Here is an amazingly short, but usefull article on how to set up virtual hosts in Apache. This is a very cool idea. If you are working on 3 different websites, it allows you to enter www.foo1.dev, www.foo2.dev and www.foo3.dev as the addresses of the sites. Since each site will most likely be hosted on its own, it also allows you to better mimic the final production environment.
Tomorrow we get access to a vehicle, woohoo. I am not really sure what term would be best to describe this, but we are definitely not buying or leasing a vehicle, nor will we have a vehicle of our own. Instead we are going to be sharing a vehicle.
We have signed up with a company called AutoShare that gives people access to vehicles. For us this is a great idea. It allows us to use a vehicle when we need one — say when Danielle needs to get to a photo shoot or when we need to buy groceries — and it allows us to forgo the costs of owning a car. We only really need a car a few times per month and this allows for that.
I will blog about how things go I am sure.
This article has been on every blog since it was written. However, it is worth putting on my simply because it is such an important issue. The article lays out in perfect english why we (web designers) need to start design web pages using CSS. In order to drill this point home, the author redesigns the homepage of Microsoft’s website and then goes on to detail all the savings.
If you are into web design you must read this article.
I actually found this article several months ago (okay, it was published on June 16, 2004 - I’m a little late). However, it is an excellent article that discusses the role of Usability Testing within the field of web design and some ways of properly carrying out testing your designs.
Here is a rather long article that compares Macromedia’s Flex to JSP. Not to give the ending away, but Flex wins.
I am starting a new project and I need a top notch RDBMS for the backend. The problem is that I can’t decide if I want to use PostgreSQL or MySQL, or if I should use Microsoft MSDE instead. Whatever I choice though must support Transactions and Concurrency (i.e., proper locking).
I have used MySQL before and for straight forward databases it works great. The best thing about MySQL is the fact that it is easy to administer and it runs on just about any OS under the sun (including Sun). However, its support for transactions and locking is somewhat new and I am not sure how it would hold up under the stress.
PostgreSQL seems to be a lot more complicated to administer and requires a fair bit of setup to run on Windows. However, it does support the two main bits that I really need. The problem though is that the project is to be done in Flash and J2EE and, therefore, I need windows for the development. Once it is completed, it can be deployed onto a Linux server with no problems. However, this makes development very tricky.
The one solution that I have thought of so far is to use two DBMS’s — MySQL for development and PostgreSQL for production. Not sure how much extra work with would result in though.
I will definitely post what conclusions I come to and which DBMS I finally choice. Who knows, I may ditch both of them and go with Oracle.
Ben Forta has posted several more articles in what has become a ColdFusion vs … series. Due to requests he received from the first versus article, he has followed it up with articles comparing CFMX with ASP, .NET, and PHP. Hopefully the information from these articles will dispell some of the myths surrounding ColdFusion MX.