Category Archives: Development

Loss of a great mind

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Today we mourn the loss of a great champion of open information, Aaron Swartz.  Co-founder of Reddit, Co-creator of the RSS 1.0 standard, digital activist, and author of the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.

Everyday billions of people have him to thank for the news they receive.  We all owe him a HUGE debt of gratitude for the work he did in preventing the SOPA monstrosity from becoming law.

On this day my small voice screams for a moment of silence to be observed in ALL RSS feeds for at least 10 mins with the only feed being: “Thank you Aaron you shall be missed and not forgotten.”.

For those that don’t know what the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto is I suggest you read it. http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=cefxMVAy

There is so much more to be written but it would be impossible for me to do so and not get on my SOPA box (pun fully intended) and this is not the time nor the place to do so.

My hope is that you will read this post, search for the truth, read the stories (via RSS feeds) and hopefully the outrage you will feel will drive you to act for the greater good like Aaron did.

 

 

Website Rescued from Unresponsive Designer & Host

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I’m tired today, I came back to the office last night on behalf of a new client. Why? Becuase I thought it was the right thing to do.

Here’s the backstory. 3 weeks ago, around December 20, 2012, I received an email from an anxious business owner in need of the skills of an expert webmaster. Her website was sending her hundreds of spam emails every day, and her repeated requests to her web designer and host had been unanswered. Until that day, when she was told that they were on vacation, and would not be able to provide any assistance or access to her own website until after the New Year.

She was upset, to put it mildly.

Since then, I have worked with them to make specific requests from the web designer to get website access, FTP or CMS access if available. We received several emails providing usernames and passwords, but none worked. We were being led around.

After the third such email from the web designer, and still no end in sight to the spam problem or gaining access to the website, I moved to Plan B. Luckily, and this isn’t true for everyone, this client had her domain in her own Godaddy account, so I knew that if I rebuilt the website, and wrote a new form processor, I could point the domain to a new host and resolve the issue so she could worry about real goals, like improving her web position and getting new leads!

So last night I downloaded the whole website, set her up on our managed hosting server, built a new contact form processor and compared the old version with the new version to make sure that I’d gotten everything, and that the conversion forms worked properly. When done I pointed her domain to the new hosting.

The result: 4EverFitBody.com is back up and running, and this business now has all the critical logins for their own website and is in touch with competent, caring website managers. That’s what we do, can we do it for you?

IT Reflection for the new year.

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January 1st was the 30th anniversary of the modern internet. The 1st marked the cut over to TCP/IP.

Where computers had a giant impact on the way we do our work and what not TCP/IP has had and continues to have an even greater impact. Prior to TCP/IP all things were proprietary. Sharing and sending information between the various networks was all but impossible. TCP/IP changed all of that paving the way for what we have today.

It has been the underlying tidal force of my entire career. Computers may have been the vehicle but without TCP/IP there is no where to go, stuck on an Island trapped in a silo.  TCP/IP Changed all of that.  Computers in their current forms and iterations are nothing like what they were 30 years ago (ok sans a keyboard and yes we still have command prompts.).  TCP/IP on the other hand is the same for the most part.  Even with the addition of IPv6 its still the same at its core, just has more segments its still TCP/IP.  One could argue the same thing about computers that at their core they are still the same too, but to that I say “Shush! this is TCP/IP’s day not yours 8086”.

Take a moment, sit back look at all the devices around you. Every news feed alert, IM message, each dungeon run or quest you complete (Fellow Warcraft players, im looking at you), all Netflix movies you watch on a smart TV and wall you post to would not be what it is today with out the pioneering work of Vint Cerf in 1973, Robert Kahn in the 1970’s, Jon Postel.

There are many other very smart and creative people that provided frameworks to make these things happen but the creation of TCP/IP was the road which they all had to navigate.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MODERN INTERNET…..and

Thanks for one heck of a ride so far.  {Tip of the hat and toast of the Red Bull to ya TCP/IP}

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/marking-birth-of-modern-day-internet.html

The Javascript Bug is Back

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Since working on a recent JS App for a project, I’ve caught the JS Pattern and framework bug again!

Enter Backbone.js.

Just diving into the docs for this now, but so far I am very impressed. It’s been a long while since I’ve really explored some new JS tech, so Backbone.js has been a welcome change of pace.

I see this library and Phantom JS used together to make some seriously rowdy music.

Icenium Cloud For Mobile App Development Seeks To Replace Visual Studio and Eclipse | TechCrunch

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Icenium Cloud For Mobile App Development Seeks To Replace Visual Studio and Eclipse | TechCrunch.

Definitely seems cool, but jesus, what happens when the cloud infrastructure breaks? Yesterday’s Amazon Web Services Outage should give many developers pause to relying solely and exclusively to the cloud as a magic bullet (if nothing else, it should be an example of the inherent flaws in single zone deployment!). In this scenario, when the cloud breaks – you can’t even develop locally! YIKES!! That’s a big trade off.

Plus, if i’m not mistaken, with eclipse there are plenty of ways to affect a develop-once-deploy-many facility by way of plugins.

My big problem with IDE’s in general is their interface – it really offers a very clunky out of date workflow. Updating the interface therefore would improve the mobile development lifecycle while not being so brittle by encumbering development with the cloud-scape.