Trey Connell

It’s good to see the Razorbacks will be going to a bowl game this year. We’ll be playing East Carolina in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, TN. We bought 4 tickets and are going with some friends of ours who we always tailgate with when Arkansas plays in Little Rock.

I really think Arkansas showed their potential this year although I have to admit I was hoping for a bit better record and a better showing in the SEC. I hate to be the typical “wait till next year!” fan, but I’m excited about seeing how far Bobby Petrino can take the Razorbacks and their newfound offensive prowess next year. If we can get the defense to show up at every game, we should have a chance for a really good season. I’m not talking BCS bowl yet, but we should get close.

As for this year’s Liberty Bowl, my prediction is that we DESTROY East Carolina. Conference USA??  C’mon – no way that team can compete with us – especially considering that playing in Memphis is going to be almost like a home game for the Razorbacks.

Go Hogs!

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I purchased the annual subscription to peepcode.com which gives me access to all screencasts and PDF eBooks they offer for one year. If they add new material after I purchased, I still get access to it – as long as my 1-year subscription hasn’t expired. I’ve found the screencasts to be of great quality and very helpful for introducing me to new concepts, languages, and tools. It’s really nice to sit back with a cup of joe and watch an instructor sometimes, and these guys do a great job.

The Pragmatic Programmers write some of the best development books out there. The great news is now they offer everything in electronic format – including PDF, .epub (eBook), and .mobi (mobile version). At an average cost of around $24 for all 3 electronic versions, these books are a steal. Also, there is no DRM and the Pragmatic Programmers site states that you are free to distribute the files to other members of your team. I purchased around 10 books and simply placed them in a secure location for our team to download.

All in, I spent about $400 for a wealth of knowledge and portable information that I can distribute to our team. That’s hard to beat when you’re trying to continue and encourage the growth of your employees but the economy is telling you to take a hike.

As creative and talented people, web designers and developers sometimes get into a funk – usually called “burn out”. I believe much of that funk can be attributed to their ever-dwindling patience with the very people they are there to serve – the customers.

It doesn’t matter if that customer is internal or external to your organization. Your job as a creative is to articulate the value of what you are proposing. And not only that, you also have to describe the process you’re going to follow in order for both you and your customer to achieve success. Finally, you have to make the sale and convince them to pay your price. That could be the internal time frame you need or real greenbacks. Sounds straightforward right? Well, it’s not.

I believe much of our frustration comes from customers who think they already know how it should be done, what’s involved, and ultimately devalue our contribution to the project. How many times have you had a customer deliver a document describing what they want on the home page of their site only to then have them turn around and say designing that home page should only take a few days because they’ve “practically done all the work already”.

What about when you build a new feature that does X but then the customer decides they want it to do Y. It’s all fun and games until the customer then asks you to revert back to X. Furthermore they think because X was already built, it’s basically like simply changing lanes on a highway or making a U-turn. “You should be able to have X back in place this afternoon right”? Slow down sparky.

Now it’s your job to explain how that code was branched a long, long time ago and you’ll have to merge it back into the product months later when 9,000 other things have been added since then. Then you’re going to have to run your testing routines and possibly do manual regression tests on the entire system to ensure you haven’t borked everything. Then THEY are going to need to test it and approve it for production launch because their idea of X 3 months ago is probably not going to be what they think X should be today. As you know, the list of details goes on and ultimately you spend 8 hours putting something in place that the customer thinks should have taken 15 minutes.

Circling to my original point, if you can’t properly and effectively communicate what you are doing, why you have to do it, the processes involved, and WHY YOU KNOW BEST AS THE EXPERT ON THE PROJECT then you’re setting yourself up for some major frustration. In my experience, customers just don’t know what they don’t know. If you take the time to explain it to them and justify what you already know is the correct approach, you’ll find your working relationship with them will improve and they will start to question less and move forward more.

We use Java as the foundation for our product framework at work. While we’ve always been pleased with Java compared to the P’s in LAMP (PHP and Perl), I’ve often wondered, “Is there an easier way? Do we really need all these pieces and parts that make up our stack? Can we build sites faster and with more predictable results?” While I think Java is a fantastic language, I think it tries to be all things to all people. We don’t need to write embedded systems. We don’t need to tie together disparate systems with middleware. We don’t need massive EJB deployments. We need to build feature-rich, dependable, scalable, and beautiful web sites. And we need to build them yesterday quickly.

Enter Ruby on Rails. I’ve been using Ruby on Rails outside of work for about a year now. The first thing I will say is that it’s FUN. At my age I don’t want to futz around with bits and bytes, memory allocation, and the like. Ruby on Rails seems to let me focus on building cool stuff and not on wrestling with the framework to bend it to my will.

The second thing I’ll say is it’s easy to get up and running and to deploy changes to your applications. We have a very intensive build and deploy process surrounding Java and our sites. Nothing makes me more frustrated than spending 30 seconds to fix a typo and having to go through a 15 minute deployment process. With Ruby on Rails, that pain point goes away since I can make changes to my code or my templates and simply refresh my browser to see those changes.

