Cool! I got my question answered. phpMyAdmin seems to be much improved in recent versions, and I'm excited to be able to use it.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1051

06:37 (utc-5)

 

BetaNews: Interview: Beta Expert Michael Fine. "[My company], Megahertz had no real infrastructure to support beta [testing]. I was expected to build it from the ground up with very limited resources. It was a tremendous challenge. ... I was expected to manage every aspect of the test… from the mundane shipment of product to the high level debugging of the product. It forced me to evaluate every aspect of the beta test process and determine what had value and what was useless. The first six months were purely experimentation. Once I got the program running effectively, Megahertz was shocked at how many issues I would find. Immediately, customer feedback was discovering critical issues, providing valuable marketing feedback and improving the quality of the products. Megahertz changed the product development process to require beta on every product and as we merged with US Robotics and then 3Com, each company adopted our beta program."

Sounds impressive. Beta testing often isn't a systematic enough process, and can often be helped a lot by good supporting tools. He goes into some detail about some of what he does, but best of all he's writing a book. I should remember to look back in a few months to see if its been published yet.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1050

04:48 (utc-5)

 

Via PHP Everywhere, Zend.com: Using PHP to Develop Three-Tier Architecture Applications - Part 1. "Designing your application in layers, or tiers, is useful for many different reasons. In a multiple tier design, each tier can be run a separate machine, or machines, allowing for improved processing performance. Depending on your design, multiprocessor machines, or many different independent computers can be used to improve performance. Efficient layering can give structure to you application, promote scalability, and ease long-term maintenance requirements for your code."

Permalink | Comments? | id 1049

04:37 (utc-5)

 

Via Hack the Planet, an article from InfoWorld about how Microsoft is planning to use the storage engine from SQL Server as the foundation of many of its products, including Exchange and the Windows file system. ""We're rebuilding Exchange on top of the SQL Server data store," said Bill Gates... "One of the great Holy Grails inside Microsoft is the vision of a unified file system." Gates continued that the strategy is to move from five or six data stores in separate products to one single data store. "This is probably one of the toughest things we're doing," Gates said."

Permalink | Comments? | id 1048

04:27 (utc-5)

 

Hey, I want to add more features to my weblog, but I don't need any more. What's a geek to do? I'm trying to think of stuff to add but can't! I guess maybe I can put in statistics (you blogged 284 words today), but who cares? I want to read some of my theory books I recently ordered before I finish the other programming I've been working on, so I have nothing to program.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1047

03:24 (utc-5)