DevLife

A few weeks ago I inheirited a older HP/Compaq laptop. It suffered from extreme slowness and the current owner couldn’t get it to run any of his apps. I found this strange since it was a dual core machine running XP Pro.

Upon learning that it was originally sourced from Best Buy, it made it extremely likely that it was lacking RAM. The specs on the HP site called for 1 GB of RAM, but as usual for Best Buy, it only had 512 Mb in it.

A neighbor had an HP laptop which had a screen that was busted, so i pirated the ram, 2gb worth and placed it into the old machine. We had to take the machine apart since one of the ram chips was hidden under the keyboard. Nice design, HP!

Then I acquired a universal power supply since the original could not be located. Talk about a bad move, the screwy amperage delivered to the machine caused the CPU to cycle to 100%, rendering the machine useless. It had all sorts of trouble installing the new OS. Yep, I put windows 7 on it. Meh! Is about all I have to say that, just not enough there to be really impressed.

Anyway, google and trial and error lead me to working out the power supply issue. I sourced a new power supply through kijiji, with the help of a buddy at work. The new supply works like a charm and the machine is running great now.

That entire process took about 3 weeks to sort out. What fun!

Posted in: gear, on the job by Bastien / Tags: hp, laptops, power supply

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I recently replaced my six year old machine at work with a new Dell. Due to certain requirements, I’ve decided not to upgrade to windows 7, but I have been playing with some of the MS dev tools like the web platform installer and ms web developer express. Work is deciding on a new tech direction as classic asp is, well, old and useless.

Although my personal preference is to move to php for a variety of reasons, there is a focus on moving to .Net. Php runs well under dot net and ms has made significant investments into making php run really well. However, there has been some argument surrounding the use of C# as the language of choice.

In either case, I am pushing to use an MVC pattern codebase to provide better code standards. So I went and found asp mvc which plugs nicely into web express. So I download and install it with MS web platform software. This is where it gets good… The web installer starts up and while installing the mvc module, it offers to install:

1. Webcache for php
2. Php 5
3. Moodle
4 joomla

Among a few other bits. These packages are solid php offering dealing with CMS and Learning Management System. So MS is offering php as part of the who MS development experience! Doesn’t that seem a bit…odd?

To me, it seems like this is a bit of an admission that the path they chose is perhaps not the right one. This says to me that MS is offering the better language because there is some lack of interest in their tools and offerings.

This also tells me that PHP is the right language to develop in. Now if I can just make the required people see the light!

For some more laughs, the web platform also installed mysql, even though the original install of the web express package came with MS SQL Server.

Posted in: on the job by Bastien / Tags: MS PHP

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An excellent article on why APIs should be open. This was recently echoed by a blog post from Jonathan Rosenberg of Google on much the same topic.

Openness of standards and APIs will drive a lot of innovation. Twitter is one of the best examples of this. Their open APIs have allow a number of companies to build various clients for the site. Those clients also drive innovation within Twitter itself to provide and adapt to new functionality.

Then there are the apps that analyze the datastream and extract trends and other valuable data that can be sold to other parties again. An entire ecosystem built on being open, and it’s a very disruptive one at that, but also offers resounding opportunity to those with vision and ability to move quickly.

I am trying to build the things that I am working on to incorporate those ideals. It will be a challenge to get there and one that I relish. The end result will be better code and simpler growth patterns.

It will be a fun journey!

Posted in: on the job by Bastien / Tags: coding technology google

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If you’ve not seen Terminal with Tom Hanks, it a movie about a guy trapped in an airport terminal due to circumstances beyond his control. I forget how long he was trapped for, but I am starting to know what he felt like.

I finished up the work for the clients and got to Boston’s Logan Airport around 2:30, could have been earlier, might have been somewhat later. It’s now 12:30am and I am still here trapped in the shoddy Air Canada lounge waiting for the plane to be fixed. Maybe them it will take off, but at this point I am not holding out much hope.

The days adventures started when I got to the airport to find that Delta had changed my reservation, offering to fly me direct to Toronto. This sounded good, I prefer direct flights and why spend more time in the air during bad weather than I have to? And right now the weather is bad almost across the continent. From the Midwest to the east coast, rain, wind and snow have played havoc with all forms of transportation.

So this flight change was to change from leaving at 5:00pm for JFK to 8:30 direct. Since the arrival time was only a half hour later, it seemed like a good deal.

