Those of you who know me, know I am an old school database guy. One of the things I miss from my pre-web programming days is sitting down with an Entity-Relationship Diagramming tool and painting a picture of the database I want for my application. Since moving to MySQL as my primary database, I’ve tried out several ERDs. I’ve loved at least one, hated most others for either lack of features or price tag – or both – or been generally just unimpressed.

In the second half of April I got an Email from Patrick Smacchia. I was very surprised, I mean, I’ve follow Patrick’s blog for some time and I though “this guy is really smart” so I was excited about getting in touch with him (starting from his side by the way), and while I’ve heard of his product Visual NDepend, I’ve actually never tried it and neither paid too much attention about the product itself. It was embarrassing because he was kind enough to offer me a Pro License to try it, evaluate it and see if it was functional and useful for me.

Whether you are a FrontPage user of Yesterday or a Brand New Web Designer of Today, learning Expression Web may be a bit more challenging than you first thought.

With the release of Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has brought lot more cool stuffs to both the web developers and end users. For the end user it’s faster and cleaner browser. For the web developer, a improved JavaScript engine, HTML 5 supports and few more. One of which is the download-able fonts support, introduced by Firefox 3.5.

It's been quite a while since this blog featured information on GraphicsBuilder, I'm pleased to announce that the builder is not dead, it actually has been rebooted with a new name, GfxBuilder, its sources can now be found under the Griffon umbrella project.

An OpenIDAvatar, or open identification avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

The other day I had a look at NDepend website visits by countries statistics (produced by Google Analytics). Despite some important bias the result were pretty interesting, enough to be published publicly.

Here's an expansive archive of tasty programming quotes. Someplace to come for inspirations, or when you need a pithy line to drop and just can't put it into words yourself.

Throughout my 20s and 30s, I played D&D and other fantasy role playing games at least once a week. Doing so did more than teach me the rules of combat or proper behavior in a dragon's lair. I gained several skills that truly did help me in my computing career.

I know I said this about Lego Mindstorm back in the day and never followed through, but I have just discovered the NeuroSky Mindset device and… I Must have this SDK!

AmigaForever is a very full-featured AmigaOS emulation tool, packed with various different ROMs and AmigaOS versions (1.3-3.x), as well as tons and tons of included games, software, and demos. This new version comes with even more stuff.

Backup2Mail is mini PHP application that creates regular backups of your MySQL database and sends it to configurable e-mail address. The whole process is scheduled with a help of Cron, a Unix program that runs programs at scheduled times.

If you are looking for code formatting tools for Flex Builder, scoot over to https://sourceforge.net/projects/flexformatter/ Ernest Pasour has built an excellent set of source code tools for Flex Builder.

This article describes how to use Portal Pack plugins to create and modify Sun GlassFish Web Space Server/Liferay themes on NetBeans IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

On Mac OS X, Growl has become the de facto standard for all notifications. There is an opened bug asking for Growl support in SWT/RCP : Bug 209911 – [Mac] Support for Growl notifications.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the public availability of Milepost GCC, the world's first open source machine learning compiler. The compiler intelligently optimizes applications, translating directly into shorter software development times and bigger performance gains.

This article combines tools, scripts, solutions that I have stumbled over over time and that I find worth knowing.

A library for compiling programs in a variety of languages including Java, Scala and C#.

"Can you integrate this with my e-mail?" It's one of the more dreaded questions in software development. For any programmer who has been around the block a few times, it evokes a long repressed fear of Sendmail m4 macros or Outlook COM objects. When a non-technical managerial type asks this question in a group meeting, and your boss assures him that Internal System from Hell X can easily be integrated with the company's e-mail system, your palms sweat.

Sun released VirtualBox 3 this week, the latest version of its open source x86 virtualization software. The new version introduces support for 3D graphics and SMP.

Clay and Aaron were both at the University of Illinois Summer School program so the weeks show was prerecorded interview with Dr. Calvin Lin discussing Principles of Parallel Programming, a book he co-authored with Dr. Lawrence Snyder.

In this post I’ll show how to automatically open an issue in TFS when a test fails. This is a standard requirement, because in such a way you are immediately aware when some test are failing.

The latest version of SpringSource Tool Suite (STS), an Eclipse-based development environment for building Spring applications, supports Spring 3.0 and OSGi Development Tools. SpringSource development team recently announced the release of the first Release Candidate of SpringSource Tool Suite 2.1.0 version. The new version also supports run time integration with Amazon EC2 and VMware tools.

So what’s my point? Twofold really, firstly, just because you are not co-located does not mean that you can’t work in an agile manor. Secondly, XAF is a cracking prototyping tool! So if you have XAF, even if you have no intention of using it to build your finished product for whatever reason, don’t forget that you can use it to build a prototype, in real time, whilst you sit down with your subject matter expert.

After you have an email server configured it is time to set the MAILTO variable and start getting email alerts about your scheduled cron tasks.