The last thing I’ll say is that I’ve been using Java for a long time and part of my infatuation with Ruby on Rails may simply be due to the fact that it’s new and exciting. Regardless, we’re going to continue to explore the Ruby on Rails framework for our next major iteration of our product. I think at the very least that it’s a good exercise, and we may just find that we need to take the plunge and move away from Java for our future web development efforts.

I love funny t-shirts, and the fact that I wear so many t-shirts (working at home!) guarantees that I’m going to wear them out quickly and need to refresh the collection. I found a great new online store to get funny t-shirts called Rizzo Tees.

Chris – the owner – runs the company out of his basement for now, but you’d never know it when it comes to his customer service. I’ve placed multiple orders with Rizzo Tees, and communication regarding my orders has always been top-notch. Chris also interacts with his customers over Twitter which gives everything a real personal service touch.

I really think Rizzo Tees is an example of a company who has it right – leverage social media, provide a simple online storefront with great products, and provide stellar customer service. When you combine those three things, you truly have something special.

Now go buy some t-shirts!

I saw this for the first time today, and it’s definitely now in my top 10 video finds on the Internet. This couple and their friends definitely take a wedding proceeding to the next level.

I can’t remember the last time I played online multiplayer on my XBox 360. I just haven’t been very social online for several months. For that matter I haven’t spent a lot of time playing video games at all. But that may change on November 10 when Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 comes out. This video makes me giddy like a school girl.

I’ve been using a free GTD system called Tracks for about a month now.  From their web site:

Tracks is a web-based application to help you implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done™ methodology. It was built using Ruby on Rails, and comes with a built-in webserver (WEBrick), so that you can run it on your own computer if you like. It can be run on any platform on which Ruby can be installed, including Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux. Tracks is Open Source, free and licensed under the GNU GPL.

So far I’m really diggin’ it. I installed it on an Ubuntu server in my office so I can always access it from my laptops or my iPhone. The application is very, very straightforward and does a good job of giving me the tools I need and none of the tools that I don’t. The mobile version (included) is also implemented very well, allowing you to enter tasks and projects quickly from your phone.

If you’ve been looking for a simple task management system you can run locally and access from many devices, Tracks might just be for you.

I’ve recently installed Kubuntu on my Acer Aspire One netbook. The Acer came with Windows XP, but I decided to dual-boot so I would be able to develop in Linux.  Kubuntu is really nice, and the install was relatively painless. However, I’m still getting used to the little quirks and unknowns of KDE.

After installing Eclipse, the first thing I wanted to do was add a shortcut to it in the KDE application launcher (equivalent to the Start Menu in Windows). I actually feel a bit silly that it took me a while to figure out how to do this. Just in case someone else is having trouble finding where to add to and edit the shortcuts in the menu, here’s how to do it.

Right click on the KDE button in the taskbar. The first option is Menu Editor. Now click it. Yeah – it’s that simple.

The KDE Menu Editor

I had been rocking along with an older version of WordPress for about 2 months now – 2.7.1 to be exact. I was hesitant to upgrade to the latest release which as of this time is 2.8.3. I knew that several plugins would be broken if I attempted to upgrade so I had been busy contacting the plugin authors inquiring about new releases that were compatible. Boy, did I learn my lesson.

I came to my site last Thursday morning to find the URLs were completely screwed up. I went into the permalinks tool and noticed my configuration had been modified to include a bunch of javascript garbage in the URL. Some ass clown had undoubtedly changed this setting in order to gain further access to my site or the server it’s hosted on.

After investigating, I found no further damage, but I was left wondering how in the world someone could have gained access to that admin tool within WordPress. I soon found the answer here. The article by Core Security Technologies identifies and describes how someone can gain unfettered access to some core admin screens as well as configuration panels for plugins by simply modifying the URL.  Specifically – inserting an additional slash before the php file name causes WordPress to bypass the privilege system checks. Not good and so simple it’s really quite horrifying.

After fixing my site, I was still loathe to upgrade WordPress without testing everything first. The phrase “bull in a china shop” comes to mind. So instead, I put in a bit of Apache mod_rewrite magic:

# Remove double (or more) slashes from the URL.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)//(.*)$
RewriteRule . %1/%2 [R=301,L]

So I had Apache protect me while I went about the process of (sanely) upgrading and testing my WordPress installation and plugins. As of today, I’m all happy on version 2.8.3, but I definitely will be paying more attention to security notices from now on.

Well, it seemed like it took a lifetime, but I finally got the”What else you got?” achievement for completing all the job tiers in New York. I can finally call myself a “Master Boss”. Not sure if it means much on a resume, but I’m going to brag about it anyway!

My bragging post on my Facebook profile

Today is my dad’s birthday so I decided to post a video of his granddaughter having a good time in celebration (well, we’ll pretend she actually knows it’s his birthday).  I used my new iPhone 3Gs since I didn’t feel like busting out the regular video camera and going through all the importing and exporting jazz.

I have to say I’m a bit surprised. Even after exporting from iPhoto and using MPEG Streamclip to convert it to flash format, the video doesn’t look half bad at only 3 Mb in flash format and 640 x 480 resolution.

Take a look: