All entries of my technical and business blog

In one of our applications, an event system requires a start and end date. There is validation to check to make sure the end date is after the start date.

Recently, I had a programmer create a new feature for one of our products. He inadvertently caused another feature of our product to look less polished and function a bit weird. (I called it ‘wonkified’). The consensus of the group was to push out the feature, and then go back and fix the broken part of the old feature in the next week or so.

I constantly look for ways to explain to non-technical people the daily challenges I must face and decisions I make. I like using analogies. One of the biggest ones I face where I work currently is the support of out-dated browsers.

When I installed Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04, I had the problem where the terminal would boot up until it said something about checking battery state, and then freeze. If I flipped to a different terminal, I could sudo launch lightdm - and then login on the first terminal. Obviously, this wasn’t my first choice in fixing this, though.

One of the things I struggle with is the validation of data objects. I submit that there is such a thing as a dumb data object and a validation domain object. The validation object could also be some sort of helper or a service I guess. But, the point is, that the main data object doesn’t have validation on it. It has coupled objects that provide that validation.

Recently, someone mentioned to me Conway’s Game of Life was a programming challenge at a code retreat they attended. I had never heard of it so I went to take a look at the concept. It seemed like a cool idea. So, I decided to use Canvas and Javascript to create my own instance of it. This is just my first draft of it - so take a look. And, if I’ve done anything incorrectly, please please please! let me know.

I did a bit of looking for websites that will service a Bible verse of the day via email, and I did not like what I found. First, I felt that a lot of them were very confusing to use. It wasn’t immediately clear what you were there to do. I didn’t know where to put my email address, etc. Finally, after reviewing a lot of the copy right information with bibles, I wonder if they weren’t breaking the copyrights for a lot of the bibles they offered.

I was doing some code challenge review for an open web developer position I have for my team, and I came across one piece of code that made me smile.

Lately, I’ve been working on the “2.0” of a very old piece of software in our organization. I rarely use this software - partially out of the pain caused to try to figure out how to navigate it and the associated slow user interface - and partially out of a different theory about new software development. Let me explain.

To start out, I realize that a lot has changed in Zend Framework 2 regarding Zend_Form. I think there have been a number of interesting changes, but perhaps those changes weren’t explained that clearly either. But I digress. This piece is about Zend Framework 1.12.x Zend Form - and using view scripts for elements/the form.