Blog
March 27, 2012
How To Build an Online Community
One key to the success of the NITRC web site is the strong community support we have from it’s target audience: neuroscience researchers. This didn’t happen overnight. There were a lot of steps that led up to where we are now, and…
Project: Facebook Data Liberation — Part 1
One year ago my wife, Elizabeth, started a facebook group to help encourage people with their personal exercise programs. She didn’t know if her friends would be at all interested in participating. It turns out that not only were they interested…
March 22, 2012
Lightweight ORM for PHP
My family hosts an event called the Chili Bowl once a year. All our friends bring over chili, we play football, then eat the chili.…and most importantly vote to see who brought the best chili and who brought the most original…
March 21, 2012
How to Choose a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Device
So, you want to get a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for your home office or small business. I think that is a great idea and have one myself. There are a lot of possible options though. You can get a dedicated network appliance that…
March 20, 2012
Upgrading to MySQL 5.5 on Ubuntu 10.10
I was recently asked to upgrade the MySQL install on a Ubuntu 10.10 system. Normally these kinds of upgrades are simple affairs using built in tools like apt or yum, but in this case I was trying to go from MySQL 5.1…
March 19, 2012
NGMA Announces Annual Conference Keynote Speakers
The National Grants Management Association (NGMA) has announced the lineup of keynote speakers for its upcoming 2012 Annual Training Conference, Trends in Grants Management. The conference will be held April 22–25, 2012, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Alexandria, VA.…
AABPA Announces Spring Symposium
The American Association for Budget and Program Analysis (AABPA) has announced that registration is now open for its Spring Symposium which will be held on May 16, 2012.
The symposium will focus on providing budget and program professionals with tools…
March 18, 2012
Too Clever?
In many weakly-typed languages, such as Javascript and PHP, you might find code that takes some ambiguous value and coerces it into a straightforward boolean like so:
$boolean = (boolean) $mixed;
But what about this radically shorter alternative?
$boolean =…
The Beautiful Ternary
I am a fan of the ternary operator. Yes, it’s alien the first time you meet it, but wow, talk about getting things done! In a single line you can succinctly express a test and two options, making for truly compact yet clear…
March 16, 2012
Every Project Needs a Cat … or Why CMMI Works For Me
When the cat is away, the mice will play.
Earlier this month, TCG was re-confirmed as a CMMI Level 2 organization. Many people look at the CMMI documentation and think that it is a lot of overhead, but that’s not the way I see…