clickonchris

Sunday Quick Hits

Christopher G Johnson — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:54:00 -0700

Here are today's blogworthy thoughts that I don't care to write entire articles about * My team and I at Geneca finished our B2B auction web application ahead of schedule last week and there was much rejoicing. I had a lot of fun on the project. * About two and a half weeks ago now I finished my summer MBA course: Cost Accounting. Man am I glad that's over. * Today I upgraded "RedCloth":http://redcloth.org/ on my rails app to 4.0. Dreamhost didn't have redcloth installed by default however and to make it work I ended up having to create a gem repository in home directory - it ended up being a real pain in the ass. I mostly followed the instructions on doing so from here: "http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/RubyGems#Application_Specific_Gems":http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/RubyGems#Application_Specific_Gems * I saw an "old post":http://www.clickonchris.com/articles/show/18 I made last year saying I dropped my yearly hosting costs to $23. Renewal time came around again and without being to use a promo code it costs $119/year. Dreamhost has been pretty good and I don't feel like shopping around for a new host so I bit the bullet and paid it. ouch.

Red Ring of Death Claims Another Victim

Christopher G Johnson — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:20:00 -0700

!http://www.clickonchris.com/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=183312&g2_serialNumber=1! Today I turned my XBox 360 on for the first time in three weeks and was greeted by the telltale sign that your 360 has bit the dust: The dreaded Red Ring Of Death!
I keep my 360 in an enclosed entertainment center, but I keep the entertainment center door open while using it - otherwise it would overheat after 5-20 minutes of playing. This has been unfortunate as the thing gets LOUD when it heats up during operation. The noise is actually my biggest complaint (well it used to be until the RROD). I received the unit around Christmas 2006; I'm not sure what generation that makes it. Click "more.." for the rest of the story

Craigslist: it works!

Christopher G Johnson — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:39:00 -0700

My first experience with "craigslist":http://www.craigslist.com this week was a good one. In case you're not up on the latest trends, craigslist is an online classified advertisement site where it is free to post a classified ad. Its one of the big reasons that the classified section in your newspaper keeps getting smaller and smaller. Anyway, I was trying to sell a fridge. I put the ad up, and not 5 hours later I got a reply from a buyer. He picked up the fridge and paid in cash the same day!
So in case you're keeping score: Craigslist - 1, Mass-emailing your family - 0

ASP.NET isn't so bad

Christopher G Johnson — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 06:15:00 -0700

Previous to my new job it had been a long time since I did any programming in asp. That would have been around 2003 when working on the Augustana College marketing club webapp. I was soured on it then, convinced that PHP was the superior language. To be fair, asp.net is more of a set of tools for creating a webapp (since you can use any .net language you want), where as classic asp was really its own language.
Lots of things have changed since then and I'm finding myself enjoying building apps in asp.net as opposed to PHP or Java. I will still maintain that Java lends itself better to large, scalable webapps because of ejb and its built-in transaction handling. However, if your goal is to make a complex UI and make it quickly, I'd lean towards asp.net

Inside Nuance's Dictaphone Healthcare Dept, Part 2

Christopher G Johnson — Sat, 31 May 2008 15:00:00 -0700

This is the second part of a two-part article. I was recently laid off from Nuance Communications. This is the story of what I did at Nuance and why I was laid off. "Part 1":/articles/show/31 was the "why I was laid off". This part two is about my part on the ill-fated FX project.
The FX team was very diverse and we made heavy use of offshoring/outsourcing. There were five full time developers(including myself) and the project manager

Inside Nuance's Dictaphone Healthcare Dept, Part 1

Christopher G Johnson — Fri, 30 May 2008 06:55:00 -0700

This is the story of the Dictaphone FX project – of how it almost was, and how it got canceled – from someone very close to the project (me). I have since been released from Nuance and am now working for a company called "Geneca":http://www.geneca.com. This article is rather lengthy for me and covers several topics. This is part 1, which covers the business perspective, or 'Why Nuance canceled the project and laid me off'. Part 2 will cover the technical perspective, of 'What went into FX'.

Clickonchris is Web 2.0!

Christopher G Johnson — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:53:00 -0700

I have implemented AJAX style comments system. If you click on the 'Add Comment' button below you can see it. The difference is that now you are presented with a comments form appears within the existing page instead of a comments form being on a new page, as was the previous behavior. This is AJAX, and it is the technology that people are calling Web 2.0. What's the big deal you ask? By having the ability to only update parts of a web page instead of updating the whole page every time you invoke some function, it makes the browser act more like a desktop application than a web page. The end result is more robust applications served over the web. Think google maps or facebook.

Chris Johnson Highlights

Christopher G Johnson — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:13:00 -0700

In case you didn't hear, I was drafted by the Tennessee Titans in the '08 draft. I wanted to share my college highlight reel with you: Ok, for anyone who doesn't know me, I'm not that Chris Johnson; its just a coincidence. I like to think I'm fast, but not that fast.

I am Linked In!

Christopher G Johnson — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:46:00 -0700

I have created a linkedin profile. At first I thought linkedin was going to be a facebook or myspace ripoff, but I see now that it's really a great tool for professional networking. In fact, given that I'm studying business administration and that I have a passion for web applications, I think that linkedin is pretty awesome.
"www.linkedin.com/in/johnsonchristopherg":http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsonchristopherg

Java Project Versioning with perforce+ant

Christopher G Johnson — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:19:00 -0700

I recently developed a useful ANT task to automatically increment a version number on your Java project when using perforce as your source control application. This task is intended to be run as part of an automated build. It checks out version.properties and checks it back in after incrementing. Click "more.." to see the full article.