I finally got a UI designer to complete the mockups for my site. And when it was time to get the HTML markup, he suggested I use a “Design to HTML” service. There is lots of them out there. You pretty much give them the Photoshop PSD file, and in return they provide you with XHTML/CSS markup. So...

So you wake up in a cold sweat one night as you are in a ‘half sleep”. While you were in this delirious moment, you conjure up the most amazing idea that is going to make you a bazillion dollars and no one has done it before!!!!! ho hum…………………..BORING!!!! This...

This morning I came across the most inspiring web site – http://www.24hour-startup.com/. (watch the 3 minute video presentation here) Basically the idea was a bunch of developers, business guys and designers got together and delivered a startup, from start to finish in 24 hours. And I mean START...

In a recent project I was working on I had a requirement to be able to set up Quartz jobs programatically as the application is running. So in other words, when the app is started, there are no jobs scheduled or running, but through a user interface, create jobs and schedule them. I could not find any...

I am a big fan of the Apple AppStore process, and I find myself buying anything that I think will be useful. And generally they work. But recently, I bought an App that just would not work for me. So a disclaimer; The application was Mini Confluence, which is an Atlassian Confluence Client for the iPhone....

I recently re-discovered a power feature on Firefox, and its ability to use keywords to help Firefox know which search engine you want to use without having to select it from the search engine lists. Why do this, well if you are like me, and get annoyed at the need of selecting a search engine form...

For those of you that know me, you will know that I am a big fan of Grails and Groovy. This week we have had 2 huge announcements. Firstly that VMWare has acquired SpringSource (Groovy and Grails custodian), and then Grails 1.2 M2 got released yesterday. I downloaded 1.2 M2 last night and I am super...

Today is my last day at Optus. I started here just shy of 3 months ago, and decided to leave to start an exciting new role within a small organisation in Freight & Logistics (more to come on that later). It was my latest foray back in a large organisation, and I have to admit, I am pretty sure I...

I recently purchased the “5 for 5″ deal with Confluence and Jira from Atlassian, but I wanted to use it for something useful rather than just run it on a local server. So then I had to go through the usual process of finding some kind of hosting service that will allow me to run java apps....

Don’t you hate that? When you are working on something, and people start raising problems that we don’t actually have. In traditional projects, this is disguised under the term “risk”. Raise it, acknowledge it, maybe have one person spend 5 minutes thinking about it, then shelve...