November 22, 2010
The Tenets of Source Control Source control has been around for a long time. There’s nothing earth-shattering or ground-breaking to say about it here. So, I’m going to borrow from Eric Sink creator of SourceGear, one of the tools we’ve used at Volano: There are many source control tools, and they are all different. However, […]
November 15, 2010
Back on August 15th, Volano turned 3 years old! That was the first day that I sub-contracted at Jelecos. Rod and I had been talking about various ideas to start off on our own with for quite a while, but a consulting company was never really one of them. A few stars (clients) aligned and […]
June 18, 2010
It’s been a while since Big Omaha so my memory is fading, but I believe one of the presenters said that companies can identify themselves by figuring out what they won’t do. At Volano, we won’t respond to RFP’s any more. RFP’s are like the NBA championships… rigged. Of course the championship is going to […]
June 14, 2010
Volano Solutions does not provide hosting services of e-mail. What we do offer is assistance in the initial configuration and ongoing support of e-mail for our clients. The solutions we suggest do not tie our client to us – switching from one hosting solution to another is usually difficult, painful and may result in the […]
April 17, 2010
My first post for Volano (or any blog for that matter) was about Office Space. Rod and I have been looking for space for about a year now and we have finally, yes finally signed a lease. The building is two blocks south of where we currently are, which makes moving not so bad as […]
March 9, 2010
Concrete5 is an open source PHP-based content management system. The look and feel of the application is very nice. It makes use of lightboxes to display forms and the administration section is very stylish. For a developer, the learning curve is a tad steeper than I would have liked. The first problem is documentation. Concrete5 […]
February 16, 2010
I’ve been doing a significant amount of PHP development lately. There were two projects in particular that made me think about PHP best practices. The first was just a website with a login feature that stopped working when it was moved from one server to another. The problem turned out to be how the query […]
November 13, 2009
Last night aired a news story that I had the fortune to be part of about web sites people should know about. It was easy for me to come up with a couple sites that I thought everyone should know about: mint.com and pandora.com. I love these sites – real love. After that though, I […]
November 10, 2009
Back in the spring, we met Jeremy Heeg through Twitter and had him do some contract work for us developing a Windows app that tracks the indexing of land records for the register of deeds of South Dakota counties. He was willing and able to take this project and run with it. After that application […]
October 25, 2009
One of the requirements for a project I’ve been working on is to connect to Oracle and retrieve some data related to data in MS SQL Server. After successfully setting up the Oracle server as a linked server, I ran into trouble. Oracle’s data types aren’t quite the same as SQL Server’s data types. In […]
October 2, 2009
We’re looking for another developer to join our team. I wish there was a less corny phrase for “work hard, play hard” because that is the best way to describe our company. We have a lot of work to do and we take our work and our dedication seriously – but we like to counter […]
September 29, 2009
It was like Bull Hurley vs. Lincoln Hawk in the 1987 classic “Over the Top”. Rod was Hawk — Doug = Bull. The Final Arm Wrestle But where Stallone was able to overcome Bull and become the national champion; Rod gave a fight but then was flung around like a rag doll and defeated by […]