Watch the video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=QYyXX3jVwwI

Last week, a friend of mine asked me if I was posting under Cambrian House under an alias on Tech Crunch. I said no, and didn’t pay it much thought. It wasn’t until I saw this video that I did some digging on TC and found an article that put all the pieces together for me.

It’s no secret that I used to work at Cambrian House. About a year ago now a bunch of us were gathered into a room and laid off - I don’t have any compunctions about saying this because it’s pretty common knowledge; they even admit it in the video. But when I joined CH in the early days, the idea I was introduced to sold me. Like Gord, I wanted to change the world. I watched the vision shift and mutate and evolve so quickly that I was left with my head spinning.

Near the end of my reign at Cambrian House, I didn’t see anything to really get behind. Nothing to sink my teeth into - nothing to champion. However, Let me make one thing perfectly crystal clear. Despite having naught to champion, my opinion of Cambrian House and the people therein has been a positive one. I’m not one of the guys dragging the name or the idea through the mud. Period.

[/end obligatory statement]

Enter VenCorps.

Now, this is something that I can believe in. Granted I don’t know much about it but what I do know is something like this has been so lacking in the startup space I’ve oft considered building something like it myself. This is something that I, as a startup founder myself, can sink my teeth into. Something I can emotionally and personally invest in.

Good on ya CH. Good on ya.

Most tech savvy people I know in Canada, especially entrepreneurs, already have an iPhone. Indeed, even Peter Scowen admitted to unlocking one. I decided to wait, feeling that it’d feel that much sweeter when it did arrive with all the fanfare and glory that is to be expected.

Well, I’m a little behind the game as I’m just hearing this now. But yes kids, we’ve got confirmation the iPhone is coming to Canada.

Finally.

Probably not till June though, when the 3G iPhone is anticipated, but at least now, yes, for sure it is coming. No more pranks or speculation.

Now… All I have to say is this:

It’s about damned time.

I have to admit my favorite blog to read lately has been trumped by TechCrunch and is now Rick Segal. Onlookers would say that that’s because I have a personal investment on keeping tabs on Rick because I want to go after money for Karmba eventually… In fact, it’s much more simple. I find that Rick’s posts convey a lot of wisdom (not to mention common sense) that could be applied not only to the pursuit of venture capital, but everyday business and personal life as well.

Take, for instance, Rick’s post about The No Email Thread. One line in particular stood out.

your time is just as valuable (or more) than mine

Doesn’t sound like a there is lot of ego there. Despite Rick’s history - not to mention the fact that he and his team of mad scientists control the flow of millions of dollars - he still recognizes that time is valuable and tries to conduct his business affairs in such a manner.

I think that most people in this industry could learn a thing or two by checking their ego when they open an email or go to a meeting. Programmers especially are guilty of this. We build applications, engineer specifications and somehow it gets in our brain that we’re god’s gift to [insert your demographic here].

Your time is valuable, but so is the time of the people you’re working with. If you’re not interested in an RFP, a potential client, or a partnership, take a lesson from Rick and tie it off in a respectable manner so they can move on.

Kudos Rick. Keep it up.

When I first heard about the VC Roundtable that Rick Segal is putting on, I jumped to sign up with nary a thought.

Just got an email via eventbrite.com. Looks like we’ve got a confirmation on the location.

Now, if I could just figure out what the devil I’m going to wear.

Part of what I love with ZF is the ease at which I can extend it to do what I need.

For instance, recently I was developing my app (codenamed Karmba) - something I needed to do is to be able to log every transaction, and at any time restore a version of information.

Let’s say for instance, that I have a blog - I know, I know, everyone uses that as an example, but let’s stick with something familiar, okay - and within my admin, I want to edit an entry. I start with my controller.

Disclaimer: This post is based on a real application, but isn’t all of the actual code. It is not plug and play; expecting this code to work out of the gate does not reflect what I’m trying to do.

For reference, DomainObject is just a convenience class - you can easily replace it with Zend_Db_Table

Now, let’s take a look at the Factory itself. A majority of this should be familiar to you.

Now, to illustrate my point, we create an object, Blog_Post - within Blog_Post there’s as much or as little as we need to alter the data.

Now this is where we start to see a little bit of the magic happen. Db_Table_Row (or another suitably named object) accesses functions that are called by Zend based on certain events. The event that I want to illustrate here is _postUpdate - an event that fires AFTER the object is updated. Now, a bit of hacking is required to get this to work. If you don’t know what _cleanData, _data or _modifiedFields are and how they’re used, a lot of this won’t make sense to you.

Now, inside AuditFactory is where we log all our transactions. We can revert entire objects or alternatively pick and choose what we update. That’s why every field gets a new object.

And that’s it!

This example proves how powerful the Zend_Db component of the Zend Framework is - and how contrary to popular belief - easy it is to extend existing functionality in a real world environment.

Audit factory doesn’t need to log to a database either. You could easily alter the class to the log entries to disk, or send an email, et cetera.

Feel free to comment, or expand on what I’ve said.

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

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

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?