http://kylecordes.com Kyle Cordes's Software Site Mon, 12 May 2008 01:38:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Historically I have not been a fan of “frameworks”, and I have often repeated the following joke: What’s the difference between an application and a framework? An application is something a customer actually wants! However, for some applications, I recommend use of an application framework. For some Oasis Digital projects, I require it: Please, ... http://kylecordes.com/2008/05/11/please-web-framework/ I’ve been attracted to, and trying out, various distributed source control tools for the last two years, and have come to the conclusion that the most likely “winner” is Git. Git does a great many things right, good progress is being made in the few areas it is weak, and ... http://kylecordes.com/2008/04/30/git-windows-go/ A couple of months ago I posted about using the current model Comtrol RocketModem IV with Debian / Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu/Debian includes an older “rocket” module driver in-the-box, which works well for older RocketModem IV cards. But for the newest cards, it does not work at all. The current RocketModem ... http://kylecordes.com/2008/04/18/debian-rocketmodem-package/ I’ve been trying out various distributed source control tools, and used several of them for various very small projects. I’ve most mostly settled on git as the one I prefer, but I haven’t yet published any code with it. Also, I’ve been frustrated that git support for Windows has been ... http://kylecordes.com/2008/03/22/git-windows-works/ On one of our projects, we’ve been using the Comtrol RocketModem IV for several years, for both modem communications and FAXing (with Hylafax). All of our RMIVs have been completely reliable and very easy to get working under Linux, particular Ubuntu/Debian which includes the rocket driver in-the-box. Then we got a ... http://kylecordes.com/2008/02/18/rocketmodem-iv-linux/ A few months ago Alex Miller pointed me to this Delphi doom article (the site appears to be down at the moment), which reminded me to post about the same topic. Here goes. Delphi shipped in 1995, and its demise has been declared frequently since 1997 or so. In a sense ... http://kylecordes.com/2008/01/14/delphi-dead/ Last year I posted about the use of a Joe Celko-style nested set hierarchy representation, for fast hierarchy queries. Here I will describe another approach which is simpler to query, but more wasteful of space. I did not invent this transitive closure approach, I learned of it from several ... http://kylecordes.com/2008/01/13/transitive-closure/ Last year I gave a talk on Ruby GUI toolkits, and concluded that none of those I looked at were compellingly slick or mature. There is a new player on the field now (thus certainly not mature, but interesting nonetheless): Shoes, from why the lucky stiff. Shoes creates native applications with ... http://kylecordes.com/2008/01/10/shoes-ruby-gui/ The title of this post is a lie. It costs $70 or less, but takes a lot of work. I've offered this advice person-to-person many times, and finally got around to posting it. How well you speak can have a great impact on  your ability to get customers, to attract employees, ... http://kylecordes.com/2007/11/03/better-speaker-100-dollars/ I’ve been a fan of Joel Spolsky for years, though I haven’t agreed with everything he’s written, and even mocked him a bit. Joel has written at length on his web site and in print about attracting the best developers, and one aspect of that has bothered me: How do you ... http://kylecordes.com/2007/10/31/great-developers/