Category Archives: Software Development

Stuff about wordpress, firefox, agile and other soft-dev related stuff.

Fusion 2011 and Desire2Learn Learning Repository

FUSION is Desire2Learn’s big annual user conference, and this year it’s in Denver, CO. Last year in Chicago was fantastic, and a professional breakthrough for me. It was pretty great to present for, interact with, and get to know 700+ power-users of the software my team was building. This year is special, as I’m representing …

July 8, 2011 – 15:18 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Seven days with the Samsung Omnia 7 Windows Phone 7

One of the perks of working in software is occasional access to sweet, new hardware.  I’ve befriended the super-busy Mobile team at the office, and asked to borrow one of their spare Windows Phone devices.  Craig handed me a Samsung Omnia 7 and asked me not to destroy it.  I had been wary of the …

March 25, 2011 – 13:34 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development, User Experience | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Presentation on Accessibility and Design on Jan 20, come!

For those of you in Kitchener-Waterloo who are into web accessibility and product design, myself and Ali Ghassemi are doing an hour-long talk at the next uxWaterloo event on January 20, 2011 at 5:30pm.  We’re super excited! The focus will be practical advice for designers and developers about building accessible web applications. Ali and I …

January 4, 2011 – 17:50 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development, User Experience | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Practial Advice for Agile Sprint Planning

This last year has been a great year for my software-making skills.  The team I’m on at Desire2Learn has really embraced Agile SCRUM. So far it’s been an adjustment, but with a lot of immediate rewards.  More than anything (more than improving quality, or throughput, or any of that), it just feel like a better, …

December 9, 2010 – 18:59 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

How Farmville caused Firefox 3.6.6

So I noticed that Firefox updated itself again today, only a few days after it did last time.  Why the short time-lapse between Firefox 3.6.4 and 3.6.6? Just one bug: 574905. The Farmville Bug No joke, Firefox pushed an update on a single bug. Last release they introduced this great feature that times out Flash …

June 28, 2010 – 02:21 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Microformats to the Rescue

This one is for the CMS designers out there.  If you’re in the business of building platforms that people create content in, you undoubtedly have run into the problem of storing metadata.  It may seem easy at first, “just put it in a database!”, but then you start running into predictable problems: the context information …

May 21, 2010 – 16:26 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Happy IDN Day!

Today is the day that internationalized domain names (IDNs) go live on the internet. As someone really interested in globalization, this is a huge development: this is the first time non-latin characters can be used as domain names in the public internet. Arabic nations especially are loving this, and I’m sure Hebrew and Chinese language …

May 6, 2010 – 09:11 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

PHP on IIS

I’ve been playing around with IIS recently.  The Windows/IIS community is not nearly as well served by Open Source as the competition, which is unfortunate given that IIS is a really popular platform for intranets and other enterprise applications.  It’s not really fair to ask your IT department to support Apache + MySQL as well …

March 11, 2010 – 18:08 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Getting lucky with free mobile WiFi

Like lots of people in tech, I have a Blackberry with WiFi.  Regardless of how good Rogers has been with their 3G network, WiFi is faster to browse with, and free-er. With that in mind, I’ve added my home and work WiFi networks to my connections (Manage Connections -> Set Up WiFi Network), and just …

December 18, 2009 – 12:51 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Tagged , | Comments (0)

TorCHI Presentation: Sprint Zero and Agile Design

My co-workers Khan and Brian and myself went to the University of Toronto for a presentation at TorCHI.  It was by Lynn Miller, a  Senior Manager at AutoDesk (Maya, 3DSMax, AutoCAD, etc.) The presentation was about Sprint Zero: the lead-up work that is required before a team embarks on an Agile project, or any project …

December 9, 2009 – 15:23 | By dariusz | Posted in Software Development | Comments (5)