Revolution Web Design Blog

From the Navtrak Blog - Ven·dor ac·count·abil·i·ty

Tue, 25 May 2010 08:26:00 -0600

Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility.
Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? But how does the concept of accountability transfer into the corporate world? Specifically, in high-tech companies like ours that offer GPS tracking services, -where promising "immediate" ROI's and "free trials" is the norm?
We've been around since 1990 (and our sister B2B communication companies for 30+ years), which makes us, , "industry veterans," and as such we've seen countless vehicle tracking companies come and go. The ones that make it, like us, do business the right way by treating each customer as a partner, and realizing that if the customer doesn't succeed, we don't succeed.
Read more: http://navtrak.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/gps-tracking-video/

Help a fellow CF Programmer

Wed, 05 May 2010 06:39:00 -0600

this is TOTALLY snagged from Ray Camden's post on this topic... Pardon the brief, probably overly dramatic title, but I wanted to get your attention. ColdFusion Community member Aaron West is one of many people suffering with due to the Nashville flooding. A Paypal donation site has been set up to help him out: http://friendsforaaron.blogspot.com/ This is 100% legit. If you've been a user of any of my open source stuff and have been looking to visit my wishlist, I'd urge you to send a donation to help Aaron and his family out. They are close to half way to their goal of 5K. Please give what you can! And yes - the blue arrow is his house:

Google Wave grows a little...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:41:00 -0600

Although it's not quite the tsunami they may have hoped for *yet. I believe it's gotten one step closer with Notifications to your email address of Wave activity in your Wave account. Here's a great blog post by the Wave team on how to turn these notifications on. I turned mine on, and I hope that we can use Wave to our advantage at Navtrak.

Programming is like a dream

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:28:00 -0600

I don't know how many times I've tried to explain this phenomena to people in my company, or others who work with/for programmers, but the truths espoused here are so very self-evident to us programmers, but maybe not so much with everyone else. Anyhow, great article and here is a link to it: "Programming is like a dream" Here's my favorite excerpt:


My brother contends that it is this same phenomena that makes programmers so bad at estimates. The problem is, as he says, that the programmer already knows everything that needs to be written. When you have it all in your mind, it seems like it should be easy to write it all down. But it's not. The physical act of writing the code takes a long time. But more importantly, your mind never thinks about all the "meaningless" details. It knows how to code them so well it doesn't even need consider their existence anymore. Unfortunately, the computer still needs them. It can't infer. All those loose ends, niggling details and corner cases end up eating a great deal of time... sometimes more than the rest of the program.

10 things Google has taught us...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:40:00 -0600

While this article "10 things google has taught Us" originally appeared on cnn.com today, I thought it was a great read, and I didn't want to forget where I could read it, and show it to others. The 5th thing that Google has taught us really struck home for me :) (i wonder why)


5.) Treat engineers as kings

For most Valley companies, engineers are the equivalent of the television writer, the movie director, the book author. They are the creators. The 20% time Google grants its engineers gives them a sense that they are liberated to take risks, to follow their passions.

Innovation, as Bill Campbell told The McKinsey Quarterly, comes when "the crazy guys have stature, where engineers really are important.... empowered engineers are the single most important thing that you can have in a company."

It is no accident that Page and Brin and Schmidt spend so many hours each week in meetings with engineers. For most traditional media companies, the engineer is less central.

However, as digital is now part of the mainstream, and as older media companies struggle to master its challenges, they would do well to heed the advice Google's David Eun offers: Don't do what these companies traditionally do and stick "the geeks in a corner." Instead, CEO's should have at their elbow "a top Chief Technical Officer."

The rest of the article is filled with 9 other great tips and things to think about and it was well put together by Ken Auletta. Hop on over to cnn.com to view this interesting and thought provoking article. Hopefully I can help permeate some of these things into the culture of Navtrak, although I have to admit... we really happen to be quite like the points described here, we are very lucky! And one more, the last point in fact is also good to ponder:


10.) "Life is long but time is short."

The words belong to Eric Schmidt, who explained: "Life is long in the sense that we have long memories. Time is short in that you have to move very quickly. But to me the most important thing to know is that life has a way of working things out. We forget so quickly what the problem was three or four years ago. So my personal view of life is that every problem is an opportunity."

This is a reason to think and act boldly, as Google has, to take risks, and not to be anchored down by "long memories."

Navtrak releases it's newest website navtrakgps.com

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:46:00 -0600

So, yesterday my company launched it's 6th or 7th incarnation of our website. Here's a link to the first one :) Starting back in 1999 we had this crazy idea to start tracking vehicles on the internet, and now here we are 10 years later and still kickin! Things have come a long way, the product has matured into a VERY stable platform complete with a tracking API, a newly released AIR Application (interface designed by me), Flex application and a Coldfusion driven reporting system (done by your's truly.) So go check it out, and if you or someone you know could use vehicle tracking for their company, give 'em my name, and our website http://www.navtrakgps.com

iPhone and Flash - It's about to become reality!

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:23:00 -0600

That's right folks... just announced at Adobe Max 2009 - With the advent of Flash CS5 flash developers around the world will be able to make games and other applications for the iPhone using flash! it's about time, and you can go here to read more about this amazing new feature! This is NOT flash in the safari browser inside the iPhone this is native iPhone application support. One great step towards a more Flash Filled Future on my iPhone! By far the best comment of the day on this comes from Ryan Stewart - Adobe's Flash Platform Evangelist

"When Apple is ready to bring the full Web browsing experience to iPhone users, we'll be ready to bring Flash Player to Safari."

