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Finally! After months of toying with various CMS and blogging tools, our company site/blog is finally up!

Chalk it up to me being so anal about finding the perfect system to use – which finally ended up being Wordpress anyways (almost went with Drupal, but Drupal 7 isn’t around yet!)

We’ve imported all the various entries we’ve made the past two years in here, so you see a lot of stuff we’ve already blogged about – but we’ll be blogging more this year – share most of the good stuff we’ve had the opportunity to learn and do – in the hopes that you’ll share with us your good stuff! Anyways, check back with us to read more on customer development engineering, Ruby on Rails, OpenERP, and the latest on web technology!

Here’s the slides I used to explain pair progamming to my peeps – whew!

Pair programming looks like fun. We’ll be doing it next week, so more on this later!!

Before I forget (and I do it a lot), here’s the link to the file

Ever gone on a road trip – alone? Not much fun is it? With a Big Mac in your mouth, you’ve got to have one eye on the road, one hand on the steering wheel, the other eye on a map, and the other hand clutching it. Now that’s a feat even unicycle riding, ball juggling circus clowns find hard to do.

It’s the same thing with programming – on the one hand you’ve got to make sure you’re codes are syntactically correct (never mind politically), and on the other, you’ve got to think about software and database design, security, speed, scalability and a whole bunch of other issues. Now i know most of you out there can do this better than a circus clown, but the fact remains – wouldn’t it be better if there where a ‘co-driver’ so to speak?

Here’s where pair programming really shines. I used to think pair programming was just a bunch of ‘poppycock’ – two people sitting working on a single computer one the same set of codes – whatever for? So they both can slap the sense out of each other if one decides to snooze?

It turns out that, when explained the ‘co-driver’ way, it makes a lot of sense. When I do programming, and I reach a design decision point, I tend to stare off into space for a good few minutes while the cogs in my brain turn (rather slowly, I might add). It’s kinda like stopping at the side of the road to refer to your map to decide which way to go (if you’re alone of course). Having someone else figuring out the way, just makes more sense.

Ok, enuff explaining – I’m preparing training slides for this to start pair programming in my team – slides for this next post!

It’s been a while since i posted anything up on this blog. Meanwhile, our programmer fadhli, has been busy – in the right way of course.

Here’s a link to his own blog for a post that talks about rails 2.1’s new script that helps manage your database…

And i promised some posts on agile methodology last week… shame on me… one coming up next week!

I was running the functional test and didn’t realize it was sending actual emails from my data fixtures. However, I did learn how to globally set the email settings so not to send the emails out during tests.

If you want to use this, create a file called global_email_settings.rb (or whatever you want to name it) and put it in your your config/initializers/ folder. Restart your server to get rolling.

begin  unless ENV['RAILS_ENV'] == 'test'       ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp    ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {      :address => 'smtp.domain.com',      :port => 101,      :domain => 'domain.com',      :authentication => :plain,      :user_name => "",      :password => "
"    }  endend

Here’s a link to a blog with a Youtube video link talking about Google’s much awaited Android – sorta like a phoneOS…

But the keynote spells out more than that, and Vic Gondotra, one of Google’s VPs, does a good job of explaining things… and of where Google’s headed with the internet and with world domination!

Now, for geeks like me who don’t get to actually be on the scene and get all screamy and excited, the video in the link will have to do… just hope I don’t wet my bed tonight!

This week’s been a bit slow, so i’m picking up the pace this weekend for all you readers out there. I’m studying an updated version of XP today – i mentioned we needed to do some improvements on our project management methods… so expect more on this next week!

What’s Rails without Git version control right? Here’s a cheatsheet on Git by Jan Kruger from http://jan-krueger.net/git

I thought I knew it all already… well… never hurts to learn… that is, until you suffer from CM (yeah, that’s cranial meltd-… i know you know it already!)

You really know you’ve got cranial meltdown when you got that really dull throbbing at the back of your head… but peeling your eyes away from the screen is just torture – “Gotta get this thing solved by sundown!!! “&%#$(^%&*@$%$!!” – you don’t want to, no… cannot possibly, read another word of tutorials, but you know you have to… so it boils down to: do it, or die…

If you’re doing AJAX on Ruby on Rails, trust us, you’ll want to know these two words: Prototype and Scriptaculous (we don’t – yet). In the coming weeks, we’ll be posting stuff on Prototype and Scriptaculous and – if we can actually glue our brains together again – post a quick guide (or cheatsheet, if you want) for all you guys out there who don’t think they can suffer like we did today…