federated namespace. Basically, you can create a FlexWiki and I can import your namespace and very easily cross link to your topics without embedding HTML links. Nice!
The tricky bit is going to be deciding what goes into the Wiki and what goes into the Weblog. It certainly feels like the two should be merged into a single platform. The thing I hate about weblogs is...
I've been battling it out trying to install FlexWiki. It seems like I've got it right but it's not giving me joy. On my localhost, I can hang it badly enough that I have to use iireset to get it going again. On this site, I've got it installed but I can't seem to get the directory permissions correct even though the ISP control panel looks correct. Very frustrating.
I'm hoping to use a Wiki to capture and evolve my thoughts on various software design issues rather than put it into static articles. I also quite like the idea of a...
Welcome to my new weblog site! I've just migrated it over from Radio Userland so please let me know if anything is broken.
I felt a bit frustrated with Radio Userland. I knew it could a lot of things but I didn't want to invest the time in learning a proprietary scripting language. I finally decided that I would be best off using a .Net bloggging tool since that's what I know. It was very tempting to switch to Movable Type since it has such a rich feature set and great support but then I'd be stuck learning LAMP. I'm am planning...
I got my machine infected with malware and Lavasoft Ad-aware 6 updated with the latest reference list file wasn't able to clear it up. So I went looking for an alternative and found SpyBot. Downloaded it, ran it and it found two dozen nasties lurking around my PC. Excellent bit of software and worth getting. Worthy of a donation. Watch out all the SpyBot URL's that are hijacked by SpyHunter and SpyKiller. Nasty competition.
Shopping around for PC components I discovered this excellent business based in Germany. They easily beat the best UK prices I could find even taking the tax and shipping charges into account. For example, the Zalman 7000A-AlCu cooler is 35 euros which works out to under £24 while Quiet PC charges £29 and Dabs charges £26. If you're buying quite a few components, the savings add up. Service was friendly and quick over email. The components arrived reasonably well packed and in excellent condition.
I tried to find a cheap supplier of a broad range of PC components based in Europe rather...