Please please please stop changing what I write.
You don’t know best. I do!
If I enter three dots, I want three dots, not a bloody ellipsis.
I don’t want smart quotes.
Don’t replace my apostrophes with backticks.
I don’t want my perfectly valid nested XHTML trashed when you “fix” it.
If I enter a div in [...]

Posted in Software Development, Technical 6 Comments »

In one short year we’ve gone from building web-based datacenter management and planning tools for our customer’s customers to starting our own web application development and getting ready to launch it. If you’d asked me a year ago where we’d be today, I would probably have said “doing the same thing as now”. I love [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, LouderVoice, Software Development, Web20, microformats 3 Comments »

As regular readers know, I used the sxore comment system on this blog from April to September. Whilst the intent of sxore was good, the reality fell far short. It was a big mistake handing over my comment data to a third party where that data was not transparently available to me if I ever [...]

Posted in Administration, Software Development, Suppliers, Technical 6 Comments »

Jason Kolb coined this great term a few weeks back and it has stuck in my head. He is writing the end-user documentation in the wiki before he starts development. Our scope is slightly less ambitious and that is simply to use a wiki as the initial requirements management tool for the first time.
In my [...]

Posted in Software Development 6 Comments »

0.3
A one day guide to building a Web Application
Jul 24, 2006 by

Conor O’Neill

event
Carson Workshops “A-Z: How to build a Web App”

★★★★★ Last Wednesday I attended the one day Carson Workshop on how to build [...]

Posted in Business, Software Development, Web20 6 Comments »

Over the many years I have worked in project management I have become less and less a fan of the highly formalised methodologies and much more impressed by Agile approaches. I have seen more death marches driven by gantts than I care to remember. In fact, I saw one in Lucent many years ago that [...]

Posted in Business, Software Development No Comments »

it@cork Web2.0 Conference
Event type: Conference
Date: 2006-06-08
Rating: 4 out of 5

As sponsers of the conference, it was only fair that Microsoft was given the opportunity to present their Web 2.0 wares. I talked to Rob the previous night to discover that he is an evangelist from Microsoft’s Platform and Developer Group. [...]

Posted in Software Development, Web20 No Comments »

The world of SCM and Version control has always been a major part of software development but usually comes as a big shock to new developers. SCM approaches range from global Clearcase systems with multiple sysadmins keeping it humming to single developers creating files with names like *_v01, *_v02.
Many years back, I was kicking off [...]

Posted in Software Development 6 Comments »

One of our customers is rightly a big VMWare fan. We have a test-bed in one of their labs running ESX Server with four VMs on one rack-mount. The management and maintenance overhead of this compared to four servers? You do the math(s).
If you test software and you don’t use VMWare Workstation, ESX or [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development No Comments »

The Inquirer has a nice round-up of most of the players in the Open Source Datbase Market. Over the past few years, we have dealt with a lot of different customer DBs and here are a few thoughts based on that experience.
Overall what we have seen is an inexorable move from Oracle to SQL Server [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development 2 Comments »

We recently had to do a very fast turn-around proof-of-concept for a Web-based Dashboard/Portal/UI on a reasonably straightforward relational schema in SQL Server.
As this was to be a throw-away development, we decided to leverage it for some internal training and feasibility study. We try to avoid buzzword bingo and don’t jump on every new technology/toolkit [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development 2 Comments »

In our first Python post we mentioned that there can be push-back on the usage of Python in solutions for customers, particularly if the entire system is to be built in Python.
An interesting alternative which can gain more customer acceptance is Jython. This is Python reimplemented in Java and it provides features which are [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development 2 Comments »

As mentioned in a previous post, we have been having great success recently using Python as a develoment language for both customer engagements and our own internal long-term projects. There are however, some areas where we have to make decisions in its usage.
The first is quite simple - development environment. The options are currently [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development Comments Off

We have always been big fans of development languages which have traditionally been referred to as scripting languages.
Going back over 10 years, we created some very useful tools and automation systems using TCL. This may seem like an odd niche choice, but for us, at the time, it had some major advantages. It was [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development 2 Comments »

Jon William Toigo over at Byte & Switch has a great article on Aperi and the history of SRM in general. His analysis of industry reaction to the Aperi announcement by IBM is particularly incisive.
Whether IBM will succeed (with the help of the OpenSource community) or not is obviously the great unknown. In any other [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Enterprise, Software Development 3 Comments »

Oracle has just launched 10G Express Edition, a stripped down version of their mainstream DB. The limits appear to be very similar to MSDE or SQL Server 2005 Express (1 CPU, 4GB DB, 1GB RAM). This should be big news. Oracle have absolutely no penetration at the low end where MySQL and (funnily enough) MSDE [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Software Development Comments Off

CNET has a very good interview with Bernard Liautaud who is Chief Executive of Business Objects. His vision for Business Intelligence has enabled BO to grow at an impressive rate. Whilst we can criticise the technical support problems which have occurred in the Crystal product range since they acquired Crystal Decisions, we have been mightily [...]

Posted in Argolon, Enterprise, Software Development Comments Off

We spend most days up to our necks in Crystal Reports. Our standard platform for many customers has been Windows 2000 Server, SQL Server 2000 and Crystal Reports (and Crystal Enterprise) 10. However we have been getting some push back from customers who are very anti-Microsoft. In general this is just manifested as a refusal [...]

Posted in Argolon, Enterprise, Software Development Comments Off

This is a good solid down-to-earth post from an EDS blog. Of course we can all make easy lazy cheap shots at EDS due to the various well-publicized problems they have had with their huge contracts. But in our dealings with them we have always found the people at a project level to be tough, [...]

Posted in Business, Enterprise, Software Development Comments Off

This is a very interesting announcement:
OPSWARE INTRODUCES NEW GLOBAL SHELL TECHNOLOGY FOR CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT OF LINUX, UNIX, AND WINDOWS

You don’t see much in the way of innovation in command-line shells but this looks extremely powerful. Cross-platfform, remote automation, supports all the leading current shells. Definitely worth a read if the scripted management of large-scale [...]

Posted in Argolon, Enterprise, Software Development Comments Off