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SXSW: Use big data tools to chart your own data

clinton@cunningclinton.com — Sat, 11 May 2013 14:33:00 +1000

Summary: At SXSWi 2013 Ed Hunsinger explained how he used Splunk's big data tools to turn his personal data into visualizations of his productivity, sleep habits and more.

zdnet.com
Violet Blue
March 16th, 2013
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Content first approach to Mobile first approach to...

clinton@cunningclinton.com — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:54:00 +1000

I recently read an article that covers the emerging paradigm of responsive web and the mobile first approach. What I really took from this was the content strategy used in designing digital experiences often neglects determining the importance of individual pieces of content. Prioritizing this content goes a long way to defining your entire web experience.

The mobile first approach considers that your smallest medium of information consumption in today’s world is through mobile devices, iPhone + Android, etc. Taking this approach means your screen real-estate needs to be better utilized by providing only the most important content for the user within the smallest viewport.

The reason this really translates well into web design as a whole, is that traditionally designers have faced a desktop screen approach to fitting in all relevant information, instead of narrowing down each content elements’ importance. Not only does this focus help drive the web design, but really helps organizations understand their own internal content hierarchy and how it affects their customers.

Using content as your driving user relevance benchmark, it's becomes apparent as to where the focus should be and as you scale up your content you can see the priority of content unfolding to fit the canvas, with your central focal point always being around the most relevant user content.

Checkout this great article and critique of the Starbucks new responsive web website by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

10 Year Old presents app hack at Defcon

clinton@cunningclinton.com — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 21:58:55 +1000

Image by purpleslog via Flickr

We still live in an age where security is too much an afterthought, it doesn't *sparkle* enough – but lack thereof quickly removes any product sheen you ever had when exposed.

Inspiring to see young minds challenging the status-quo in Information Security, like this young girl at Defcon19.

PcWorld -10yr old outs security flaw

This is only a game break - the scary thing is, you’ll never even hear of the majority of security breaches your Government and Banks experience on a daily basis.

Joel on Frameworks

clinton@cunningclinton.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:16:14 +1000

Brilliant, Hilarious and very apt article on ‘Frameworks’ penned by Joel Spolsky “Joel on Software” almost 7 years ago.

It’s funny because it’s true.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431

Onion Architecture

clinton@cunningclinton.com — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:13:45 +1000

Image via Wikipedia

I like a good paradigm challenge, so when I stumbled upon this series post by Jeffrey Palermo on software architecture using an Onion layered analogy as opposed to the traditional Stacked layer analogy approach of separating concerns, I was hooked. He talks about something I’ve been battling to put my finger on for years.

The traditional, stacked, layered approach to software architecture was intended to create loose coupling has always had that noble goal – to separate concerns to a level of total layer autonomy. All the projects I’ve worked on follow this principle, yet every time it comes to an architecture overhaul it becomes clear just how tightly coupled these layers have become.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of MVC3 work lately and I like the way the .Net framework is heading, the little things like Convention over Configuration for dependency injection just make programming that much easier and step closer to purer loose coupling. This is where I stumbled onto this view of looking at dependent layers.

I believe focusing on Domain Driven Design and development is the right approach to creating an agile project that can adapt the users needs readily. That's why I like the Onion Architecture, It focuses on the clear restraint – the Business domain’s needs, no solution can un-couple from it’s requirements – otherwise it becomes something it was never intended for.

The Onion approach builds dependencies outwards from this absolute constraint and approaches projects more realistically. Read the three part series below, Jeffrey does a great job of explaining the thought process.

Jeffrey Palermo on Onion Architecture: http://jeffreypalermo.com/blog/the-onion-architecture-part-1/

Speed up Windows 7–Tips that actually work

clinton@cunningclinton.com — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 18:00:18 +1000

These performance enhancements are phenomenal and would recommend implementing these tips to anyone. Also follow the link to the registry tweak file, all up – my machine responsiveness seems to have doubled!

http://www.computingunleashed.com/speed-up-windows-7-ultimate-guide-to.html

Agile Architecture

clinton@cunningclinton.com — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:58:36 +1000

Image via Wikipedia

What is it? No more design up front? Blaspheme!

Most Architects of the day would scoff at the thought, the idea of an evolving architecture seems counter-intuitive, if I’m building a house I cant just keep changing the foundation…. Can I? Well I can, but it will have an effect on the house. Just as in Agile development, all change have an effect - It’s about weighing up the effects with the pay offs.

Picking a proven, lightweight framework to get the minimum requirement's done. Use this first step to get the conversation and tight feedback looping going from as early as possible. Feedback loops with stakeholders are vital, if you can get your lightweight framework done in a sprint (from project inception) means that you’re already getting feedback on what you system can do – and what your stakeholder wants it to do.

Your best base architecture is any architecture follow at least all SOLID principles and patterns and practices. All problems resolve to common patterns (some unique situations – but there are exceptions to every rule)

I found this talk helpful in articulating the process of Agile Architecture, in particular the Command and Query pattern / ideology.

http://pluralsight-free.s3.amazonaws.com/pluralcast/pc_045_mario_agile_arch.mp3

Welcome to BlogEngine.NET 2.5

clinton@cunningclinton.com — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 10:00:00 +1000

If you see this post it means that BlogEngine.NET 2.5 is running and the hard part of creating your own blog is done. There is only a few things left to do.

