IT on Computers Fear Me

Remembering Steve Jobs

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I was 12 years old in 1980 when I first saw an Apple computer. It was at a friends house. He showed me some games, used a synthesizer program to create some music and showed me a program he had written and I was hooked. I went home that night with a recording of the music and played it for my father. I said, if we had an Apple II we could do things like that. I really wanted it. Well my dad, being an electrical engineer, was into electronic gadgets and I guess he thought it would be good to have a computer in the family, so he bought one!

The Common Denominator of Successful Programmers

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

PHP File Upload Size Issues

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ran into a problem when I was maintaining a customer’s site today. They wanted to upload 10 - 20 MB movies as attachments to their Drupal blog posts. The standard limit set in Drupal is 2MB. I changed the setting to no avail. There was a note at the bottom stating that my PHP settings limited the upload to 4MB. So I did a search and come up with this post. So I changed my upload_max_filesize setting to “20M” this still did not work. The problem is that PHP also limits the post size and my default config limited post size to 8MB.

IE Rendering Problems Solved

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A Review of jBPM

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Lately I have been reading the hype surrounding the concept of Business Process Modeling (BPM) systems. I always take this stuff with a grain of salt because I have not seen an idea that lived up the hype since the Object Oriented hype of the early nineties. I know some would debate that point and of course I don’t mean to say that OO lived up to some of the more absurd hype. I remember some marketing fools actually were saying that OO would allow us to get rid of programmers. However, in this case, I think BPM and Graph Oriented Design/Programming has the potential to rival OO in its impact on our industry and jBPM is an excellent entry into this market.

SOA - Something old & Something New

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I just read the article linked above and I have to tell you I am never surprised at how often I hear old ideas repackaged as new ones and then marketed aggressively like they were some kind of handed down wisdom. The truth is, SOA adds very little but a buzz word. Grady Booch was talking about loose coupling being imperative for programming in the large, as he put it, back in 1994. Back in 2000 the buzz was “Component” architectures and further back it was “Object-Oriented”. The problem is not with the technologies, it is with the people.