I've been asked how I created the headline animator that that I use as my email signature,  like the one shown below:

Xavier Pacheco

It simply, really. Its a feature of www.feedburner.com.  Once you have an account set up you simply navigate to the Publicize tab for your feed and then configure your animator under the Headline Animator section as shown below:

From there you can configure your animator as you like given the various settings.  Have fun!

According to Steve McConnell, Gold-plating "comes from developers who want to explore a technically challenging new area..."  Jeff Atwood, in his blog, says that "In the purest sense, all refactoring is gold-plating. That is, it consumes extra project time and results in no material benefit for the users. But without periodic and aggressive refactoring, we can't produce sane, maintainable code."

While I agree with Jeff's conclusion, I would not go as far as he does in equating refactoring with gold-plating. Having maintainable code does have a direct benefit to the customer or client (the person paying for the development).  Ultimately, it's a cost/benefit matter. When the cost outweighs the benefit, then it's not worth refactoring.  Plus, at some point (I hesitate at saying this), the code just works and no further development/refactoring is needed regardless of the code being ugly. Furthermore, when it comes to gold-plating, there is an ill-motive even though it may be subtle. 

I should probably note that when I use the term "developer" I may be referring to a development consulting organization, an independent consultant or a developer (at any level) within a development team.  In all cases, this is a person who can influence the tools and technologies employed in a development effort.

That said, I find that an extensive amount of gold-plating occurs at a much earlier phase of development (such as the proposal phase) which is why I prefer the term "Technology gold-plating" over "Developer gold-plating".  This goes right in line with McConnell's definition.  

I divide Technology Gold-Plating into two categories.

1. New Technologies (Bleeding Edge)
2. Preferred Technologies

New Technology Gold-plating

New technology gold-plating is exactly what the name implies. The developer wants an opportunity to delve into the latest technology.  This is extremely dangerous for the client who may be investing his/her money to the effort.  In essence what is going on here is development research and education at the client's expense.  It works like this. The vendor comes out with a new bleeding edge technology. The vendor pushes it on its partners (who want to play with it). The partners push it on to their clients. Their clients get blood splattered all over them - not good and frankly, quite messy.

Preferred Technology Gold-plating

Preferred technology gold-plating is the use of technologies with which the developer is most familiar or favors for whatever reason. For instance, a developer may use a pre-designed architectural model from the latest popular book on software architecture. Or he may use some pre-fabricated framework.  I am by no means saying these are bad. They are excellent if they actually meet the client's technology and business needs.  Yet, it happens too frequently that a company ends up with an over-architected monolith of a system when all they needed was an html page and a few lines of java script.

So, how does one prevent this from happening to their project?  Stay tuned, I'll be covering this and more in future posts.

If you intend to use the Product Cloud widget from the Amazon Associates program - CAUTION!  I used it on my page here, then later realized that it included to REALLY offensive material.  Please forgive me if you saw that and were offended. I have removed that widget. I'm surprised that Amazon actually allowed for that. Yikes!

This is cool.  I posted this blog using email and a handy service namedBlogMailr. It's a free service(provided your blog is not for commercial purposes).  Neat!

This is cool.  I posted this blog using email and a handy service namedBlogMailr. It's a free service(provided your blog is not for commercial purposes).  Neat!

I have to say that I am very happy with dasBlog's technology. It has been relatively easy to deploy blogs sites.  My only gripe is a combination of the lacking dasBlog themes and my own artistic inability to create my own theme. Then, I discovered that numerous designers make their designs freely available. One is simply required to credit the artist accordingly.  It took me only an hour or so to theme my personal site at www.xavierpacheco.com.  To find free themes, simply Google "Free CSS Templates". 

Have fun!

Technorati Profile

I decided I wanted a place to blog about more personal matters and do I made www.xavierpacheco.com my personal blog. I've relocated this tech/professional blog to www.xavierpacheco.com/tech.  I do believe I have correctly relocated the feeds through feedburner (you'll know if you get this in email or in your reader if you're a subscriber).  Please, would someone let me know that you were notified of this post. Thanks!

So this is weird. I've notice that my screen saver never kicks in.  I have a Dell Latitude D830 with Windows XP.  My mouse is one of those optical deals (Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 4000).  When I unplug the mouse, the screen saver works. Go figure. Anyway, if anybody runs into this, that's the deal.