John Locke's blog

Damon Cortesi ( @dacort ) over at Untitled Startup recently wrote up a summary of recurring payment services provided for startups. It's a decent analysis of current payment services that offer a hosted recurring billing solution, if you don't have a merchant account or want to handle your own e-commerce. If you're writing a software-as-a-service platform from the ground up, and would like to outsource the payment side of things, these are good options.

I have a confession to make. I'm absolutely terrible at making estimates. No matter how long I think something is going to take, it always takes longer. Even if I double, triple, or even quadruple my original guess.

And it's hurting my business. Why? Because I do everything I can to deliver what I promised. And I end up losing money, instead of making money. Instead of renegotiating with the client, I work nights, weekends, and pay my employees out of my own pocket to deliver. I go months without a paycheck, rarely get a day off. Does that sound like any way to run a business?

I finally did it... long after my old Palm V died, I finally got a smart phone, the Nokia N900. I've had it just over a day now, and thought I would jot down my impressions/thoughts so far.

Chris Wilson over at Slate claims that the new Whitehouse.gov move to the Drupal content management system is the "triumph of hope over experience," basically slamming Drupal as not up to the task for a variety of, well, silly, ignorant reasons. He points to a migration of Recovery.org to Sharepoint as evidence.

There are basically 3 models for getting web applications built:

• Proprietary platform
• Custom code
• Open Source
  

I get this question all the time: What's the difference between Drupal and Ruby on Rails, or another framework?

Quite simply, Rails is something you build an application in. Drupal is an application. So chances are you're one major step closer to building a web site that does what you want it to do, if you start with Drupal.

What do Twitter, cancer, interviewing movie stars, bike culture, and instant salt & pepper shaker manufacturing have in common? They were all represented on stage at GnomeDex 9 last Friday, a blogging conference on the waterfront in downtown Seattle. Several hundred thinkers, writers, inventors, and other interesting people from all over the country converged for a couple days of sharing their ideas and projects with each other and making new human connections.

After emptying my camera recently, I noticed a bunch of the photos were cluttering up my home directory. It turns out that the default photo manager for Ubuntu had a bug in the latest release, and while it's fixed for the next major release, they haven't released a fix for 9.04.

If you're dealing with this, here's how to fix. Full details are here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/f-spot/+bug/354264

At Freelock, we're big fans of the Dojo Toolkit. It's a Javascript library for providing data-backed widgets in web applications, on-the-fly graphing, animations, and much more. As we move more of our web applications to the browser, we keep pushing the edge of what's available, and sometimes hit bugs in Dojo itself. So as I mentioned in a previous post, I often find myself teetering between the most recent stable releases and the tip of Dojo development. And I think we have the best way of managing these changes of anyone.

So once more, development on an internal project hit a stumbling block. The latest release of Dojo, 1.3.1, has some bug fixes I'd like to use, and in general I like to keep my main project working with the newest dojo releases. But 1.3.1 introduced a new security constraint that basically escaped all the html that I was showing in a grid control. Suddenly, instead of rich text, I get HTML markup!!!