Outsource the Scaffolding

October 27th, 2008

Outsourcing the scaffolding is an article from a fellow Atlantian discussing how best to oursource code. His thesis is that you should only outsource the the initial version or core product. Once you get into the details where the problem is nolonger simple you need to bring it in house.

I agree and I think this applies to outsourced development even when it is a division of the same company. When the designers and requirement gathers are far away from the developers you are asking for trouble.

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Proposed policy. Get rid of the Drug Micro Monopoly.

October 18th, 2008

Require multiple suppliers for any FDA approved drugs.

This seems like a no brainer to me. One of our problems in the US is the expense of drugs. In other countries with more comprehensive government supplied health care there are price controls. In this country it is considered anti-capitalist to be involved with price controls to the point that our sitting president has not given medicare the right to negotiate lower prices directly with drug companies. The US pays more for drugs than other industrialized nations and thus subsidize drug development that other countries benefit from. The government is already involved by giving drug companies temporary monopolies through our patent system. And without this government involvment their industry would collapse.

Of course drug companies say that they have to do a lot of research to get even one  sucessful drug on the market.  So they need these temporary monopolies to get a decent return on investment.  However there is no way for the markets to determine a fair price because a consumer expects their insurance company to pay whatever it takes to keep them alive.  The status-quo is not unacceptable. Between the micro monopolies and the third party payer system the markets do not have room to operate properly.

I would require multiple suppliers for each drug that gets FDA approval. The research company could auction off rights to manufacture/sell their drug to two other companies so there would be at least three suppliers. This would allow the drug research company to recover some of their investment quickly and industry experts (the researcher’s competitors) should be able to determine the proper value of the drug during the auction phase. We would have to be careful of collusion. (Three companies always buying each others patents but never manufacturing their partner’s drugs). But the situation should be no worse than what we have now and should be a little better.

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Education.com’s API for Schools

September 12th, 2008

Now you can integrate school information into you mashup with education.com’s school api.  Get your key here.

They have an example application here.

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Tools to develop flex on linux

September 11th, 2008

Sometimes you need to write a debug log when developing flex. The best way to do that in linux is first configure your ~/mm.cfg file with the following:

ErrorReportingEnable=1
TraceOutputFileEnable=1

Then either use the flash player debug plugin or use the standalone debug player. I prefer the standalone because I can launch it from the command line right after a successful mxmlc compile. Both are in the tar file here

The log will by default be written at
~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/Logs/flashlog.txt
And no this is current as of 2008-9-11, well after the macromedia/adobe merge. Adobe just hasnt bothered changing the path yet.

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The Hidden Knowledge Mangement system.

September 7th, 2008

I’ve recently read Datawocky’s article on Replacing Email with blogs, wikis and IM. Its has some good ideas however the devil is in the details. The advantage of email is that it is convenient for the creator. If it is not convenient for the creator then they are less likely to create/send the data. It might be correct that the 3 system approach would be easier to retrieve data but if it reduces the amount of electronic data then it only hurts the communications.

I think a better approach would be to have special email addresses that automatically publish the content and responses of the emails themselves. We see this for mailing lists on the internet today. Any email written to low level groups in your organization could be published to an internal website.
However this does not solve the multiple document revisions being passed back and forth over email problem. To handle documents that are passed back and forth I would argue that better group editing tools would be better such as google docs but for the intranet company. Nobody likes downloading documents to their local machine unless they are taking it off line.

A little scripting on the email server side could eliminate this issue. Whenever a document is emailed out it could be replaced with a link to an editing tool with the document saved on the server side.

Along with this companies should be smart about how they define email addresses. People on the helpdesk should not their person specific email address to customers. Instead they should give a generic email address that can be reassigned to someone else after the original person leaves for a new job. How oftern have you used your email as a datastore. A person that has been with the company for a decade probably keeps a significant amout of his information in his email. A resource a lot of people never look at after the original person leaves.

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Knowledge Management in Services

September 7th, 2008

Just came back from a competitive bidding event. My company was one of the 5 suppliers that were bidding on replacing the customers test equipment with our equipment. We interviewed everyone from the guys in the back office to the guys in the field and the interviewees scored us on the types of questions we asked.

