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Thu, June 10, 2004 (Creating boxes with Latex, vacation)

Here's a quick example of how I create a box with borders using Latex. I also show how to include a box inside a table. My motivation for this is discussed there also.

By Alvin Alexander on June 10, 2004

The vigilance of great developers, part 2

Unfortunately, time does not permit me the opportunity to delve deeply into my thoughts here. So, here's a short list of areas within the development process that developers think are "nonnegotiable":

  1. Code quality. No sloppy code, no repeated code.
  2. Source code control. Gotta have it.
  3. Repeatable build processes.
  4. Dedicated development, test, and production environments.

There is also a secondary list of items that are close to these ... but that will have to wait for another day.

 

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011

The vigilance of great developers

One quality I've seen in great developers is that they are vigilant, merciless, and uncompromising in certain key areas. These are areas of the development process that are nonnegotiable. Even on their laziest days, these are the practices that they know that, if they break the rule once, they may break it again, or that this might open the door for another person to break this rule.

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011

Flash - How to remove the Flash plugin

Big-time sick today, and I'm trying to slip in a little work between sleeping spells, but Flash is killing me on my slow home PC. Here's a link to uninstall the Flash plug-in. Seems like Macromedia could provide an uninstall program or otherwise make this easier (argh!). I don't think most people would be brave enough to follow these instructions ... but maybe that's the point.

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011

Tue, June 1, 2004 (Book ideas, old notes)

RR tells me that Neuromancer by William Gibson might be a good sci-fi book to read on the upcoming vacation. It has some Matrix correlations. Oprah also had an interesting book idea about a deaf person during the depression. I can't remember the name of the book right now, but the first name of the author is "Carson".

While cleaning up my home office over the long weekend I also found an old note, and a good reminder, about the Hawthorne Effect. Another old note about JTest and JContract remind me of things I need to test!

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011

Fri, May 28, 2004 (New search engine online)

I finally got the new search engine running. It's not Lucene, but it works just fine. You can now search the blog at this URL.

By Alvin Alexander on May 28, 2004

Thu, May 27, 2004 (Principles of task flow for web applications)

Here's a link to a nice article where the author at boxesandarrows.com discusses the principles of task flow in web applications. His approach makes for some nice, if not overly simplified, web pages. Generally speaking, I agree that his approach is good for the majority of web users.

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011

Wed, May 26, 2004 (Two LaTeX sample files)

I just started a LaTeX section in this blog. Today I'm including two LaTeX examples that I often use as reference material:

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011

Sat, May 22, 2004 (Lyrics from the IBM Songbook)

Hmmm, it looks like maybe somebody was working a little too hard one day ... here's a link to the "IBM Songbook". Somebody *should* buy the guy a drink.

By Alvin Alexander on September 4, 2009

LaTeX strikeout tag (Thu, May 13, 2004)

Some of my cohorts in development are using the Hibernate object/relational mapping software with decent success.

And although this must seem trivial to most people, last night I found the LaTeX "strikethrough" (strikeout) capability I've been looking for. Just use the "sout" tag in the "ulem" package. I don't know why that had to be so hard to find (arghhh).

By Alvin Alexander on August 6, 2011
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