The Latest from Redpoint
Redpoint consultants are not just great practitioners - they are also industry thought leaders who derive personal satisfaction from sharing their insights with the larger community. Take a look at what Redpointers have to say...
Various “abstract” thoughts on “Dark Leadership”… Welcome your thoughts! Individuals and Collectives: Self and Context Individually, I am my-self, you are your-self, she is her-self, …
Matthew Dixon (@CEB_SEC) and Brent Adamson (@brentadamson) of the Corporate Executive Board kindly honored my request for a copy of The Challenger Sale (Amazon) book. …
Israel Gat (@agile_exec) (Cutter Consortium Fellow and Director of the Agile Product & Project Management practice), who is recognized as the architect of the agile …
Jonathan Fields (@jonathanfields) (www.jonathanfields.com) kindly honored my request for a copy of his Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance book (Amazon). Based …
Joseph A. Michelli (@josephmichelli) (The Michelli Experience) kindly honored my request for an advance copy of The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and …
We live in a convenience society where we need everything quickly and easily. We have an extremely limited amount of time with our customers or …
Fact: putting a skirt on a Gorilla doesn't make it any more gracefulAre your agile initiatives Gorillarinas?If you're working in a large organization and trying …
Steve Jobs was much more than an entrepreneur, he was an enigma. What made him so unique? First, his sense of Identity profoundly anchored him …
In my previous post, I mentioned a bit about the architecture from a project I was working on. In this post I wanted to mention …
In my latest engagement we built an occasionally connected application that required synchronization, concurrency/conflict resolution, and event driven. Taking all these requirements into account we …
In Artist of Life, Bruce Lee, the father of Jeet Kune Do, describes the Six Diseases [of excessive self-consciousness]: The desire for victory The desire …
In Leading Change, John Kotter of Kotter International emphasizes: 30 years of research by leadership guru Dr. John Kotter have proven that 70% of all …
Agile is an umbrella term for Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean Development, Kanban, etc. with roots are in Agility or the “ability to be agile”. Many …
After discovering Round Table Companies (RTC) and exploring their Entertain. Educate. inform. Inspire. message and their Articulate. Amplify. Monetize. (“Your Ideas + RTC = Impact”) message, …
Looking through cloud literature, it seems we've run out of three letter acronyms (TLA), so we're now using four letter acronyms (FLA?). Chief among these …
In ruby 1.8.7, the following worksMichael-Mainguys-MacBook-Pro:~ michaelmainguy$ irbruby-1.8.7-p352 :001 > foo = {"foo","bar"} => {"foo"=>"bar"} ruby-1.8.7-p352 :002 > foo["foo"] => "bar" ruby-1.8.7-p352 :003 > In …
I was thinking about some of the differences between the ruby and java ecosystems and one comparison point I thought would be telling was how …
My one sentence evaluation: If you MUST use Internet Exploder then Gliffy is your solution, otherwise download Chrome (or other html5 capable browser) and use …
There are two deployment models: push and pull. In a "Pull" deployment model, the individual servers contact a master server, download their configuration and software, …
Engineyard and heroku are two widely used ruby on rails hosting providers. A common question is: Which one should I use? The answer everyone gives: …
One common theme in the development world is the vast difference in productivity between individual practitioners. Among folks with similar backgrounds, some are easily 10x …
We recently noticed some pretty interesting changes in ruby 1.9.2. It appears that require no longer allows relative paths and ruby is now more unicody. …
I recently stumbled across a problem with git that is going to cause no manner of headache for the uninitiated. Git repositories are fundamentally insecure …
For newcomers to javascript, it might come as a surprise that there is no sleep method. Worse yet, if you search the internet, you'll find …
OK, the title is a ruse, you can't easily add methods to java classes at runtime. But I'll illustrate how to do it in javascript …
Suppose we need to create a counter that starts at zero, increments to 4 and then restarts at 0 (A "you can't count to five" …
OK, the title of this post is a lie... git is decidedly NOT for dummies. Git is more for your really smart mentally gifted people …
Are you constantly besieged with emergencies and don't know how to dig yourself out?If so, I'll give you some insight as to how bring some …
Anybody not living in a cave knows that NOSQL is a current hot topic amount technology solutions. One sadly missing piece is some sort of …
Technology decisions are difficult and it often seems that architects and developers resort to throwing darts to determin which solution they should use for many …
I read a recent article about the importance of writing physically. Fundamentally, the author says that "writing physically" means writing about things you can drop …
As the spring soccer season is winding down, I'm reminded of a saying that I heard the AYSO national director of coaching say. I was …
As a person who has one foot firmly in java and another in ruby, I'm often in a situation where I try to have an …
I read a great article about productivity and I think there is a side issue alluded to that needs to be addressed. A common problem …
I thought I'd give some explanation of the difference between scalability, performance, Efficiency, and concurrency. To make things more accessible (and because I'm watching a …
In the spirit of the holiday, I figured I would try my hand at writing computus in scala and java. For those who aren't aware, …
As I'm sure most tech geeky folks now know, Amazon EC2 had a massive outage yesterday. This affected numerous online applications and web sites totally …
My short answer is: "very".My Long answer Follows:Devops is a reaction to a common problem in software development. It's referred to here as a "wall …
Seymour Cray once said, "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" He was making an …
Ruby on Rails? For corporate apps, with lots of users, complex business logic and lots of transactions to process? Uh, yeah...