Write Permissions

To be able to log in to the blog and writing posts, you need to enable write permissions on the App_Data folder. If your blog is hosted at a hosting provider, you can either log into your account’s admin page or call the support. You need write permissions on the App_Data folder because all posts, comments, and blog attachments are saved as XML files and placed in the App_Data folder.

If you wish to use a database to to store your blog data, we still encourage you to enable this write access for an images you may wish to store for your blog posts. If you are interested in using Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, SQL CE, or other databases, please see the BlogEngine wiki to get started.

Security

When you've got write permissions to the App_Data folder, you need to change the username and password. Find the sign-in link located either at the bottom or top of the page depending on your current theme and click it. Now enter "admin" in both the username and password fields and click the button. You will now see an admin menu appear. It has a link to the "Users" admin page. From there you can change the username and password. Passwords are hashed by default so if you lose your password, please see the BlogEngine wiki for information on recovery.

Configuration and Profile

Now that you have your blog secured, take a look through the settings and give your new blog a title. BlogEngine.NET 2.5 is set up to take full advantage of of many semantic formats and technologies such as FOAF, SIOC and APML. It means that the content stored in your BlogEngine.NET installation will be fully portable and auto-discoverable. Be sure to fill in your author profile to take better advantage of this.

Themes, Widgets & Extensions

One last thing to consider is customizing the look of your blog. We have a few themes available right out of the box including two fully setup to use our new widget framework. The widget framework allows drop and drag placement on your side bar as well as editing and configuration right in the widget while you are logged in. Extensions allow you to extend and customize the behaivor of your blog. Be sure to check the BlogEngine.NET Gallery at dnbegallery.org as the go-to location for downloading widgets, themes and extensions.

On the web

You can find BlogEngine.NET on the official website. Here you'll find tutorials, documentation, tips and tricks and much more. The ongoing development of BlogEngine.NET can be followed at CodePlex where the daily builds will be published for anyone to download. Again, new themes, widgets and extensions can be downloaded at the BlogEngine.NET gallery.

Good luck and happy writing.

The BlogEngine.NET team

Orchard CMS…Install, setup and play.

clinton@cunningclinton.com — Thu, 12 May 2011 21:26:44 +1000

I’ve heard a good things about the new CMS from

Technorati Tags: Orchard,CMS,Microsoft

Microsoft – Orchard – from some fellow developers.

It’s open source. Great. Most importantly, it’s not MCMS – which I’ve never been a fan of.

I haven't had the time to look closely at it, but I found a great post via MSDN on installing, setting up and configuring Orchard. It looks quite straightforward. I like the interface screenshots, pretty enough to entice me into trying it out.

Maybe one day it will make it onto the Falcon blog CMS Fight Club

Here we go,

A foray into the installation, setup, and configuration of an Orchard site

First look at Kentico CMS 6.0 released

clinton@cunningclinton.com — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:34:31 +1000

I excitedly hurried along to the link tweeted by Kentico’s Wayne Jasek last night to a blog post covering the latest release of Kentico 6.0 CTP.

WayneJasek (@WayneJasek)
4/29/11 8:28 PM
RT @jeroenfurst: Just blogged: First look at #Kentico CMS 6.0bit.ly/jSp4x6

It’s an informative post with some screenshots, my favourite kind, and covers a high level overview of all the new features.

I’m still looking to see what architecture enhancements they’ve made behind the scenes, hopefully there’s no need for a zillion files per deployment and they’re combined into a single assembly.

I think the Online Marketing Suite was one of the most anticipated features, especially since Sitecore seems to have built a large reputation around their OMS module, soon to be renamed Direct Marketing Suite (DMS), just about every clients I have come across seem to be most interested in this feature. There’s seems to be a fair bit more analytics involved in the Kentico CTP 6.0 release, which never hurts, but just on how to implement a rules based system on these analytics isn't quite clear yet.

So far, I’d say they’re still a fair bit behind the CMS behemoth Sitecore in the Online Marketing field, but I think they’ve done well to polish off all other aspects of content management and considering most clients don't even have a clue on how to implement OMS of any kind – Kentico just might have the right angle to break them in.

One thing both Kentico and Sitecore (and many many other CMS’s) are lacking is a mature marketplace. Sharepoint and Drupal are two examples that have so many plug and play modules out there, it sometimes makes them the simplest choice for meeting all requirements quickly.

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SXSW: Use big data tools to chart your own data

Content first approach to Mobile first approach to...

10 Year Old presents app hack at Defcon

Joel on Frameworks

Onion Architecture

Speed up Windows 7–Tips that actually work

Agile Architecture

Related articles

Welcome to BlogEngine.NET 2.5

Write Permissions

Security

Configuration and Profile

Themes, Widgets & Extensions

On the web

Orchard CMS…Install, setup and play.

Related articles

First look at Kentico CMS 6.0 released

Related articles