So why am I still in purgatory, also known as the AC lounge? Well, the plane was delayed coming from Toronto due to weather. OK, I can accept that, it happens. The plane finally arrives and we all board like the good little sheeple we are, the plane taxis from the gate towards the runway at which point the pilot declared a mechanical issue with the brakes. Those need to be checked, which seems prudent as I sure don’t want to fly in a busted plane. Don’t think any one else does either.

The small brake issue has turned into an hour and half repair job which means the plane can’t leave until 1:00 AM at the earliest, if they get it fixed.

As cynical as I am, I don’t see the plane leaving tonight. Toronto is getting hammered with high winds. But Air Canada isn’t telling us that. What I see is that around 2AM they will pull the plug for the night and leave us all hanging. That means it’s not worth getting a hotel room for the next 2-3 hours ( that would be an expensive nap! ) and getting back here for 4 or 5AM to line up for the next flight out.

Well, there is no food other than some tiny airline packages of pretzels and only a water fountain for something to drink. I suppose I could drink the duty-free vodka, but I would have to drive home in the event the plane actually takes off, so I can’t do that.

Well and truly f@&ked at this point. I love air travel!!!!

[update]A little late (like a week) but the plane did finally leave around 2:00AM, landed in Toronto around 4:30AM and I made it in the door at 6:00AM on the nose. Definitely the most fun I’ve had in a while. On the other hand, I did get to watch District 9 again. What a great flick![/update]

Posted in: on the job, travel by Bastien / Tags: movies traveling work

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So I’m on the road again. Back to Boston to sort out some application issues. Always good to get some face time with the clients and re-establish those relationships.

For me, the joys of travel have been far outweighed by the inconveniences and annoyances of going. As the flights are often early, it means I have to get up, earlier. Novel notion but it does mean getting up around 330 am and dragging my ass to the airport. This doesn’t sound all that bad but I’ve never been a sound sleeper before a trip. Always in the back of my mind is missing the shrillness of the alarm so I toss an turn fitfully until the damn things sounds off.

At the airport it’s become an endless series of line ups and security checks. The stripping down, almost to the boxers, of the belt, shoes, coat, sweater. Take the electronics out, put it all inthe tray and 30 seconds later the rush to put it all on, pack it all up and try not to cause a jam up.

So what mad this trip so damn memorable? Well, as I got off the small regional jet that brought me on the first leg of my journey, I left my damn rolly carry on case at the gate, then I walked out of the terminal. Of course it wasn’t until I was standing in the cold waiting for the shuttle to the next terminal that I realized that I had forgotten the damn thing. So, I have to clear security again to get back to the gate only to have the agents tell me the bag was sent to the baggage claim area. I high tail it back to the claims area, root around for the bag, which was the lost luggage office, grab it and head back to the shuttle bus to grab the next flight. So I got to go thru security, again, though I took the road less travelled and chose the furthest checkpoint from the maddening crowd for a slightly speedier traversal of the security zone.

As I write this it’s about 1230 am, I’ve been up for almost 22 hours and I am tired. It’s been a hell of a travel day.

Posted in: on the job, travel by Bastien / Tags: travel work ckients

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Microsoft has made a number of interesting moves over the last year, from open sourcing the .Net framework to natively including php in the new windows 2008 server. Does this mean that .Net is dead?

Well, it may not be dead yet, but it’s on life support. When you take in the two above items and add the disaster that was Vista, IE rapidly dwindling market share ( down to 65% ) and the coming explosion in mobile technologies driven, of course, by the iPhone, .Net has lost it’s appeal.

In it’s inital form, when run with IE and the framework on both the server and the client, the theory of a unified environment was a good one. It held promise and seemed a good way to balance the work between the server and the clients. However, MS has run into significant difficulties in adoption and major issues in convincing customers to recode major applications using .Net. Many just don’t want to do the work again, no matter what the gains in performance or managability.

And on the competition side, many changes in the last few years, the growing adoption of other browsers and operating systems have also had an effect on .Net as they either don’t use the framework if the browser is on Windows, like Firefox or Chrome, or it’s nit available at on when running on a Mac or Linux box.

But those events pale in comparison to the coming mobile revolution led by the Apple iPhone. MS has been left behind in that arena, WinMo is losing traction to Andriod and the other Linux flavors and developers are not seeing WinMo as much of a viable platform with the visibility of the iPhone and Android.

So what does this mean? With a losing market on the client, .Net is relagated to the server. With that, does the framework offer anything to make it a more viable option than other technologies? I may be going out on a limb, but I don’t think it does. The inclusion of PHP as a server side language proves that. PHP is one of the most widely used langauages in the world, and it’s dominance on the LAMP platforms couldn’t be ignored by MS any longer.

