January 30, 2009
Last Saturday I spent the day at ProductCamp here in Austin. It was my first ProductCamp, and I'm sure it won't be my last. What is ProductCamp? From the ProductCamp wiki: ProductCamp is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on Product Marketing and Management topics. At ProductCamp everyone participates: by presenting, leading a roundtable discussion, helping with logistics, securing sponsorship, or volunteering. ProductCamp is a great opportunity for you to learn from, teach to, and network with professionals involved in the Product Management, Marketing, and Development process from the Austin area! The first ProductCamp Austin had over 130 people sign up, and over 90 participate. Inspired by Austin's great participation, the ProductCamp concept has swept to other cities such as Toronto and Boston! Put simply: ProductCamp is a bunch of smart, passionate people coming together to discuss, debate, and…
February 16, 2009
Last week, I blogged about a recent support issue an Amdocs customer was facing. They had contacted Amdocs, but couldn’t get assistance. We helped the customer solve the problem even though we have no support agreement with that customer. Well, we are at it again. Last week, Jorge posed a question on ITtoolbox for the Clarify experts. Seems Jorge “tried Amdocs' tech support but they said it would require an enhancement ($$$) of their doing.” Not content to have another Amdocs customer go away unhappy, Gary Sherman solved Jorge’s issue. You can see the full exchange , but as you can see below, Jorge got the answer he was looking for: Reply from jcruz1965 on 2/16/2009 10:32 AM “Hi Gary, I was able to squeeze on some time on Friday and implement your fix in our development system. Worked flawlessly. I now have to talk to the business…
While reviewing what I did to Create an RSS Feed Using ASP.Net. We got worried that overzealous customers or feed readers might hit this feed kind of often, and since the data served up by the feed does not change too a lot we could easily do some caching. Luckily this is easy to do using ASP.Net’s built in caching support. Unfortunately the code to, programmatically, setup the caching is a little ugly. To make things easier to read I added a couple extension methods to create a very poor man’s DSL. Following the Microsoft code example is ugly Seeing the code below in my HttpHandler made me cringe. Hopefully it makes you cringe too. TimeSpan freshness = Timespan.FromHours(1); DateTime now = DateTime.Now; context.Response.Cache.SetExpires(now.Add(freshness)); context.Response.Cache.SetMaxAge(freshness); context.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Server); context.Response.Cache.SetValidUntilExpires(true); context.Response.Cache.SetValidUntilExpires(true); context.Response.Cache.VaryByParams["days"] = true; The essence of what I want to do…
January 14, 2009
jQuery just released its latest version, and celebrates its 3rd birthday as a JavaScript Library. The big features of this release are: Sizzle: A sizzlin’ hot CSS selector engine. Live Events: Event delegation with a jQuery twist. jQuery Event Overhaul: Completely rewired to simplify event handling. HTML Injection Rewrite: Lightning-fast HTML appending. Offset Rewrite: Super-quick position calculation. No More Browser Sniffing: Using feature detection to help jQuery last for many more years to come. jQuery at Dovetail Software Almost all of our current development projects are using jQuery, so upgrading to the new version to take advantage of the new features and performance will be an exciting improvement. The performance gains in the selector engine and HTML injection should help us improve our software. The benefits of using jQuery is already apparent, and we continue to use it more…