http://binarymuse.net From the mind of a geek Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:12:10 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Matt Gemmell brings up an interesting point in a recent blog post regarding user choice and defaults in software design. But a problem arises when you allow precision-based design principles to hinder user experience. All too often, when faced with a decision about how to implement certain functionality, engineers take the ... http://binarymuse.net/2010/03/12/engineer-thinking-and-the-art-of-software-engineering/ This is a nifty tip I picked up somewhere on the Internet to show the Git or Subversion branch you are currently working in on the command line prompt. I haven't done a ton of serious programming under Subversion, but I know with Git I'm branching all the time (branches ... http://binarymuse.net/2010/02/22/current-working-git-or-snv-branch-on-the-prompt/ smallsoftware dreamland by ~lopagof at deviantART There are a lot of choices in the world of technology these days, and it doesn't take a well-thought-out Google query to find a huge following of people on any side of any given topic. Of course, there isn't a digital war older or that ... http://binarymuse.net/2010/02/20/the-operating-system-wars-cant-we-all-just-get-along/ Prior to my current job, I never really did any "serious" programming. I had a few web sites, some tools and such I created for myself at home, and so on. The biggest team I worked on for a serious project was two people strong--myself and a good friend of ... http://binarymuse.net/2010/02/16/how-come-no-one-told-me-about-git/ You may have heard the name “Google Wave” thrown around recently in tech news. Google Wave is Google’s hot new product, still in development and testing via an invitation, much like how Gmail started out. But what is Google Wave? Well, let’s start there. What Is Google Wave? When I was trying ... http://binarymuse.net/2009/10/21/why-you-should-be-excited-about-google-wave/ This post is part of the “ITworks Design Journal” series. In a prior post, I mused about the advantages and disadvantages of using GWT's RPC implementaion for server-side communication versus something like another server-side technology with JSON. I went and found some folks more experienced with GWT than I, did some reading, ... http://binarymuse.net/2009/05/26/itworks-design-journal-gwt-rpc-it-is/ This post is part of the “ITworks Design Journal” series. Currently, ITworks uses JSON generated via PHP for client-server communication. This decision was made for several reasons: I am not extremely familiar with Java servlets or serving them (ie, Tomcat, etc) I am not familiar ... http://binarymuse.net/2009/05/15/itworks-design-journal-gwt-rpc-vs-json/ This post is part of the “ITworks Design Journal” series. ExtJS has been working on version 2.x of GXT, built upon GWT version 1.6. Recently, ExtJS released the milestone 1 "release" of GXT, and I decided to upgrade and see what all the fuss was about. Before I could test anything, some changes ... http://binarymuse.net/2009/04/23/itworks-design-journal-gwt-16-and-gxt-20/ This post is part of the “ITworks Design Journal” series. Where I work, we authenticate against an Active Directory server. In an effort to help the consolidation of usernames and passwords, I decided that users of the ITworks app should also authenticate against the AD, and that the user's role, or ... http://binarymuse.net/2009/04/01/itworks-design-journal-authentication/ This post is part of the “ITworks Design Journal” series. After deciding on a language and framework for the new inventory/work order application, I started to write some code. I wrote a couple of samples just to get the hang of the widgets and how handlers worked and all that jazz. ... http://binarymuse.net/2009/03/27/itworks-design-journal-spaghetti-code/