I have built an JNLP (Java Web Start) application to FTP files to different remote servers. Here are the problems I have encountered while building …
One of the best parts of my job is working with some really great people. People who are at the top of their field and …
I am building a large Arduino-based project and want to incorporate music from the circuit board that I ripped out of a Hallmark card that …
For this blog I will look at the Sharepoint UserProfileManager. In particular how to get around user permissions in regards to profile management and to …
This article tackles some of the unit and integration testing woes when using the sharepoint object model.Testing with Sharepoint kind of sucks. First it lacks …
Last time I described how RIA improves the quality of business services and quickens customer decision-making. In this second part I'll describe how RIA can …
At Redpoint we’re doing a lot of mobile work with touch-based interface devices including iOS (iPad & iPhone) as well as the Android. Earlier this …
Last month I described an an important advantage RIA can bring to your business by providing increased market share through improved brand recognition. In this …
Why RIA?The advent of rich internet applications (RIA) empowers organizations to create a new brand of user interfaces brimming with features and capabilities previously unimagined …
Tracing and auditing is one of the most common ways to monitor an application. If your application is Spring-based, you can use Spring AOP for …
Now that .NET has the power of a dynamic language the first comparison is going to be with the powerhouses that are currently gaining momentum. …
I have been trying to find an occassion in an existing application where Dynamics would be a good fit. The big problem is that the …
Dynamic languages like Groovy and Ruby are all about productivity. Not only do they eliminate the need to write tons of boilerplate code, they also …
A colleague of mine and I have agreed on an analogy for Grails development: it’s like driving on the Autobahn, with serious sets of speed …
Test-driven development and the resulting test coverage it affords are some of the most important benefits of modern development practices. When it comes time to …
The framework knows when it needs to see the content of your view so you don’t have to worry about it… the system is very …
It has been a little while since my last post… I have been spending my time picking up Ruby on Rails so that I could …
My work life is a series of Roseanne Roseannadanna moments. ("Well, Jane, it just goes to show you, it's always something.") I discovered that my …
If your application is multithreaded and you use Java 6.0, most likely you will use ThreadPoolExecutor. The ThreadPoolExecutor class is a concrete implementation of the …
I recently purchased an Apple bluetooth keyboard and Magic Mouse for my Mac Mini (which I bought with the intention of using as a home …
I have been working on my BusTracker application and have recently added the ability to view upcoming bus arrival times for a specific stop. The …
When I ask Flex to render labels outside the column for a column series, I want them all to render outside the column. According to …
I always need reminding that for each....in iterates over the values of an associative array:for each (var value:* in object){ trace(value);}...while for....in iterates over the …
Error messages were popping up when I hovered my mouse over a chart. I discovered that this was due to a bug (or just poor …
In a previous post I went over the process of creating a favorites view similar to the Phone app on the iPhone. While the concepts …
Last week I wrote about an error I got when I added a property to a Managed Object. I posted the solution, but was unable …
I got this error last night after going through the Core Data Tutorial on the Apple dev site. I completed the tutorial and everything worked …
This will be the first simple tutorial covering some of the new things I am tackling as I build my first iPhone app. Today I …
On accident, I accomplished something I had been trying to do for a while now: listen to a video-cast with the iphone asleep. I believe …
Nib files (.xib) are Interface Builder User Interface Resources files used to describe the View portion of a Cocoa application (os x, iphone). It isn’t …
I have been wanting to dive into developing and deploying a real iPhone application but have had a hard time deciding on what type of …
If you want the label displayed by a ColumnSeries to be rotated, you don't set a "labelRotation" property like you would on an AxisRenderer. Instead, …
A big frustration I have with Flex is getting components laid out the way I intended. Usually the problem is with me setting improper values …
Background Anyone who uses Outlook tasks and notes and an iPhone knows the pain of not being able to sync tasks and notes over-the-air from …
At Adobe MAX last month, Adobe announced the Mosaic alpha release (to a beta community). It is a composite rich internet application product that allows …
I stumbled across a very cool cloud-based music service called SoundCloud (http://www.soundcloud.com) today. I love it for two very different reasons. First, it’s a great …
Extreme Programming (XP) defines a concept called a spike. A spike is an activity to find out answers to a touch technical or design problem. …
There are differences in evaluating and comparing open source software (OSS) products, as opposed to commercial packages. A number of key OSS criteria are also …
Remember Shimmer on Saturday Night Live? Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner? “It’s a dessert topping and a floor wax!” If you’re as old as I …
I really like Hibernate. Sure, it can be frustrating at times, the learning curve can be steep, and some of the exceptions you get when …
At Redpoint Technologies, we’ve been evaluating many of the services offered by leading cloud vendors in order to better understand where various cloud offerings are …
Late last month (November 18, 2008), Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the public beta of a new service for content delivery. The new Cloud Computing …
Last week I attended the Adobe Max conference in San Francisco. It was my first time at this particular conference, and I must say I …
It seems the excitement and use of Class, Responsibility, Collaboration (CRC) cards has diminished over the years. But with an emphasis on agile development approaches, …









