Blog
March 20, 2012
Upgrading to MySQL 5.5 on Ubuntu 10.10
I was recently asked to upgrade the MySQL install on a Ubuntu 10.10 system. Normally these kinds of upgrades are simple affairs using built in tools like apt or yum, but in this case I was trying to go from MySQL 5.1…
March 19, 2012
NGMA Announces Annual Conference Keynote Speakers
The National Grants Management Association (NGMA) has announced the lineup of keynote speakers for its upcoming 2012 Annual Training Conference, Trends in Grants Management. The conference will be held April 22–25, 2012, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Alexandria, VA. …
AABPA Announces Spring Symposium
The American Association for Budget and Program Analysis (AABPA) has announced that registration is now open for its Spring Symposium which will be held on May 16, 2012.
The symposium will focus on providing budget and program professionals with tools for…
March 18, 2012
Too Clever?
In many weakly-typed languages, such as Javascript and PHP, you might find code that takes some ambiguous value and coerces it into a straightforward boolean like so:
$boolean = (boolean) $mixed;
But what about this radically shorter alternative?
$boolean = !!$mixed;…
The Beautiful Ternary
I am a fan of the ternary operator. Yes, it’s alien the first time you meet it, but wow, talk about getting things done! In a single line you can succinctly express a test and two options, making for truly compact yet clear…
March 16, 2012
Every Project Needs a Cat … or Why CMMI Works For Me
When the cat is away, the mice will play.
Earlier this month, TCG was re-confirmed as a CMMI Level 2 organization. Many people look at the CMMI documentation and think that it is a lot of overhead, but that’s not the way I see it.…
March 15, 2012
Adrianne Fielding New NGMA Executive Director
Adrianne Fielding is taking over as Executive Director of the National Grants Management Association. She comes from Thompson Publishing, where she was Grants Managing Editor, steering some 30 of their products. Adrianne was a member of the NGMA board and…
Web Accessibility Pays Off in Spades … or Why You Shouldn’t Count on JavaScript
Every web designer tries to make their sites as usable, understandable, and beautiful as possible. Web accessibility is the practice of ensuring that you site is equally usable and understandable for all people, including the disabled. It may not be obvious,…
March 14, 2012
Protect Yourself Against Surprise Cloud Hosting Fees
There are lots of great things about hosting a web site or service in the cloud, but price stability is not one of them. There are numerous ways a small project can get hit with a bill that is many times more than…
March 8, 2012
Debuging Dynamic JavaScript
I have always been a fan of integrated debuggers. They really help me think about tricky bits of code and verify that my solution is correct. While testing my code I like to use a debugger to watch all my variables and boolean…