All entries of my technical and business blog

There seem to be two schools of design lately: Feature rich, RIA designs and simplicity.

In my “younger years” in the coding world, I’d have an idea like I have right now with the website monitoring project - and immediately start coding. I’d get the framework done, implement a feature or two, and then finally start thinking about my requirements. Predictably, the code would turn into an unmaintainable mountain of crap - and I’d be wasting more time rewriting and refactoring than I wanted. For this project, I decided to take steps against this happening.

(“the triangle”) just recently purchased a book for the library at my request, Test-Driven Development by example by Kent Beck. The current Amazon price for this book is $35. The book took me about 2 weeks of sporadic reading to finish. The first section took the first week, the remaining 2 sections and appendix flew by.

Recently, while working at (“the triangle”), I came across a project that I had to research. This project’s definition included finding an up-time monitoring system for our websites as well as a dead link finding feature. So, after doing about 8 hours worth of searching, I didn’t find anything that met our needs. There were tons of dead link finders that could be ran on demand off your desktop platform, but very few that could be scheduled and ran remotely. Additionally, it was hard to find any remote uptime monitoring systems that allowed the flexibility I was looking for - the ability to check for website up - to not give false positives, and to remotely test functionality (kind of like a remote unit test).

As I was looking through some old code from Big Boy, I noticed a block of his code at the top of his initial control file and noticed a way he was using his configuration. He was defining his from an INI file and setting constants in the code with a prefix identifier. I then took a minute to look at my most recent framework to see how I was using my config - a static class instance with an internally held singleton pattern. It got me starting to think of which was best… I have a new open source project coming up and I’d like to do the right thing.

In this posting, I’m going to share the steps to making a slimmed down, cleaner, nicer layout for MySpace to help showcase your personal interests, your band, or your business.

On February 28, 2007, JEMDiary 3.0 was released. Since 2001, JEMDiary has been growing, adding new features and hosting more diaries. To take advantage of the newest technologies as well as give JEMDiary a needed face-lift, 3.0 was launched. Don’t worry - if you had a JEMDiary account before the upgrade, your account is still active and all your entries still remain. Check it out and look at the new features.