http://www.innovationontherun.com Ruminations about innovation and software by Rob Di Marco Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:50:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Building a successful product is hard.  You think so much about what features a user needs and how you can have a better product than your competition, how you can win.  However, sometimes we forget an important part of the process, how do I make it easy for a customer to ... http://www.innovationontherun.com/remember-to-make-it-easy-to-buy/ I have been trying to use MapMyRide to track my workouts.  While they say they will have a JSON feed soon, for now, all I could do is work with their RSS feed to put it up on my blog. Originally, I hoped I could just use a standard WordPress RSS ... http://www.innovationontherun.com/mapmyride-wordpress-plugin-released/ Just started using Jash for debugging my JavaScript.  It is a JavaScript shell that you can dynamically startup and directly execute JavaScript functions within another webpage.  So when I am developing, I can try out new JavaScript or execute debug statements right in the page without having to edit server ... http://www.innovationontherun.com/next-useful-tool-of-the-day/ Through Hacker News I found out about DabbleBoard.  Very easy to use tool for quickly whiteboarding out diagrams online.  Still needs some work (limited shapes, not easy to collaborate), but seems very nice and easy to use.  Probably will replace Gliffy for me for simple whiteboarding exercises.   http://www.innovationontherun.com/cool-tool-of-the-day/ About six months ago, I switched my work computer to a MacBook Pro.  Today, I read a LifeHacker tip talking about easily forgotten/not know about Mac features. One that I had never heard of was using the say command, a terminal command that will speak whatever text you send ... http://www.innovationontherun.com/does-your-code-sound-good/ Started working with git for the first time last week and I am really impressed at how powerful the tool is.  I've been interested in using a distributed version control system like git, darcs, or mercurial for a while, but I have been turned off on actually making the move ... http://www.innovationontherun.com/the-power-of-git/ I'm on a hot streak tonight... Another comon problem that I have had to solve recently is how to attach a build number to files that are being generated out of an Ant build script. We have developed a versioning scheme (inspired by http://geekswithblogs.net/emanish/archive/2006/09/25/92219.aspx) for our releases where our release are ... http://www.innovationontherun.com/creating-a-build-number-with-ant-and-subversion/ One of my clients is a large e-commerce company (>$500MMin annual revenuse through their website). They use Akamai for caching some of their image data, but some of the other images are served off of their server. They are trying to minimize the load on their JBoss instances and wanted ... http://www.innovationontherun.com/integrating-cached-content-with-apache-and-jboss/ Recently I've been doing a lot of different jobs: President of my own company, 416 Software Adjunct Professor for Penn State Interim VP of Engineering for an unnamed startup doing cool things with email Build/Release/JBoss Expert General Software Consultant but for my latest title.... Management Consultant. Good to know someone takes my ranting seriously! http://www.innovationontherun.com/my-latest-job-title/ Last night I presented an Introduction to JRuby at the Philadelphia Java Users Group.  My goal was to introduce Java programmers to Ruby and get them to how features of the language allowed for functionality and code structure that is not possible in Java alone.  While I did talk about Rails ... http://www.innovationontherun.com/philly-jug-presentation-on-using-jruby/