http://www.theunfunded.com/

Okay, I know it’s an April fools joke (er, at least I think it is) but this is still really amusing. I even emailed one of the gentlemen in my blogroll about it.

I’d love to get your thoughts on this.

/me is still chuckling

Saw something in #zftalk that could be considered a no-brainer, but since the question was posed I’ll reproduce the answer here.

Rather than turning on the profiler to see what kind of query is being generated, use the __toString() magic method.

This should produce something like:

This probably won’t mean much to anyone but me.

Did a lot this weekend regarding Karmba. 76 files added to the repository since my last commit (Wednesday). This was the first major revision since I scrapped the project and started over in February.

Here’s the commit message I just posted:

Major revision.

-Updated sql schema.
-Finished implementing and verifying BootstrapFrontController & BootstrapController
-Major updates to the Row object including postUpdate postInsert & postDelete hooks
-New template updates
-Various template additions - @TODO: cleanup templates
-Domain objects for Accounts, AccountsRelatedRecords, Audit
-Start of UserPrefFactory
-Form builder stage one - @TODO: cleanup, modularize
-Added view helpers, relocated to app/views/helpers
-Completed Audit Engine application wide
-Added sidebars for certain modules, just cause I didn’t want to lose the data.

The rest is module work in accounts. Big weekend.

I’m trying to keep a log of everything I do - yay subversion!

I’m really excited about this version. I feel like I’m actually putting a foot forward again, and this version especially is close to being able to do everything I want. I spent two days just allowing the addition of custom fields within the application, but it certainly lays the groundwork for faster development.

Ignoring the fact that I’ve smoked far too much this weekend, if I keep up the pace I’m going I should have a fully working demo within the next month or so. Of course, I’ve said stuff like that before, but this time I’m not making any promises. Just going to keep plugging away.

Of course, now that I look at my commit logs, I notice some things need to be cleaned up and moved around. Bleck. Now I’m tired.

My Amazon.com order came today. I’m finally a proud owner of:

Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey A. Moore
The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki This is my second copy
Bootstrap - Kenneth L Hess
Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston
The Elements of Style - Strunk/White/Kalman as recommended by Stephen Fleming

Announcement: Amazon EC2 Release: Introducing Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and new public AMIs/Kernels

Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to host web sites, web services and other online applications in Amazon EC2. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your AWS account, not with your instances, and can be programmatically mapped to any of your instances. This allows you to easily recover from instance and other failures while presenting your users with a static IP address.

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/ann.jspa?annID=295

This is really good news for servware app vendors - it is becoming easier and easier to design an entire infrastructure around Amazon services.

After hearing about it enough, I finally caved…

I can be found, easily enough, at http://twitter.com/zed23

Short answer: Yes.

Recently, I had the displeasure of having to design wireframes for my application. Now, it was a very hard lesson for me to learn several years ago that I just wasn’t a designer, and the notion of even trying to dive into photoshop again made me somewhat sick to my stomach. So rather than getting into layers and gradients, I instead busted out my trusty code editor and mocked up the wireframes as how I envisioned the application being used, to the point where they were no longer wireframes at all, but a mashup of logic, aesthetics and mockups.

I kicked, screamed, dragged my feet, but eventually I did finished them. Dashboard, login, views, listings, I did it all. Actually, it was a much better exercise than I anticipated and something I’ll have to encourage other developers to do.

It’s a good exercise because it helped me think out some features I wanted to do. All of a sudden I’m staring at a blank page going “Well, that won’t work” and it’s incredibly important that I make it do so. If I hadn’t made a mockup, I would not have addressed that fact till I actually started development, or worse - built an architecture around a theory.

Some of these challenges with logic and engineering can easily be thought out. Others will creep up on you. So what if you’re not a designer. Don’t focus on the actual interface itself, focus on the presentation of the data. All the data flow diagrams and specification documents aren’t going to help if you can’t figure out how to present two objects with different metadata in the same table - which was, incidentally, my problem.

After you’ve designed a wireframe or - if you’re a little more bold - a mockup, hand it off to a designer; have them take it to the next level, get all mad scientist on it and give it some better colors than #FF0000 and #EEE. Now they have an even better idea of what kind of interface your user will need.

So in closing, don’t treat spec docs, data flow diagrams or mockups as the be all end all to your application. All of these should be used, complimenting one another; it’ll save you considerable headache in some scenarios where you scratch your head and go:

Uh, I didn’t think of that.

Inspired by: How do I write my UI specs?

Alec Saunders made a really good post about VC companies and events like the Canadian Innovation Exchange, which was promptly followed up by Rick Segal.

Both had good good points, but I found this particularly interesting:

I’d like to believe that there is more to it. I’ve been told over and over that it is the networking at event like this which really matter. In addition, there are panels/discussions/sessions that also should be worth it. While Alec isn’t going to get much out of this (he knows this drill from more angles then most), others might get some good knowledge out of the sessions, find somebody to link up with, etc.

I’ll be perfectly frank; I don’t much care for the idea of pitching investors. True I’ll need to do it eventually but personally, the notion of approaching a giant firm/company controlling millions of dollars examining everything that I tell them scares the words right out of me - not to mention turns me eleven shades of red.

Now, I’ve never approached investors, never even met one. Because of this, the investors I envision in my head are the adult version of the scary monster I imagined as a kid, with a gaping maw ready to swallow me whole.

Events like the Canadian Innovation Exchange and Founders and Funders are events I’d go to just to network. Even if nothing comes of it, it gives me a chance to communicate with both scary-investor-folk and would-be founders that are probably as scared as I. An opportunity to ask questions and puff my chest out and announce my presence in the space.

However, I maintain, let’s set up similar events in Calgary, hmmm?

…now if I can just get the courage to pick up the phone and call some of the folks Rick mentioned.