The longer you stay in software, the more technologies you’ll likely see become commoditized. Things that once used to be quite difficult, specialized, and costly inevitably become simple, accessible, and cheap (if not free). Some examples of capabilities that have been commoditized might include: Antivirus CMS’ Source Control Advanced hosting/infrastructure (e.g. Geo-redundant storage, elastic computing, … Continued
Installing assemblies into the GAC is no longer straight forward. In the good ol’ days it used to be as simple as dragging a file into the Assembly folder. Or using the gacutil.exe. Neither is available any longer. According to various posts out in the wild wild web, the updated .NET 4 version of gacutil.exe … Continued
IBM Cognos has a special name for a Framework Manager model that can absorb changes without affecting the reports already written and published to the Cognos Connection web portal. They are called “Durable Models” and by following a few best practices you can create (or update) FM models that empower your reporting authors to spend … Continued
Still Kicking For those who track this stuff, Mono will turn 10 years old this summer. Since June 30th 2004, the Mono team has been relentlessly trailing the ever evolving CLR (Microsoft’s implementation of the CLI), and hasn’t seemed to stop or get bored with the idea. At time of writing, they still trail a … Continued
Setting the $JAVA_HOME environment variable on the Mac OS can be a little confusing. I hope this clears things up. Open either ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile in your favorite editor. I am using TextMate and I prefer editing ~/.profile. Add “export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)” to the file and save it. You can reload the current environment without logging … Continued
Mac OS X Mountain Lion comes with Apache installed but not enabled. Here are the steps to re-enable Apache 1. Open the OS X Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/) 2. Create and open an Apache user configuration file named for your account in your favorite editor. I am using TextMate so I used the following command sudo mate … Continued
I recently spun up a MicroStrategy VM to be used as a demo/training box. In doing so it seemed natural to throw it on a Windows Server 2012. MicroStrategy 9 is shiny and new, Windows Server 2012 is shiny and new, what could possibly go wrong? Well, I’m posting about it. There’s the first clue. 1st … Continued
In my last 2 posts I discussed the importance of engaging in a postmortem at the end of your projects and promised to provide a template that can be followed when gathering feedback prior to the meeting and consolidating feedback during the meeting. Templates like this have been created and posted all over the web … Continued
So I jumped at the idea of working on a PHP/Zend project. I mean, who doesn’t relish the thought of developing in a weakly-typed language that seems more like a virtual explosion of the key-word and function factory than an actual language alongside a bloated, overly complex MVC framework? Throwing caution to the wind, I … Continued
“How do you get data organized and stored so that Business Intelligence tools can access and distribute valuable information to the right people at the right time?” I intend to summarize a technique that I have used for several years now and will do a deep dive on each topic in future posts. I adopted … Continued
