As someone with a hearing impairment, I have stated in the past my frustration at the total lack of captions in the online world. Although network channels and television stations are required to provide closed captioning as per FCC regulations, online video is completely free of this requirement… which leads to many interesting videos with [...]
Archive for November, 2008
OsCommerce: A Lesson in Unmaintainable Code?
November 30th, 2008
22 Comments
I’ll let you in on a dirty secret: my first paid programming task was to make custom modifications to an oscommerce shopping cart. I cut my teeth on PHP that weekend and learned through trial by fire how much good, clean code (with no global variables!) matters, and how much it really SUCKS when everything [...]
If There’s One Thing I Know, I Know That Agile Just Doesn’t Work
November 25th, 2008
3 Comments
Okay, I lied… that was just to get your attention, but the statement is reflective of something I’ve found myself pondering lately. As software developers, we often think we’re experts in everything and downtalk a lot of ideals and technologies that we often have zero experience with. Why is that?
Back to the Basics: Javascript var keyword
November 23rd, 2008
1 Comment
Recently I’ve been pouring over some legacy code that also happens to have a ton of crappy, yet slightly masked, javascript errors. This has prompted me to consider that sometimes it’s a good idea to go back over some of the very basics. To start, let’s look at some javascript samples: for(i = 0; i [...]
Google Adds Result Ranking
November 22nd, 2008
2 Comments
I was doing some random searching for jQuery when I noticed that google added some kind of new reddit like ranking system to SERPs. Although I like the idea, I’m wondering how they’re protecting such a system from underhanded SEOs? It’d be trivial to write a bot to promote SERPs all day long, but of [...]
MidMoSoftwareDevelopment Group
November 22nd, 2008
1 Comment
Some of you may have attended the MidMoXp usergroup which I began organizing on behalf of CARFAX in September of last year. Although the usergroup always had very good meetings and even a couple notable speakers, it’s always suffered from on again off again scheduling, mostly in part due to my own rather haphazard, sometimes [...]
OOPSLA 2008 Wrap Up
November 22nd, 2008
No Comments
Life has gotten terribly busy as of late, and I have neglected to followup with my blog. First, I want to get my OOPSLA 2008 closing thoughts out of the way. I attended OOPSLA back in 2006 and was very impressed with the program… I got to meet a lot of big names in the [...]