So when this is taken into consideration with other options like J2EE, there are a lot of choices for running server side code on the window platforms. Java and PHP have one other significant advantage over .Net, they are truly portable languages, you can pick them up and move them to anywhere. Java may need to be recompiled for the new environment, but PHP is simply interpreted on the new systems and is portable into many environments.

So lets look at langauges themselves. Object oriented? All of them are, C#, PHP and Java. Extendable? Ditto. Lots of free libraries and functionality? Here’s where PHP and Java really shine. The Windows ecosystem really favors letting comapanies create and sell add-ons. This raises the cost of entry in doing business with MS as a backbone of the systems. That along with the cost of the tools to develop ( even though there several free ones ) for .Net make using MS technologies such an expensive proposition when compared to the myriad free tools available to develop for the other langauges. Not to say that all the tools are free, Zend charges a pretty penny for the Zend IDE, but it is a bloody good tool. There many free Open Source tools like Netbeans, Komodo ( which has both free and paid versions ) or the various flavors of the excellent Eclipse based IDEs like Aptana Studio.

So are .Net’s days numbered? I think so. Windows still suffers the same basic flaws that the previous generations have, poor security being one of the main things. I just don’t think that .Net would survive a new operating system, which MS is working on. No one knows when it might be released, but it makes no sense to keep it.

So long .Net. It’s been fun.

Posted in: on the job by Bastien / Tags: dotnet microsoft web development languages

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Is good enough software good enough? I think that what is required here is the definition of good enough. If the missing pieces are not related to the core functionality of the application and are either new or nice to have features that are accompanied by a roadmap of where things are going and when they might get done, then perhaps good enough is good enough.

However, should the core functionality be compromised, by the omission of something like data validation or error handling, then it’s not ready for release yet. Degrading the user experience by not doing the basics is a sure fire way to get hammered. Either you’ll spend forever taking support calls and fixing bugs or the word gets outs and you’ll watch that sales pipe dry up.

Posted in: Uncategorized, on the job by Bastien / Tags: architecture, design patterns, development, tech coding langauges design

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Apple has made significant strides in the last year in the quest to support business adoption of the iPhone. Active sync, remote wipe are great steps but the lack of central management is needed to help drive this.

Now it’s time for the last stage, admin versus user privileges. Admins need to be able to image and control the devices for rapid set up and distribution in large scale corporate environments. They need to be able to install the apps from a central pool of approved apps for the business users and maintain and alter that list.

Essentially, we need the iPhone version of the Blackberry Enterprise Server. Let’s have it, Apple or at least let someone write it for you.

Posted in: gear, on the job by Bastien / Tags: iphone apple business

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http://tinyurl.com/r4y9vl is a great reference for some awesome php stuff. It is a mainstream langauge you know

Posted in: on the job by Bastien / Tags: php classes development

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I have been working on a few new projects and have been actively investigating various frameworks that are available in the php space. Having looked at and compared :

1. Zend
2. CakePHP
3. symfony
4. CodeIgnitor

Having looked at various issues like complexity, learning curve, flexibility and speed I have found that each of these has their pluses and minuses. All this research and experimentation has lead me to several conclusions.

The first is frameworks are important. They reduce development time, take care of all the low level plementation stuff and provide the backdrop to allow developers to focus on the business functionality that the client requires.

The second is that they are different in some interesting ways. Cake and symfony both have a layer that will create the basic CRUD functionality and related object classes. Zend has introduced this in the 1.9 version if the framework, but I have not had time to explore this as yet.

Interestingly, codeigniter does not have this, but I can see that it’s something that should be supported soon to keep the codebase relevant.

CodeIgniter seems more flexible than the others due to the model being more loosely coupled to the database. The others are somewhat more rigid in the conventions needed to name and link the tables. Is this good or bad? I am not sure, but it does reduce the learning curve on the uptake of the CI framework.

So what are my plans? I see myself primary using the CI framework mainly due to the flexibility and lesser learning curve. I do see tremendous value in using one if the other frameworks for more wireframing of a new application to ensure that things flow quickly to the clients for feedback. For that, my likely choice is symfony simply for it’s extensive ORM layer which can really speed up development from a db model.

As all of the frameworks use the MVC pattern, stripping out the view from one to one of the other frameworks should be a pretty simple matter. Use the CI framework and it’s slightly freer structure makes this much simpler.

I will keep you posted on the further adventures.

Posted in: on the job by Bastien / Tags: codeignitor, frameworks, php

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