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The claim from the ORM Designer website: With ORM Designer you develop, design and document all at once. You don't need other tools to design application model. My experience: It does exactly what they claim it does. When I found ORM Designer I was just shopping for a better alternative to Gliffy, as the complexity of project I'm working on has outgrown a plain drawing tool. I was looking at alternatives like PowerDesigner and other ERD/schema management tools, and it occurred to me to search for tools with native support for ORM, as the project in question is using Doctrine2. So I found ORM Designer, and they claimed to be Mac compatible, but it turns out they pulled a bit of a fast one on that front, as the compatibility amounts to showing step by step instructions for running it with Wine. As it turns out, I've subsequently spoken to the developer, and he mentioned that version 2, which is due imminently, will have real multiplatform support. In any case, it ...

Say what you like about Charter's borderline hostile customer service, price gouging, etc, but if there's one thing that can make a man overlook a few personality flaws, it's raw speed. Yes, I hate Charter's secret $10/month punishment fee on broadband for non-cable-subscribers, but where we live (the foothill north of LA it's going to be a long time before we see fiber reaching us) there's been nothing that can come close to coaxial broadband, and Charter is the only game in town. But as luck would have it, Charter is not content to be the hands down winner in the speed department. They recently started promoting significantly faster packages at lower prices to their existing customers (me). Last month I upgraded to their " Max " offering (nominal 20Mbps Down/2Mbps Up) which turns out to be cheaper than what I was paying for the previous 10Mpbs offering, and double the nominal speed. Okay, well as we all know from the School of Hard Knocks, nominal sp...

Well, today is one of my perennial exercises in patience...

In case it's not obvious from the deafening silence here, I've been getting my blog on elsewhere. Check out the public Soliant blog, where the best content from our internal Confluence site eventually makes its way. http://www.soliantconsulting.com/blog/

It's the end of day 2 at Adobe Max, and I have not failed to be impressed. Thermo is the big noise, as expected, and has been dubbed Flash Catalyst. CS4 is pre-configured to begin leveraging the incredible decoupled round-trip work flows between visual design tools and development tools that FC promises. I only wish it wasn't "mid 2009" before we could expect to see a production version. Still happy to have my preview copy in hand. Also being promoted is the great new component explorer, now delivered as an AIR app. And AIR deployment with 1.5 is so much slicker. Check it out:

I presented my Atomic Context slides today in L.A. for the mother of all FileMaker developer groups, FMDiSC . You can get the presentation as a PDF file (2MB), PowerPoint slide show (2MB), or QuickTime Movie with narration (appx 30 minutes and 140MB). (I made the video a downloadable MOV file, rather than a Google Video or YouTube video, because it needs high resolution to be able to read the slides.)