12-12-2008
Knowledge Management Best Practices
I work for a company named Knowlysis and our main focus is in configuring and delivering knowledge management solutions to different customers. We’ve done a lot of preaching that Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) is the way to go, and I do believe that the system works. The only problem is that the organization that created KCS didn’t plan out any way to help organizations to implement it in their business processes. So Knowlysis is trying to fill that gap on moving from your current support practices to following KCS principles. We call it Knowledge Management Best Practices Implementation Planning. A co-worker of mine has put up a blog post on what we do. http://www.knowlysis.com/blog/view.php?id=4 I think will fill that gap left by KCS.
Posted by Blake Bigelow in Uncategorized | No Comments »
11-27-2008
Lessons learned from side work
I recently finished up a website for a fellow that got a hold of me through a friend. He needed somebody to create a whole website for him and he had the design setup for me already (if you know me I can’t visually design anything for the life of me). At first I decided to do it in PHP with the Akelos framework. That had a little bit of a learning curve, but was able to get it all completed and running on my personal machine. The problems came when loading it up to the hosting service. After a long fight I found out that Akelos didn’t handle cgi/fcgi. That got me fuming. I had to totally redo the whole sight some other way. I ended up doing a ruby on rails sight knowing i could get that up and running because they advertised it. That went well until I went to check on the site and it wasn’t running. Found out the hosting service updated their rails version and didn’t keep their older version around. If you are curious about the site its ring of your dreams. The main lesson I’ve learned from this is test your production deployment early to make sure you can do what you’re planning on instead of scrapping a complete site.
Posted by Blake Bigelow in Blogroll, akelos, development, rails | No Comments »
10-09-2007
Working Abroad
I am at the beginning of my third week of working in Mexico City. I have learned a few things that I have been spoiled with all of my previous jobs.
First: Having remote access to project assets is essential to a distributed team. I am working with a team that just has people travel in from all of the over US and work in Mexico and then go home for a while and then come back. This has slowed development greatly. You can take work home but can’t fully test it because you don’t have access to certain service calls that you need to make. This would also save a lot of money that the company complains we’re spending on travel.
Second: Configuration Management in the beginning of a project will save a lot of head ache when things get close to the end. My last job had a full time guy that setup build scripts and planned installs in staging and production environments.
Third: Make sure that company you’re working with has a good IT setup. Don’t have a proxy server that filters out stuff, but then throw a DNS error on every other page that is allowed but not loaded lately.
Posted by Blake Bigelow in Blogroll, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
06-20-2007
I finally got my home computer running as a server
Well, after about two years of wanting to have my own website on a server at my house I finally did it last night. Its just a resume page but its a website.
Posted by Blake Bigelow in Personal | No Comments »
01-14-2007
Persistent Value Objects
In the constant iterations of change and refactoring my development team has come up with a very in-genous way of using value objects in the Cairngorm Framework. We have created a class called BaseObject.as that is almost an abstract class. It has a function called init that takes an Object as a parameter (had better be an object of its own type). It also has a public method called populate. This function will generate a cairngorm event that calls the backend and actually calls the corresponding populate function on the backend object. BaseObject.as also has function to change the event type for the populate method if you want to create a custom populate command/delegate. BaseObject also lets you set your own callback function. This encapsulates your data work into your valueobject instead of being all over your view / viewhelpers. There is another class that extends BaseObject.as even futher which is called Pobject.as (Persistent Object). This class handles storing, fetching, and removing of a specific persistent object. These Pobjects can be thought of as an object that represents a row in the database.
This way of using value objects cleans up your code immensly. You can basically cut down your number of command objects and delegates to a few classes. Cutting out the number of classes having to be created just to pull data from the db or send it back speeds up development time thus saving money or allowing for further innovation on a project. Any questions or comments on this philosophy would be greatly appreciated.
Posted by Blake Bigelow in Blogroll, Flex 2 | No Comments »
10-19-2006
Adobe Max Conference
I’m going to the Adobe Max Conference next week. If anybody has any questions they want me to ask I’d be happy to try and find out the answer. I volunteered to participate in a Flex development round-table with the Adobe Flex guys. I’m that will be cool.
May Flex take over the world.
Posted by Blake Bigelow in Blogroll, Flex 2 | No Comments »
09-13-2006
Item Renderers
Today I was working with a giant datagrid that has about 8 columns worth of data for each row. To make it more fun I have an ItemRenderer for each of these columns. In one column I need to display a box with a number in it and sometimes two. So I put in some logic to set the visible property to false when a certain object was “null”. As I was playing with the datagrid and scrolling it up and down I noticed that the second boxes started to dissapear when I scrolled up and down on the datagrid. I later made sure to set the visible property true when I needed to display the second box.
This leeds me to believe that Flex only creates the visible number of ItemRenders and then continues to just change the dataSource on each of those rendered items. Hopefully this will save somebody some headaches down the road.
Posted by Blake Bigelow in Flex 2 | No Comments »
08-23-2006
Flex 2 Datefield bug
I have been doing some work on formatters and found that the Datefield object in Flex 2 had a formatString property. The documentation also notes that it has all the options that the Dateformatter uses. So I would guess that means the Datefield will display the selected date in the format given. That totally doesn’t happen. I communicated with an Adobe rep. and he is going to log a bug for the documentation to be changed or the object to be fixed.
Posted by Blake Bigelow in Flex 2 | No Comments »