was Firebird, now, brain farts

Battle of the Web

This was the second session of Battle of the Web, the first focusing on general Content Management issues and this one about developing for those platforms.

We had fire alarms, technical problems, but had a good look at Drupal, dotNetNuke and a roll your own content management system.  I created a wiki for the speakers to fill in a tick list of features http://ukbug02.pbworks.com/

In addition to the tick list, Cedd (one of the speakers) and I have started a Drupal diary, to document our learning curve in getting 2 separate Drupal sites up and running.

Delphi 2010

Jon Harrison on Embacadero did a great talk on Delphi 2010 with some interesting questions from the floor.  I like the Touch stuff and can think of one application I would love to write with it, BUT until multi-touch devices are more available, it still feels pretty "bookmark and come back in a year".  Today however is the data snap improvements and all the other good things in D2010.

One point that needed clearing up - the Firebird driver is for dbExpress, not as far as I know an overhaul of IBExpress.

Technical Debt

An enjoyable talk by Gary Short of Dev Express.  Not sure if I shoudl say too much as it was a preview of a talk he is giving to a wider audience later in the year / next year.  I enjoyed the talk, which makes you think about your daily development / general working practices to see if they generate problems later.

http://www.ukbug.co.uk/

This applies to you if you are a company doing marketing via e-mail shots.
Normally associated with larger companies:

1) If your domain is acmeproducts.co.uk and you send your marketing e-mails from @marketing7.co.uk it already looks like spam.

2) If the links in your e-mail don't link to your primary domain (e.g. www.acmproducts.co.uk/tracking/abc1294890384098014.htm vs www.marketing7.co.uk/tracking/abc1294890384098014.htm) it looks just like a phishing e-mail to me and anyone who has the sense to avoid phishing traps.

And the biggy, but with smaller companies:

3) If you send out an e-mail to a number of people who are your marketing database, DO NOT INCLUDE ALL OF THEIR E-MAIL ADDRESSES IN THE E-MAIL. It leaks your marketing database, it puts my e-mail onto spam databases, assuming that one of those 100 odd accounts is compromised, it tells people I have no association with something about me.

So rant over. Now I feel a lot more chilled. Have a nice day.