I was perusing Chris Bowen's blog and saw some exciting news from Microsoft:They've lauched a new program called "BizSpark" that offers "...tools, mentoring, and support" to the startup community. Basically you get a crapload of free software (easily over $100,000 worth), support (over the web), guidance (supposedly including investors?), and visibility (always a good thing). More saliently, you're able to use that software on live, production servers once you launch. Holy crap!

 I think this is a great idea for Microsoft. So many startups are going on Ruby On Rails, Python (Django), and PHP, and that's a big risk for Microsoft. Can't blame them for trying to get in on the entrepreneurial marketplace.

I've long wanted to start a business, and always assumed that I'd have to do it on an open-source stack. This would definitely make me reconsider those choices.

Sorry for the non-technical post, but this one comes from the heart. I'm a big fan of Andrew Zimmern's show "Bizarre Foods", as well as Tony Bourdain's "No Reservations". Both shows (featured on the Travel Channel) involve travelling to exotic countries and eating, as you might guess, somewhat bizarre foods.

On both shows they've travelled to Asia, where they ate the "durian" fruit.  Zimmern hated it with a burning passion, though he made a go at it twice. Bourdain loves the stuff, though he admits that   "Its taste can only be described as...indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother." Jonathan, my stepson, is half Chinese, and his Dad's family loves the stuff. I was intrigued, so Jonathan brought some home last night. How can I describe it? He brought the pulp home in a sealed tupperware container. When he opened it up, the bottom floor was immediately filled with the stench of rotten onions. It was horrid -- within seconds my stepdaughter was yelling from 4 rooms down. Jonathan then presented me with a spoon. Egad. I took a small bit -- 1/3rd of a teaspoon, perhaps. I popped it into my mouth and somehow forced myself to swallow. As expected, it was horrible. Terrible. It tasted like rotten onions crossed with gasoline crossed with death, all topped with 2 gallons of high-fructose corn syrup. I managed to keep it down, and was then blessed with 2 hours of durian burps that were worse than the flavor itself. So, in short -- if someone ever offers you a taste of this exotic fruit, kick them firmly in the lap and run away.

There's an excellent conversation with Jonathan Yarmis at PCWorld entitled How Businesses Can Benefit From Social Networking. Excellent read -- I especially like how they talk about avoiding the "kumbaya effect". 

Another high point is that many businesses initially jump in to social networking for their external site, but find out it's much more valuable on internal (intranet/extranet) pages. It makes sense, really -- on your public site you'd mainly use the tools for marketing, with limited initial impact. However, when you leverage such tools for internal knowledge share you get a lot more ROI.

We had a meeting recently with the CTO of Ektron. He showed us how he managed his European sales team using the Ektron social networking tools. It was pretty impressive how naturally and easily information flowed.

Anyhow, check out the article -- good stuff!

 

In a  previous post  I talked about  Stack Overflow , a site where developers can ask and answer development-related questions. It has finally gone live, and it's an awesome site. It's rapidly gained a high place on my list of development tools I can't live without.

Here's Joel's description of how it works:

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. This is a community project, so I’m being careful to avoid saying this is how it will work… that’s up to the community. But this is roughly what I have in mind.

Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question.

Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.

If you're a developer, you need to use this site. Really

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, beloved readers. From the end of Spring through most of the Summer things were pretty calm. I find it hard to get an interesting post together when I'm not being challenged at work, you know?

All of a sudden I find myself very, very busy -- the opposite problem, but now I find I'm too busy to post! Hopefully soon things will get back to a happy medium, and I can get back to regular posting.

These days I'm working on an Ektron site for a major securities broker/dealer. After that's done, I start on an extranet for the same company, as well as 2 other extranets for the Mennonite Mutual Aid association. Interesting projects, all of them.

I am pleased to announce the release of our rebuild of www.mennonitefinancial.com -- the Mennonite Financial Federal Credit Union website. It's a complete restructuring/revitalization of their public site, and represents a huge graphical improvement over the previous version.

The site was built in asp.net/C# and uses the Ektron CMS400.net CMS.

Almost every day in the "Answers" section of LinkedIn asking about automated testing of a web page. This one is typical : "What is a good Open source / Free test automation acceptance and regression tool for dot net applications?".

My usual response is "We've had great success using Watir for automated testing in IE. It's built in Ruby, so there may be a bit of a learning curve. Still, there are excellent tools out there to record and build scripts."

Watir, short for "Web Application Testing in Ruby", is a free, open-source testing library for the Ruby language.  It's very easy to use, and extremely powerful.  The Watir engine automates an instance of Internet Explorer (or Firefox, if you use Firewatir),  and gives you easy access to the page content. It's a real lifesaver when dealing with testing multiple page forms.

A simple example in Watir to test my blog page:

require "watir"

# open the IE browser

ie = Watir::IE.new 

ie.goto "http://danimal.acsysinteractive.com"

if ie.text.include? "Musings on web development"  
puts "  Test Passed. Found the test string: 'Musings on web development"
else
puts "  Test Failed! Could not find: 'Musings on web development'." 
end 

Obviously, that's a basic example, but it's very easy to click buttons, follow links, and the like. However, for longer tests you don't really want to hand-write all of the Ruby code. That's where a script recorder is very useful. With a recorder such as Watir Recorder, you can simply browse a site in the application to record the script. Save it as a .rb file and you can run it over and over again.

Frequent testing of your GUI with Watir, and unit testing your business logic can go a long way toward quality code. If you're not using something like Watir, why not check it out?

We have a tight team here at Acsys -- a great bunch of people who get along very well. We work hard and play hard, and have a lot of fun.

One way we keep our team so tight is daily teambuilding exercises -- namely, playing first-person shooter games. For the past several months we've been playing Unreal Tournament 2004 at lunch, blowing the heck out of eachother over and over again. And yes, it really has helped us build our team -- we have fun, but we learn to work together closer than we ever had before.

We're going through a bit of a culture shift now, though -- we're switching from UT to Team Fortress 2.  Like all changes there is a certain fear of change, but we're getting through it ok. It's a great game, and emphasizes teamwork even more than UT2004.

I'd love to be able to involve some of you gentle readers in our games. Any tech companies interested in a daily tournament?

 

How do you guys build your teams? I'd love to hear from you. 

I love my job. Love it love it love it. I love writing code, love debugging weird problems, love designing systems. To me programming is the perfect combination of craft and art, a daily combination of puzzle-solving and painting castles in the air.

That's why Scott Hackett's post "What would I do without programming" got me thinking. His post was an ode to the joys of being a programmer, but made me think about what I would do if there were no programming to be done.

Sure, it's counterfactual musing, but still merits thought. I like solving problems, working with cool tech, and making a difference for my company. I'm not so fond of business qua business, so my undergrad studies (finance and Asian languages) wouldn't help much. Sales, too -- too much stress, too much insecurity.

I guess I'd have to go with something like medicine. Docs solve puzzles -- tough, real puzzles -- on a daily basi, and get to play with cool tech as well. Maybe that's why I have Doc Shazam in my blogroll? 

What about you, my gentle readers? What would you do if your chosen career path were unavailable?