I'm interested in learning more about Asterisk (open source PBX) so I thought I would try building a "hobby" system for my home. Just play around with getting a juiced up voicemail system going for my family. That is, until I found out that a TDM11B kit from Digium costs over $500(!) if I want to get an FXO/FXS card with echo cancellat...
We all know that keeping your skills fresh and up to date not only benefit us as developers but also the companies we work for. It therefore makes perfect sense to me, and I am willing to bet you as well, that training is a good investment. What is obvious to one person is not always obvious to someone else however. Does anybody have ...
I have seen the idea at HashRocket for their Rescue Mission that is designed to step in and recover from a failing Rails development project (whether timeline, or budget, or something else will not be met). I was wondering if other people offer this service for PHP projects, or web development projects in general. Ideally, they would b...
As a software freelancer (contractor) does it pay out to budget for things such as marketing and advertisement, training, tools (i.e. business related expenditure) or just buy them ad hoc? Obviously you need to set some money aside for holidays, sickness, etc; anything that goes under “social security” expenses category, but advertisemen...
Speaking about a project with a self constructed CMS and Web Site. Maintainable should be yearly and should include two fields. Technical Maintenance Tool update, Bug fixes, new modules implementation, design improvements, emergency plans against software and hardware failure. Content Maintenance (updating videos, text, banners, commu...
Given the climate that this economy has created where every IT budget line is more closely scrutinized it seems like we as developers often need to work even harder to convince decision makers of why they should upgrade or go for the latest and greatest this or that. Given where things have been headed it seems like a very pertinent subj...
I am toying with the idea of giving agile software development teams budgets that they can spend to improve velocity. A typical agile team has 5-9 people. I want to get a sense of how they might spend the budget. If you wanted to improve software development on your team (no matter what software process/framework you use) and you had ...
Even with frameworks like GWT you end up scratching your head because of IE6 specific problems. How much discount you would give if you do not have to support IE6? Or how much of the overall time is spent on IE6 issues? ...
As a hobby, I'm writing a web application that will use some bandwith. Imagine I implement a feature that will produce custom 50 megabyte downloads for each interested user and maybe a megabyte or ten for uninterested visitors. I hope it will be popular but I don't want to have to take out a second mortgage on the house to pay for a mont...
Getting an Exception in the BitmapFactory. Not sure what is the issue. (Well I can guess the issue, but not sure why its happening) ERROR/AndroidRuntime(7906): java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: bitmap size exceeds VM budget ERROR/AndroidRuntime(7906): at android.graphics.BitmapFactory.decodeFile(BitmapFactory.java:295) My code is pretty...
My department, and I assume many others, have an unusual year end problem: they haven't consumed all their budget. If they don't spend it all, then next year the budget will be reduced. We've recommended numerous small pieces of software, but they've been rejected as "too inexpensive - we need to buy software development tools that cos...
For a single developer, who is developing a .NET application, what is the difference in cost between: Linux, using MonoDevelop, Mono Framework, and Apache, and Windows XP Pro, using Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005, and IIS 6.0 [Note: Edited heavily. If I've changed the meaning, feel free to roll back. - Jon] ...
I'm getting asked a lot more frequently by friends and friendly acquaintances to 'redo' their website. I know what to ask to learn exactly what they mean by 'redo' their website, but not what to ask to learn if they know the value/cost of the things they request. Is there a post anywhere that lists really good questions to ask a client...
How do you charge your customer in a project using agile methodology? Per hour? Then a great deal of trust has to been established before the project. Per iteration? There's gonna be a lot of budget decisions, which can take time. Per project? How can you do that when you don't know the scope? The very essence of agile is to not wr...
I have a freelance web application project where the client requests new features every two weeks or so. I am unable to anticipate the requirements of upcoming features. So when the client requests a new feature, one of several things may happen: I implement the feature with ease because it is compatible with the existing platform I ...
I've come across this story quite a few times here in the UK: NHS Computer System Summary: We're spunking £12 Billion on some health software with barely anything working. I was sitting the office discussing this with my colleagues, and we had a little think about. From what I can see, all the NHS needs is a database + middle tier of ...