General Software Engineering – It’s All Hard There’s an inside joke among software developers that goes something like “naming things is hard.” That’s certainly true.
General Gettin' off my duff Standing some during the day (as much as I can) is better than sitting all day.
General Can you be too object-oriented for your client's good? Sometimes you just have to "forget" all the OO goodness that you've learned to love over the last couple of years and go back to the "old" way of doing things in order to best service your client.
General I turned 40 yesterday...Here's to the 2nd half As the title of this post suggests, I made it through what some people refer to as the "black birthday" yesterday.
General Observations of a CES Newbie – Day 2 Day two of our first trip to CES went much like day one. We walked and walked and walked! Yesterday we spent most of our day in the South Hall
General Observations of a CES Newbie - Day 1 My wife and I experienced the International Consumer Electronics Show today for the first time. The first word that comes to mind is just WOW! We saw maybe 1/4
General Merry Christmas from the Skaggs Family Here's hoping you all have a very Merry Christmas and a super New Year
General Can You Code With 9 Fingers? That’s what I’m doing today thanks to a relatively freak accident with a staple gun yesterday. I won’t bore you with the details (that would confirm what a bonehead I can be sometimes). Just suffice it to say that, it could
General Conversation on Backup Strategies In response to a call for opinions on NAS devices by Dan Wilson, Oğuz Demirkapi and I exchanged a few tweets regarding RAID and backups and how we each use them to try to ensure we don’t experience any data loss. It’s
General There Is No Such Thing as Perfect Code The title alone may offend some folks that read this post, but, please, hear me out before you close the browser window and go away muttering “this guy has no idea what he’s talking about”. I was talking to a developer friend of
General Free and Easy Way to Play MP3 Files in Your Web Pages One of my current clients recently commissioned me to write a feature for their site that allows visitors to listen to snippets of MP3 tracks that they sell directly from within the product’s “detail” page. In my particular situation, one of the requirements
General External Monitor Solution for Your Laptop One of the things that I’ve missed greatly since moving to using a laptop as my primary machine just over 3 years ago is the ability to run multiple monitors. My old tower machine had a pretty hefty video card (for the time)
General Living the “Inbox Zero” Way A few weeks ago I read a series of articles titled “Inbox Zero - Action Based Email” on the 43Folders web site. I had been looking for a better way to keep up with all the things that I needed to do and had
General A “Cloud-y” Revelation I suppose I’m terribly late in having this revelation but it dawned on me last week that the future of a lot of a significant part of what we do in our our day to lives is going to depend on “the cloud”
General Today is “File Not Found” Day Those of you in the web development industry will immediately know what I’m talking about (and maybe some of the more observant web users too). Today is April 4 or 4/04 which in web parlance means “404 - File Not Found”. Cheesy
General Wishing All My Readers a Very Merry Christmas Just a quick note to say Merry Christmas and a very happy and prosperous new year to all my readers (all 2 or 3 of you that I know of). We've been having family Christmas celebrations for a little over a week now due
General Another Year Gone By Yep...for me another year is in the books. Today is my 36th birthday. We are celebrating as we have so many times before with a combined birthday get-together with my family. My sister's birthday is July 8 (no, we weren't almost twins, she
General Server Migration Complete Just a quick note to mention that my blog is now running off my virtual private server at SliceHost. My server is running Fedora Core 6, Apache 2.2 and MySQL 5. It is using the 512MB / 20GB plan that SliceHost offers. There was
General Personna Me Tim Buntel asked for feedback a few days ago on the "attributes" of people that develop using ColdFusion. There have been a lot of replies to his blog entry as well as some entries on other developer's blogs answering it as well (Mark Drew
General Starting Christmas Early I got home from this week's trip to a client's site early (earlier than planned originally, and WAY early in the morning). After a few hours of near-death rest, the kids and I opened up and configured what may be the coolest Christmas present
General Party's Over...Back to Work The Thanksgiving holiday is quickly coming to an end. I'll have to say that working from home the 3 days before Thanksgiving was a very nice break after travelling for 9 straight weeks and having a 4-day weekend where I (almost) completely unplugged from
General I'm Back from Stealth Mode It's been a while since I posted an entry. The end of the month is a very busy time for us as we try to tie up loose ends as the invoicing cycle comes to a close so I've not had a lot of
General Story Behind the Title Note At the time this post was written, the title of the blog was "Dan's Drivelings" The thought occurred to me that I should probably explain how my blog got it's title. Last year my brother-in-law needed someone to take over one of the
General Working Vacation Comes to an End As I mentioned when I started this blog, I've taken a new job that requires me to travel to a client's site each week and am currently working on a project outside Washington, DC. For the last 2 weeks, my wife and 3 kids
General Career Moves -or- Leaves...continued In my last post I mentioned that I've recently changed jobs and am now in a position traveling to client sites as a ColdFusion consultant. Moving away from a full-time position that I'd had for 8 1/2 years wasn't easy--for my wife and
