Pop Art Blog

One attribute of the Pop Art culture that I enjoy is the tireless pursuit of making ourselves better. We take time out to enjoy successes, but we are looking for the next way we can improve internally and how we can help clients in new ways. In that spirit, the book Corporate Lifecycles by Ichak Adizes was recommended to me by L.B. Day and Frank Roehr - two advisors that I trust. The book is about how all companies follow a certain cycle from infancy to death and some of the pitfalls along the way... Read More...

The good people at Rose City SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) and OGI had me back to talk about Accessibility. I thought the whole thing was going to be cancelled - we had a tornado in the area that night. Unlike the midwest, I learned that tornado in Portland are very rare. Almost as rare as snow we had on Christmas...that hasn't happened since the 30's. Thanks to all those that braved an ugly evening to come talk about accessibility and mobile applications. Slides: http://www... Read More...

Update 11/27/2007 We do quite a bit of Flash video integrated into ASP.NET web applications. For video library application, the best solution from a usability perspective is to use JavaScript to control the flash player. There are some issues that keep popping up with the Flash Player, SwfObject, ExternalInterface, and ASP.NET that we needed to document for the good of the world. Hopefully, we'll save someone the hours that our team took to figure this stuff out. First, we begin with some background... Read More...

At our last staff meeting, I shared some insights with our team about how we can improve our business. For some background information, we've been fortunate to keep the same team together over the past two years. We've had a chance to work together -- establishing the internal communication pathways and processes that is our business today. This stability has been one of the best things for Pop Art. That said, within the past couple of months, we've added new people that add fresh perspectives... Read More...

The folks at OGI & SPIN were nice enough to record the April Seminar. I never really considered doing a podcast, but I had a few requests to post it, so here it is. It is divided into two sections. The first being the main presentation and the second is the audience questions. Agile Practices - Main Presentation Main Presentation (wma) Main Presentation (mp3) Auidence Questions Questions (wma) Questions (mp3) Slides Read More...

I had the opportunity to speak at this month's Rose City SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network). The talk focused on three main areas: Agile's fit in an organization, performance indicators, and Agile practices that can be used outside of the Agile context. There was great turnout for the event with some really excellent questions. Many of the questions were targeted at resource leveling of iterations/sprints and how to manage customer expectations. I plan on posting some more thoughts... Read More...

I moved to Vista today, here are my notes: Good News: CVS and Subversion work well in Vista (except for what is listed in Bad below). I had to grab the night build of Subversion, but it runs well. Outlook 2007 works extremely well. It actually closes when you want it to and threads seem to be more in control. Visual Studio 2005 runs well (with the Vista Service Pack). Beyond Compare works - can't live without it. Daemon Tools allows ISOs to be attached - very nice product. Thanks to Scott Hanselman... Read More...

At Pop Art, we have some very talented folks that adhere strictly to Web Standards. It takes much discipline to develop web application using Web Standards as its often not the quickest path to a solution, but offers significant advantages for clients and future maintenance. In general, gives almost all the tools necessary to create web standards-based applications. The Pop Art development team has become adept at making .NET controls emit compliant XHTML. I crafted much of what we have learning... Read More...

I was hooked on OneNote the first time I saw it beta before Office 2003 was released. When I was at Microsoft, I had a couple of opportunities to meet Chris Pratley and he always showed me some amazing feature that I never knew about. There are a few features within OneNote 2007 that I find the most useful. The first is the Screen Clipping tool that is built it. I write technical articles and documentation often so having a easy to use screen clip is very valuable. I've used many third-party... Read More...

Well, I posted about my first week at Pop Art and didn't post again. I have many excuses with the best excuse is pictured to the right, but that didn't stop Scott from giving me some well-deserved flack for not posting in a while. I did move over to Community Server - which is the powers blogs.popart.com - and moved my prior posts with me. I look forward to writing more soon. First, I have to finish my current MSDN Magazine article about how to develop Web Standard compliant code using ASP... Read More...