Developer Blog

In the past few months I’ve noticed some really amazing things being done with augmented reality, and I wanted to share the fun with with you! First, let me differentiate virtual reality from augmented reality for those of you who may be wondering. Virtual reality applications, usually games or training simulations, immerse the user in [...]

Recently I received an e-mail from the PITT-IxD list to participate in an interaction design workshop at Carnegie Mellon University. The organizers were looking for professionals with 2-3 years of experience working on screen-based interfaces at the development and/or refinement phases. I qualified, and I was free on the workshop day and enticed by the offer [...]

Recently I was tasked with an internal project, to research the feasibility of building a web-based application for Five Star’s webinars. Not all features have been outlined yet, but we know that beyond all the normal webinar functionality built into other meeting applications, we want an application that allows us to break the attendees into groups, where they can discuss a question or topic and return to the main meeting to report their conclusions.

I am a fan of Getting Things Done (GTD), and I’ve recently gone through a re-implementation of the GTD system. I thought that sharing how I implemented the system might provide some tricks or tips to those of you interested in becoming more organized. What is GTD? For those of you unfamiliar with GTD, I [...]

Recently I was looking for an elegant way to create RSS feeds for individual blog categories in a WordPress blog. However, I could only find articles on removing categories from a blog feed. This would not be an ideal solution for two reasons: Feed links will need to be updated every time you add a [...]

Have you ever wanted to return the top X number of rows from a query?  Of course you have!  This can be accomplished easily in T-SQL using the TOP option of the SELECT statement. SELECT TOP 10 EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName FROM Employee ORDER BY Utilization But what if the number of rows you want to [...]

We recently had a requirement to store SWF files directly in our database as a file bytes field. Our client had a need to dynamically change multiple SWF files via an administrative site. Due to the clustered server environment, storing the files in a database and pulling them out on a new request was the [...]