I’m looking forward to participating in a panel Is Canvas the End of Flash? this month at SXSW on the role the new HTML Canvas element is playing in web development and how it compares to Flash. Much of the perspective I have for this panel comes from my long history working with Flash and from our recent work with Canvas for Isilon Systems on InsightIQ.
The panel has been organized by Greg Veen of SmallBatch, Inc., creators of TypeKit and includes Chet Haas from the Adobe Flex team, Nathan Germick from social gaming start up Wonderhill and Ben Galbraith from Palm and Mozilla, also lead of the ambitious Bespin project.
Come check us out if you’re going to be in Austin.
Also check out some of the presentations by friends of Carbon Five at SXSW:
From Dinosaurs to Digital: A Museum Convergence Success Story from Maria Giudice of Hot Studio on her work with Jonathon Denholtz of the California Academy of Sciences.
Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends a panel on social search organized by Brynn Evans that includes CEO Max Ventilla from our recently acquired client Aardvark.
Beyond the Desktop: Embracing New Interaction Paradigms a panel on interactions that go beyond keyboard+mouse includes Nathan Moody of Stimulant, masters of the multitouch Microsoft Surface and NUI design.
Jonah and I are taking our presentation about Javascript Testing on the road next Tuesday at 6:30 in Palo Alto, at the SDForum
The teaser for it… Recent evolutions in JavaScript testing frameworks now allow creating test suites, test-driving development, and running tests on a continuous integration server. This allows us to support more complex JavaScript, have confidence in the implementation, and push more of the logic from the server into the browser, reducing the load on the server…
Hope to see you there.
I’ve written a maven plugin to integrate Screw.Unit javascript tests into a maven build. The project is inspired by the Blue Ridge testing framework for Rails, but it’s a bit more light-weight by design.
Continue reading ‘Screw.Unit JS Testing in Maven: javascript-test-maven-plugin’
Medco Health Solutions and Carbon Five client DNA Direct announced earlier this month that DNA Direct has been acquired by Medco. Congratulations to everyone on the DNA Direct team on this new opportunity to extend their genomic medicine and health care services to an exponentially greater audience.
Among other initiatives, Carbon Five worked with DNA Direct to roll out their first release of, as founder and CEO Ryan Phelan describes it, “the first genetic guidance program for a top five health plan with Humana, facilitating prior authorization and providing clinical services to ensure appropriate testing with lower out of pocket costs from the right lab.”
I’m a bit of a hardware geek. I tend to keep up on what’s new and neat. I’m a bit conservative when it actually comes to buying the latest and greatest, but that doesn’t stop me from following the trends.
I’ve been eyeing solid state disks for the last year or so, speculating that they could have a huge impact on developer productivity once all of the major gotchas were worked out. I specifically though that pairing a decent laptop with an SSD would be awesome, since laptops generally have significantly slower hard disks than workstations. They’re also a bit slower across the board (cpu, memory bus, etc), so I thought the IO boost from an SSD might even things out.
In December I decided to end the speculation, so I bought an 80G Intel x25m (Gen 2) SSD for my 15″ Unibody MacBook Pro.
Continue reading ‘Solid State Disks’
I’ve been following a Rails convention and defining multiple environments for my iPhone projects. This allows me to quickly switch application wide settings when running a test, development, or production version of the app.
Continue reading ‘Multiple Environments in an iPhone Project’
Google announced today that they have acquired our client Aardvark. Congratulations to the very talented team at Aardvark on this next big step toward bringing their social search service to a global audience.
Aarvark has more details on the acquisition. You can also read more about the work did helping the Aardvark bootstrap their team and product development.
5 Whys is a great way to get at the root of quality problems. On my last three projects, when I felt like code quality was dropping, I ran a “5 Whys” session. I have found it adds variety, solves a very specific problem, and plugs right in as an alternative to an agile reflection.
It’s not in every agile software team’s bag of tricks. Asking around our fairy savvy office, I discovered it’s far from universal. In the “State of Agile” report from Version One, which includes survey results from 2500 software developers, it wasn’t mentioned. Since I haven’t seen it show up that much in other agile writings, I thought I’d share my experiences here. Continue reading ‘Recipe for 5 Whys with an Agile Software Team’
The latest release of the Carbon Five Database Migration maven plugin supports a new goal: check. The check goal fails the build if the database isn’t up to date. That is, if there are pending migrations the plugin produces a clear message explaining that the database is out of date and lists the pending migrations. Run mvn test and see something like this:
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Gearlist - Data Access
[INFO] task-segment: [test]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [db-migration:check {execution: default}]
[INFO] Checking jdbc:mysql://localhost/gearlist_test using migrations at src/main/db/migrations/.
[INFO] Loaded JDBC driver: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
[WARNING] There are 2 pending migrations:
20100116010256_audit_tracking.sql
20100121052539_add_daily_reports.sql
Execute db-migration:migrate to apply pending migrations.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] There are 2 pending migrations, migrate your db and try again.It’s very easy to include the check goal in your build lifecycle if you’re already using the db-migration-maven-plugin.
...
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>com.carbonfive.db-support</groupId>
<artifactId>db-migration-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>0.9.9-m2</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<phase>validate</phase>
<goals>
<goal>check</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
<configuration>
<url>jdbc:mysql://${db.host}/${db.name}</url>
<username>${db.username}</username>
<password>${db.password}</password>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>Check out the project home for additional documentation and details. There’s also a simple, complete example application showing off this configuration.
Enjoy!
Christian
I’m posting this because it took me too long to figure this out. Hope it saves someone else some trouble. If you want to use named route helpers to generate urls in your erector widgets you need to include ActionController::UrlWriter in your class, like so:
class Views::Layouts::BasicPage < Erector::Widgets::Page
include ActionController::UrlWriter
...
end
