Yammer use took off in our workplace late last year, but since everyone has returned from the Christmas break interest seems to have dropped off somewhat.   Maybe something like TeamBox, with its richer toolset, might be more attractive.  Teambox organizes communication around projects.  Users are members of projects, and a project has communication divided into conversations, task lists, pages and files.  The concept seems to have similarities with Google Wave, but at first glance the user interface seems a lot more familiar.  And TeamBox is open source allowing installation on your own server — so you can own the data.  And can customize the app (built with Ruby on Rails).  Now I just need a project to test it with… Read the rest of this entry »

I caught a reference to Selenium from a notice on a new Refcardz from DZone.   The idea of implementing automated tests for web applicatons I’m building has been with me for a  while now.  The Ruby on Rails framework incorporates a testing suite, and it is really handy.  The idea with automated testing comes in handy as you make changes.  Without automated tests you need to remember to re-test existing functionality after updates.  And as the application becomes more complex, re-testing after every update get boring, and ends up not happening.  Which can lead to unpleasant surprises.  This concept is useful even when working on something as simple as a WordPress theme.

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So it has been a couple of weeks now that I’ve been playing around with the OpenSolaris operating system on my Dell Latitude D620 laptop.  And I really like it.  I’ve installed it three times — once on a spare hard disk, once in a Sun Virtual Box running inside Windows XP, and this final time as a multi-boot partition on my regular hard drive.  Each time I’ve gotten a little better and faster at getting the install done.  So what’s so good about this that I’ve spent so much time messing around with it?

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Already a couple of days into my OpenSolaris installation and I am loving it.  There have been continuing challenges — for instance I needed to do some under-the-hood configuration changes to get the suspend feature to work.  The open source music player Songbird is a great alternative to iTunes — but you need to download extra codecs to play mp3 files (it defaults to the open source oga format.)  And connecting a USB drive formatted with NTFS is touch — in fact I just gave up and reformatted it in FAT32.  But these are just little tests, and make it all a fun puzzle.  And my first introduction to the development tools is very positive.

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Sure it is cool that Google has now released a beta of it’s dream web browser, but should we care? From a web developer perspective I kind of wish everyone just used the same browser (especially if it is Firefox 3!). It really makes me tired to thing that there is yet another browser I’ll be forced to test in.

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Ok, so I’m totally into this ‘learning ruby on rails’ thing. And for me part of the learning process means creating a total immersion learning environment. Well, maybe not total, but enough to have a couple of learning streams running at the same time which help reinforce each other.

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