Smells like Football (NFL is finally almost here!!)

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 19:36:00 -0600

how cool... it's my favorite tv to program and code and design website's to... NFL Football... and tonight's pre-season "Hall of Fame Game" and that mean's it's almost time for Nerdfootball.com And that means also, that it's almost time for the Oakland Raiders (my team) to play the San Diego Supercharger's at the Coliseum in Oakland on the very first Monday Night Football game of the year. nerdfootball.com is a really fun football pool that i built many moons ago, and in our now 8th year of running we have one of the largest pools yet! it's a pick and confidence type pool, where you assign a "Confidence Factor" to each game, and for each game you get right, you get those points. points range from 1-16 (if there are 16 games that week) and you better pick wisely, because every point matters! Oh and of course there is a "Smack Down" area where you can let your opponents know just how you feel! there is also a suicide pool on the site, where you can run each type of Nerdfootball pool on your own, and it's all self manageable! if you'd like to setup a pool for this season, we are open for business and would love to host your pool. each pool can be purchased with a credit card, through paypal, and we are real honest nerds, who just love football and website geek stuff :) the cost is very reasonable, and negotiable. in addition to the football pool website, we also have Nerdbasketball.com that enables you to run and be a part of the coolest NCAA MARCH MADNESS BASKETBALL POOL! It's built using Adobe Flex and is possibly, the coolest RIA Basketball pool on the planet! We are "The House of the Nerd" and we welcome you to a time tested tradition of football pool and basketball pool fun! Below is an image and if you click on it, you will see the larger version of it, which gives you an idea of the interface for picking games.

a change i'd like to see in the flashplatform

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:50:00 -0600

id love to see coldfusion and flex/flashplatform converge into a tool that us coldfusion diehards can more easily migrate to. there doesnt seem to be any reason we couldnt use cf-like tags inside mxml to replace what happens in actionscript... actionscript is hard to migrate to after all these years in coldfusion tag-based-land. make it happen :) please, thanks.

So, I'm now a professional Tractor Driver

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:20:00 -0600

well, at least I can drive a really old bobcat to the tune of billie jean in a friends back farm yard... what :) we made this so that i could get on the "Eternal Moonwalk" but alas, we were 1 day late to enter the video.

"Please turn camera off then on again" - Panasonic Lumix Error message

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 08:06:00 -0600

Sometime this weekend, we lost ability to take pictures with our Panasonic DMC-FS5 that is slightly over 2 years old. We kept getting an error message that stated "Please turn camera off then on again" Even though I rarely like to follow the directions, I did. And guess what, to no avail. So, I scoured the web for information about this problem, and the best advice anyone had for the fix, was to send it in for repair. Sure. A camera that cost about $400 when we bought it, was used and abused for 2 years, I don't think so. Yes, it has definitely taken some nice pictures for us, but I'm not going to spend the time to deal with that crap... So, what did I do to fix it?? So, I decided to resort to the ages old method of fixing something... I simply banged it on my desk one sharp time, and BAM, the lens retracted and the camera is now fixed. I have no idea why it's working now, it simply is. And with that, I am happy, and I can cross at least one thing off of my to-do list for today! nice.

Emitter failure from a WCF Webservice

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:51:00 -0600

so i was attempting to hit a WCF webservice today from Coldfusion 8 written by a colleague here @ Navtrak in WCF and kept getting the following error:

Emitter failure. There is an undefined portType (thisService) in the
WSDL document http://ourdomain.com/thisAPI/ThisService.svc?wsdl=wsdl0.
Hint: make sure  is fully qualified.

so, we dug a bit deeper and figured out that his SVC file did not have the following declaration at the top: [ServiceBehavior(Namespace = "http://ourdomain.com/")] this fixed it right up, and we are rockin and rollin' now!

iPhone - Internet Tethering - Live!

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:11:00 -0600

so, how cool is this... im posting this blog entry using my iphone os 3.0 and internet tethering. that's right. although we thought it was not allowed... it is! http://help.benm.at/help.php go to that site above, and follow the instructions (really easy actually, just download the settings, follow the on-screen instructions and BAM!) so, anyway, hopefully this is useful for ya, and shame on AT&T for thinking we wouldn't figure this out at some point in time! apparently there is some MMS hack that is part of what is coming, but as of yet, i cannot even figure out how to even see the word "mms" in my iphone anywhere yet!?!?

iPhone OS 3.0

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:10:00 -0600

so, here i sit, patiently waiting for the new version of the iPhone OS and I'm now contemplating should i do it immediately or should i wait until day 2 to do it, after the uber geeks have tested, tried and bricked their phones, so that i don't have to do it myself? hmmm... i think ill do it today, if it EVER SHOWS UP!!! come on apple. hurry up.

Adobe Browser Lab - limited preview open

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:09:00 -0600

From Adobe's website:

BrowserLab provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems, on demand. BrowserLab is a powerful solution for cross-browser compatibility testing, featuring multiple viewing and comparison tools, as well as customizable preferences. Since BrowserLab is an online service, it can be accessed from virtually any computer connected to the web. Also, Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 software users have access to additional functionality such as testing local and active content.

Great little testing tool, that took a lot of work I'm sure! View the Browser Lab Website (FYI: i was able to login with my Adobe credentials that I use for forums, Alpha stuff, etc) Some gripes... there is no choice for Chrome, which I realize is new-ish, but come on guys :) Also, no choice for Mobile Browsers? I guess these things will be coming soon enough!