Tech Talk

May 18th, 2013

Would you use PhoneGap again?

I was invited to the Mobile Forum Stuttgart and speak about Apache Cordova/Phonegap (great conference, check it out next year!). There is a lot of interest in Cordova these days. It’s understandable: with thousands of platforms around it is hard to build a mobile app for all of them. Actually it reminds me on the [...]

May 7th, 2013

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Disrupting the CRM Market: Eight Steps to Take

Below is a guest blog post by Ray Stoeckicht and Stafford McKay of Zurmo. I asked the question how they want to disrupt the CRM market. The answer was so great, I decided to blog it here, unmodified. It’s very useful, not just if you want to get into the CRM market. Here we go: [...]

May 5th, 2013

Web Hosting, but good.

I am blogging for a while now, but it was last year until some of my posts get traction. One of them, The 10 rules of a Zen Programmer, became so popular that my web host returned “500 Internal Server Errors” in a few occasions. If you had the luck to load the post, you [...]

March 29th, 2013

jQuery workaround when addClass does not cause a UI repaint

With jQuery you can easily add a css class to an element. For example, imagine the following button: I wrote some nice code which makes the work a little bit more like native Android buttons. When somebody causes a touchstart event I would like to see the button become a darker look. My first approach [...]

March 11th, 2013

Fragmented projects and overcommitted people

In 2010 I wrote two articles on Burn-Out and exhaustion in software teams. Since then there were more and more articles of this kind printed in the major german press. Psychologists warn companies and individuals that we are doing “too much”. I agree with them. We have increased our daily speed by lots, and I [...]

February 26th, 2013

Debugging PHP commandline applications with IntelliJ

Usually I don’t need much debugging with PHP. But recently I tried to create a TestCase and there was an issue which I simply couldn’t find.  While I had xdebug in place for my Apache HTTPD delivered applications, I had not anything ready for debugging CLI. Luckily it turned out to be pretty easy, thanks [...]

February 14th, 2013

The new .com for Geeks

I am often surprised how incredible hard it is to get a great .com TLD. It’s not that one lacks of inspiration. It’s more that the whole business of “domain reselling” seems to keep 99% of all available character combinations. Even niche domains or fantasy names without a meaning may cost hundreds, if not thousands of [...]

January 8th, 2013

Angular.js Directives with JSON arguments

Recently I wanted to write some kind of generic directive which loads some initial data into a specific scope. Something like: my-load-id=”100″. Of course, this is not very generic and I thought it would be a good idea to use the powerful Angular.js expressions and create a JSON object. More like: my-load=”{‘key’:'value’}”. Now this approach [...]

January 3rd, 2013

Zurmo, an Open Source CRM

I have had no clue on CRM. It always was “something from SAP” for me. But I was wrong, as Ray Stoeckicht, one of the Co-Founders of Zurmo explained. CRM is not tied to SAP alone I do know now. And it can be easy and fun! Let’s look at an interesting project which will [...]

December 5th, 2012

The new log4j 2.0

Before a while a new major version of the well known log4j logging framework was released. Since the first alpha version appeared 4 more releases happened! You see, there is much more activity than with the predecessor log4j 1. And seriously, despite log4j 2s young age it is ways better. This blog will give an [...]