The Crazy 80040154 COM Class Factory Error

Microsoft
I have been working on a project recently which requires me to integrate with QuickBooks Online, in this case from a web application. I have had the pleasure (strong word) working with integrating with QuickBooks in various capacities in the past and although it is not trivial, it does work....

A Serious Windows Home Server Pain Point

Technology
I talked about my experiences with not having a solid backup strategy back at the end of August. My solution included using a Microsoft Windows Home Server (WHS) system to handle backups for all of the computers on my home/office network. I wanted to give a bit of follow-up to...

Gone are the Days of Simple Developer Tools

Programming
I read with interest a post by Ted Neward titled “Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease”. I will leave you to read the post in its entirety but point out Ted is paraphrasing a talk he attended with the speaker saying:

I use Balsamiq Mockups and So Should You

Technology
No, I am not a spokesperson for Balsamiq but rather a happy customer. In the unfortunate event you have not heard of Balsamiq Mockups and you develop software or design it, you are missing out. Balsamiq Mockups is a tool that allows developers to create mockups easily using a library...

Thinking About Google Chrome Frame Deployment

Technology
Today Google announced the availability of an Internet Explorer (IE) plugin called Google Chrome Frame. The plugin is designed to allow HTML 5 support and is open source. This is an interesting and pretty novel idea. Google claims:

Patching Ruby on Rails Refresher

Ruby
UPDATE: As one comment points out, it is not a good idea to directly patch production unless it was an emergency. The normal state of patching would be to patch the source and make sure your tests still pass and likely to test on a staging environment. The process to...