Bob On Development

The real reason a lot of companies mightily resist extensive telecommute relationships with both employees and contractors boils down to the simple fact that managers do not get to strut around their personal domains and enjoy seeing first-hand all the people under their thumbs.

The other day I decided to finally bite the bullet and clean up the Page From Hell on a client’s web site. It’s a page that sees a lot of content churn, and I had been asked to insert a video feed near the bottom that would span two columns. But this [...]

An actual instant message session with Dell customer support captured for your amazement.

Here’s a great post by Tim Heur showing a few nifty PowerShell basics. I’ve taken my own advice and purchased the authoritative PowerShell Book, Windows PowerShell in Action which I will be reading in my “spare time” …

When any work for hire agreement becomes a document of distrust, you’re setting the wrong tone by either putting such an abomination on offer, or agreeing to be a party to it. Don’t doom your projects in advance by putting lawyers first. Seek out relationships that involve mutual trust and respect, and agreements that reinforce that.

No. On the other hand, it’s possible to emphasize the difference between estimates and quotes, and to provide bracketed estimates that give customers a reasonable idea of what they are in for.

Twitter is currently the largest Ruby on Rails site in operation today. And they are having trouble keeping up with the load.

I’ve posted in this spot before about some of the annoyances of working with DotNetNuke. DNN taught me the value of a good content-driven web site framework, but its general clunky feel was making me crazy. There had to be something better.

I don’t want to rain on everybody’s parade, but there is a really significant fly in the ointment when it comes to the gee-whiz media tagging feature in Windows Vista’s Photo Gallery application.

For all those who like to complain about how “closed” Windows is, have a gander at the latest technical preview of a new CGI implementation that will improve stability and performance of PHP under Windows.