I really enjoyed Taken

Just watched Taken and it was a well done film. It had a pace more akin to the Bourne movies with a better actor at the helm. I don’t know why it didn’t do so well at the box office, I thought that it had more emotional impact then any recent spy type movies I’ve seen. The action sequences were more of a desperate warrior then a calm martial artist and every scene imparted tension....

May 19, 2009 · 1 min · Aaron Held

Peeling back the onion of stupidity

I’ve mentioned the book Adrenaline Junkiesin a previous post and I’m not seeing the value in a common language for discussing problems. Today’s pattern is the ‘Onion of Stupidity’. This is a common pattern where you build up hack upon workaround upon compromise, inject a little shortsightedness and wind up seeing a good chunk of your effort goes into cleaning it up. A colleague here promoted the term “technical debt” to describe issues were we these types of issues and help us prioritize them....

May 7, 2009 · 2 min · Aaron Held

Just show up

Sometimes the answer really isn’t that hard. We were recently having a lunch conversation and talking about how to get involved in the local tech community. Kevin simply stated “Just show up”. It was a stunningly simple answer. To people that have had the great experience of being involved in the Philly tech scene this seems obvious. As a Gen ‘X’er that moved around the east coast during the dotCom days let me say this is an unual and fantastic community....

May 2, 2009 · 3 min · Aaron Held

coupling de-coupled CMS

I’m hip deep in the design of a new CMS to power some large scale sites. The big buzzword going on at this level is around how the CMS products are designed to be ‘de-coupled’. Specifically we are talking about decoupling the deliver of the site from the management of the content. This is very understandable, as your backend needs can be very different then the portal. The backend CMS has rigid security and workflow concerns and the front-end is optimized to serve pages fast....

April 27, 2009 · 1 min · Aaron Held

grails java.sql.SQLException: Table not found in statement [insert into

I’m spinning up a new grails experiment this weekend and ran into an error that I could not effectively google. So hopefully by adoping the very SEO style title others will benefit. I really want to like grails, it is a full stack web development framework modeled after Ruby on Rails but written Groovy with full access to the JVM. I have an excellent project in mind for some facebook integration using a Java library I’ve some experience with so grails seemed to fit....

March 8, 2009 · 2 min · Aaron Held