One item that came up was knowledge management. The customer is generating a huge amout of data, but there is no way for them to compare test results from one customer to the other. Or to compare data from different vendors.

There seems to be a great opportunity here for someone to leverage these issues.

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FlashPlayerTrust on Gnu/Linux

August 27th, 2008

I was getting Security Sandbox violations in my flash log. I was trying to read a local file and to connect to the network. This is for development reasons only. The final version is all web. Anyway to resolve this on my linux system I created a file with the top level paths that ended in .cfg. You can place the file in the dir: /home/{user}/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#Security/FlashPlayerTrust directory.
For this to affect all users you put it in this directory.
/etc/adobe/FlashPlayerTrust/

The file could be as simple as

/home/{user}


/tmp

 

This file should contain a list of top level paths you want the flash player to be able to find. As long as the file ends in .cfg you should be able to use any file name.

Posted in development, flash, flex | No Comments »

Edward Tufte

March 26th, 2008

Yesterday I went to the Edward Tufte Course that my company sent me on. I’m trying to figure out how I can keep the books.The Class rocked. I was inspired by some of the stuff with SparkLines Got some great ideas for the Dashboard design that we’ve been struggling with. Also learned a few other things. Edward Tufte hates Microsoft, loves the iphone and thinks that a handout beats powerpoint any day. I have to admit he made some great points. For instance.1. Data Throughput is slow during Powerpoint presentations2. Handouts that are engrossing are a good thing. Even if the audience ignores you.3. Handouts can sit there for hours while a powerpoint is on display for only a few minutes. And what better way to unsurp your competitor than by giving the potential client something to read during the competitors boring presentation.Other things I learned. Minimize space dedicated to controls. I must have known this already. I love VI editor because there is little space dedicated to controls. Its all about the content. Where as on most IDEs you are luck to get 25% of the screen used for editing code. Hell on this entry form my text box is luck to be 15% of the screen. So I’ll look for ways to hide controls.That is the Gist of what I learned. I truly enjoyed this class and I should have taken it a year earlier.

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A small trick when developing flex code that talks to hosting server

March 21st, 2008

I often develop my flex code on a machine that is not running a web server. So I have to hardcode the IP of a working server when I need to pull data from the hosting server.

This can be a pain because before you checkin the code you have to remember to change the method of pulling the IP address.

So here is my solution

   var domain:String=mx.utils.URLUtil.getServerName(url);
  var port_nbr:int=mx.utils.URLUtil.getPort(url);
 if (flash.system.Security.sandboxType == "localTrusted")
  {
    Alert.show("In Development mode:"+domain+","+port);
    webService.wsdl="http://10.0.0.60:3000/services/wsdl";
  }
  else
  {
     webService.wsdl="http://"+domain+":"+port+"/services/wsdl";
  }

Obviously this is for web services but this technique can be used for sockets as well.

Posted in flash, flex | No Comments »

Never buy a Dell again

March 14th, 2008

I’ll never buy a dell again. My wife shopped for a computer and chose the Dell M1330 last December. Around Feburary the hard drive failed. After replacing the hard drive and reinstalling Windows Vista the machine was unstable. We’ve had two technicians to come out to repair it. We’ve sent it to the Depot. We’ve spent 20 hours working on this thing. It is still failing. We’ve asked for a new computer. They say that they’ve replaced so much hardware that it is literally a new computer. That’s not the point. Obviously they are missing something. These machines are working fine from the factory but can’t handle a simple Vista reinstall. I’m not the only one with these problems with these machines.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=206587&page=3

I’m sure this is part of the Vista madness that is going on. However If I had purchased a mac that I could dual boot I’m sure that apple would have made things right. They would have refunded my money or given me a different machine. Or at least I could have installed Linux on the machine.

The customer service is horrible. We’ve spent more time repairing, reinstalling, using the computer and then it failing that Dell should have worked with us. But they refused too.

Advice. If you do buy a machine and it starts acting up within 2 months of purchase then suspend the payment on your credit card until its fixed.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

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