Here you are, once again. You just got pulled in to a new volunteer organization, and they don’t have a website. Since you’re a web guy, of course you can help solve the problem for them. They don’t have much of a budget, so they ask if there’s any way you could just cover it. Well, godaddy or bluehost are cheap, right? Well, sure… if you pay for a couple of years at a time, you only have to pay a few dollars per month. There’s a better way though, you may have heard that Amazon added hosting capabilities to their S3 service a while back. It turns out that with a bit of fiddling, and configuration, you can host a (static) website for pennies per month.
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Over the last couple of years, we have had several clients come to us requesting some sort of ecommerce site. My response has consistently been to recommend one of the existing services like Shopify or amazon webstore. These guys have all been around for a while, and provide a decent service. Invariably, there would be a response that went something like this: “I’ve tried XYZ, but they paste their branding information all over the checkout page.” or “I can’t display all of my product options.” or “I can’t integrate it with this tool I use.” After some discussion, they would then pay us to build a custom site.
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Last tuesday, FedEx dropped off my latest Amazon impulse buy. It is a book called The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers. This is one of the recent books published by the Pragmatic Programmers. It covers a popular Ruby based testing framework called Cucumber (.) Now cucumber makes a few bold claims on their site. They claim that tests can be written in plain english, and actually test real code. They also claim that with minimal training, even a non-QA person, like a product manager, could write these tests, which would double as specifications.
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<Insert apologetic comment about not writing for a long time here>

I’d like to announce the first android app produced and developed by CodeNoise. It’s called TextDrive. If you find yourself in situations where responding to SMS text messages is difficult or even impossible, this is the app for you. After you install it, you can select one of the built-in responses. Additionally in the full version, you can add your own response. Once you’ve done that, any time someone sends you an SMS message, TextDrive will automatically reply to them with the response. The app will also show a list of the messages that you have received so you can quickly glance at them and see if any are urgent. With a quick tap TextDrive will even read the message to you. This comes in handy if you happen to be driving and don’t want to take your eyes off the road. If you get a lot of texts, or want to unclutter the list, just long-tap any message and it will be removed from the list. Don’t worry, the message is still in your normal Message inbox.
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