Lost!

Over the last 2 days, I’ve been testing a new blog logging service: MyBlogLog.com and there are some interesting things in the stats: Alfresco is dominating the incoming and outgoing links on my blog.

Even though I haven’t had time to write up a decent Alfresco story in a very long time, it still seems to be very popular when compared to SharePoint. While I’d love to write about it and SharePoint more, I just don’t have the physical resources to do so since my test server isn’t fully developed yet.

Don’t worry - I’m working on the test server, and when I do get it up and running, I’ll even post how cheaply you can get a serious test server up and running very cheaply.

So, why is Alfresco information dominating my blog? Could it be that it’s supposed to be cheaper than SharePoint? Perhaps because it’s Open Source? If you’re interested in Alfresco, I’d be really interested in hearing why. What things do you want covered? What types of screenshots do you want to see? Would you rather see news or stories on customization?

I decided awhile back that I would start coding a new web application. I can’t say anything about it now, but some of the future “web desktop” environments have been catching my eye. Today, I installed Mozilla’s Prism and Adobe’s Air. I’m impressed with one and annoyed at another…

Mozilla Prism
Prism was officially released yesterday (Oct 25th 2007) and received interest, but I’m guessing not as much as the Mozilla foundation wanted. Prism is branded as an extension of the web, but not really a new OS layer. After downloading the Prism application and installing, you run it and get presented with this window.

After typing in the required info and checking the boxes you want, you’re presented with a website inside a window - thats it. Nothing fancy, no special cool things - nothing but a window. Unfortunately, if I wanted this type of application, I’d fire up IE and use the F11 button with auto-hide activated. Then I’d just have a website with no border. About the only neat thing is that I can have an icon for said website. I chalk this up to a fancy internet shortcut. Actually, thats exactly what it is. Enter C:\Program Files\Prism\prism.exe” -webapp google reader@prism.app into your Run bar and *poof*, shortcut works. I’m sooo not impressed.

Adobe Air
After Prism, I wasn’t really in the mood to try something else, especially something that Prism is and isn’t compared to. Lets just say, theres no comparison - period. Wait, I’m sorry - they both have borders around the web application, thats it. I decided to download the eBay Desktop for Air and wow. As much as I absolutely hate eBay these days, they did a good job on the application. I would say that it has the functionality of AJAX, Flash and a few other things, all rolled into one. One other neat thing that kills current web applications is that properties boxes are not limited to the window that opens them. In a standard web browser, you might be able to drag an AJAX popup “properties” menu around but it stays inside the browser window. Air, however, allows the box to be anywhere on your screen. Right now, I’ve got a properties box up on one monitor, the application up on the other and I’m impressed. Stupid, yes, but Air actually makes it feel like a real application.

Since it’s cross OS, I can create an application for any OS, but as a website and pretty much know that it’ll roughly look the same and act the same. No more crying about Javascript and other issues. The other pretty cool thing, it installs as easily as flash (no restart required) and applications install even easier - one click, type in any security password (if you’ve got Vista or XP Security profiles) and the application installs itself after making sure you want to install said application and where.

The sample applications show some of the neat stuff it can do. I personally installed the Employee Directory since I’ve seen those inside several Corps I’ve worked for - blew me away.

The winner? Hands down: Air. I’m sold and I’ll be using it for my next web application. In fact, I have an application I might port over to it…hmmmmm.

For those wondering about Silverlight technology from Microsoft, it’s pretty much a direct competitor to Adobe’s Flash.

Coders are notoriously lazy - seriously. We’d normally rather find someone else that has developed the same thing or something close to what we want, copy it, then hack it up to do what we want. Its normally not like the movie Swordfish where you see some guy dancing and singing in front of a multi-screened computer just thinking up code (although, if you catch us late at night, around 1-3AM, you might see such a sight). We typically think up a few lines of code, then look at the news and then go back to coding a few more lines. If we need a big block of code like a function, we’d rather go searching, sometimes for hours, for someone that’s already done it for us.

Search engines for coders have been non-existent until the last year or so and looking for code in normal search engines is like a trip to the dentist and talking to a lawyer all rolled into one. Krugle and a few other Vertical Code Search Engines came out very recently to help the lowly developer on their quest to borrow, learn, steal and use from others - that is, of course, the Open Source way…

But what makes Krugle stand out from the others? How do they rank their searches? How many projects do they actually have? Luckily, I was able to talk to the core AJAX developer and the company founder via email and both had several interesting things to say. I got so comfortable talking with these guys that if I actually blogged full time, I might have asked to fly in to see them in action… Continue reading…

Warning: This is a complete rant that was pounded out in 20 minutes…

I recently purchased a PC World to pass the time at the airport. They offered the “best upgrade solutions for your buck” and I figured I’d look it over since I have several computers that can be upgraded (it was more to pass the time.)

After opening it up, once again, I was disappointed by a beginners (idiots?) guide to upgrades. It explained that memory was a good bet, hard drive upgrades where good, but the kicker was the Graphics system… Continue reading…

It seems that a lot of people are starting to have problems with RAC. I’ll admit, I’ve never taken a project due to time constraints, but annoyingly, I still get invites on certain projects. At some point I’ll stop browsing through the work and close my account.

It seems there are 2 major issues with RAC: Continue reading…