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...

Dark Leadership

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, …

The Challenger Sale

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. …

Thoughts on The BMC Agile Transformation: A Seven-Year Perspective

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’ Uncertainty

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 Michelli’s The Zappos Experience

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 …

Quick Response (QR) Codes & Mobile Computing

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 …

Gorillarinas, Putting the agile skirt on a waterfall Gorilla

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: Thank You for Being You

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 …

Fun with Silverlight

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 …

CQRS and Event Sourcing in .NET 4 and Silverlight

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 …

The Six Diseases

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 …

Artful Transformation and John Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change

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 …

Agility Health

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 …

Creatively and Innovatively Approaching The Art of War and The Prince

After discovering Round Table Companies (RTC) and exploring their Entertain. Educate. inform. Inspire. message and their Articulate. Amplify. Monetize. (“Your Ideas + RTC = Impact”) message, …

defining IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS for cloud computing

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 …

Another Ruby 1.9.2 gotcha hashes are not arrays

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 …

Maven central and rubygems.org

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 …

Lucid Charts and Gliffy for online diagramming

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 …

Push versus pull deployment models

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, …

Heroku is a bus, Engineyard is a car

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: …

The economics of scaling software development teams

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 …

Ruby 1.9.2 changes and i18n on Mac OSX

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. …

git and github not change mangement tools

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 …

javascript sleep method

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 …

Adding methods at runtime in javascript, ruby, and java

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 …

Object Oriented 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" …

Git for dummies

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 …

The difference between urgency and importance

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 …

Deciding on NOSQL vs RDMS

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 decision matrix (Using Ubuntu, Redhat & Suse as examples)

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 …

Hey GOF, It's not a good metaphor unless you can drop it on your foot

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 …

Coaching a winning team

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 …

The ruby and java fightclub

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 …

Productivity, billable hours, and expert craftsmen

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 …

The difference between Scalability, Performance, Efficiency, and Concurrency explained

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 …

Computus in scala and java

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, …

Amazon EC2 Collapse and designing for cloud computing

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 …

How important is the devops movement

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 …

Small, Powerful Teams

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: Serious Software?

Ruby on Rails? For corporate apps, with lots of users, complex business logic and lots of transactions to process? Uh, yeah...

Notes from the trenches.

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 …

Why I Miss Pair Programming

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 …

Arduino Hallmark Music Hack

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 …

Sharepoint UserProfileManager Security and Sharing

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 …

Unit Testing With SharePoint

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 …

A Business Case for RIA, part 3

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 …

Phone Finger

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 …

A Business Case for RIA, part 2

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 …

A Business Case for RIA, part 1

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 …

AspectJ with Spring applications.

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 …

Ruby XML Builder in C# .NET 4.0

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. …

.NET 4.0 Dynamics and Linq Anonymous Types

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 …

A little Groovy magic – Lists and Property Accessors

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 …

Grails Pagination and CriteriaBuilder

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 …

Using Grails Controller Interceptors To Avoid Rampant Testing

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 …

Never Ever Ever Call drawRect:(!)

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 …

Understanding View Creation and Loading

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 …

Column Labels Redux

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 …

Custom ThreadPoolExecutor

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 …

Elegant Design, Customer Service: It’s In the Details

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 …

Thinking in Objective C (not Java)

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 …

Forcing Flex to Render Labels OUTSIDE for a Column Series

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 …

Iteration over Arrays in ActionScript

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 …

Flex -- Problem with LinearAxis

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 …

Quick Tip: editButtonItem connects the dots for you!

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 …

Understanding Simple Data Migrations with Core Data

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 …

NSInternalInconsistencyException: This NSPersistentStoreCoordinator has no persistent stores. It cannot perform a save operation

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 …

Bus Tracker: Adding a Favorites View

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 …

Listen to Video Podcast With iPhone Screen Off

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 …

Multiple Nib Files are Better than One

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 …

iPhone App Developement: Chicago Bus Tracker

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 …

Flex -- Label Rotation in ColumnSeries

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, …

Problem Rendering a Horizontal Chart Legend in Flex

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 …

OL2EN – Convert Outlook 2007 Notes to Evernote Export/Import Format

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 …

Adobe Mosaic – Task Centric, Composite RIA Mashup

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’ve looked at clouds from both sides now…

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 …

Spikes in Everyday Life – Deck Lattice

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. …

Open Source Software (OSS) Evaluation

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 …

On Shimmer and Patience

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 …

Of Entities and Identities

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 …

Performance Testing RackSpace’s Mosso Cloud Files

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 …

AWS Launches CloudFront

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 …

Those folks at Adobe put on a good show…

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 …

CRC Cards, Simple Yet Powerful

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, …