05.28.07
Posted in life, tech at 7:05 pm by mridley
My computer is getting old, and it struggles with running things like Second Life and Joost. And if I want to have iTunes and Second Life and Joost open at the same time..yeah…it performs really badly.
I’m running an old AMD Athlon system that I built myself a few years ago. Whenever I decide to get a new PC it’s always a battle of whether to buy a prebuilt off the shelf system or build a new one myself.
The problem with building one myself is that I end up setting “spec inflation”. By that I mean that while an off the shelf single processor Dell with a gig or two of ram would be fine, if I start looking at parts on pricewatch I end up telling myself I need some $5,000 quad-core ridiculous computer. When in fact I don’t.
What I do need, however, is a lot of storage and I’m not sure how easy that is to get with the off the shelf Dells (or competitors). Perhaps it’s time to setup NAS at my house. The other question is whether to get a replacement desktop or to get a laptop. I haven’t had a functioning laptop since the death of my much lamented iBook. I need to get both, but it’s a question of what to do first.
I think first I will focus on making money to fund all of this.
Permalink
Posted in business, life, tech at 3:01 pm by mridley
I haven’t really updated much here lately as I’ve been super busy. I did end up taking a new position, and it’s in down town DC so getting used to my horrible commute is taking some time. It’s an exciting job, however, and I’m hoping it will work out for the long run (it’s a contract to perm situation so we’ll see what happens).
I wrote before about using Salesforce.com to track job leads. That worked…um..somewhat well. I ended up with a lot of job leads in progress at once and it became somewhat of a difficult task to keep on top of updating the entires in Salesforce to log every call, meeting, email, etc. This isn’t really a criticism of Salesforce, though, as it was too many job leads to have in play at once. I got overwhelmed myself, was spending way too much time running from interview to phone screen to interview. I should have done a better job of filtering what I wanted; the problem is that because my other job that I was planning to hop to fell through I was in “unexpectedly unemployed” mode which I don’t deal well with and end up chasing after lots of things at once to “get a job quick” and that’s not really very productive.
In this case it worked out alright, though, as I am happy in my new position. Except I need to get used my 13+ hour days of work/commute. Oh well. I’ll live.
Permalink
05.11.07
Posted in business, tech at 12:19 pm by mridley
In my travels around the Internet I recently came across the QuickPlayer for Blackberry. This Blackberry application allows me to listen to selected streamed podcasts from my phone (an 8700c in my case).
The service is $7.95 per month and their content selection is limited. I signed up to try it out, but if I am going to keep this service they’ll need more content. Also, while the UI on the QuickPlayer application is pretty, it’s not very functional. The basics are there - selecting a program, adding it to favorites, and listening. What’s missing is any ability to access previous programs (only the most recent is available), and ability to fast forward or rewind the current audio program. There is pause but if you accidently hit the back button on the BlackBerry, as I did, selecting the program again starts it from the beginning.
I don’t mean to be overly negative; I think this is a relatively new service and they are still working out the kinks. But once you start asking for money your users expectations of the quality of your software will be higher than the average “not quite there” Internet beta software. Still, it’s great to be able to listen to Wall Street Journal news updates from my Blackberry and I think with a little more content and a more refined user interface I could see myself continuing to subscribe.
Tags: Blackberry, QuickPlayer, Media
Permalink
05.06.07
Posted in business, tech at 6:09 am by mridley
I saw an article on Slashdot about a competition NASA sponsored to design a better space suit glove for use in space walks. I found this pull quote from the Discovery.com article of interest:
NASA turned to cash-prize competitions in an effort to solve some of its technical problems with low-cost, innovative solutions.
This is very much the model advocated in the Wikinomics book I just read recently (see prior commentary). NASA’s approach to opening innovation on the space suit glove supports the open innovation Ideagoras presented in the book.
Tags: Wikinomics, NASA, Ideagoras
Permalink
05.01.07
Posted in books, tech at 5:33 pm by mridley
My web design skills have atrophied over the years, and the technology has passed me by. My main career path is in UNIX infrastructure, so I stay pretty far removed from anything that actually involves web design. Unfortunately there are a lot more freelance jobs for web developers than for infrastructure automation perl coders, so I thought it might be time to refresh my web design knowledge. I picked up Ajax in Action in the hopes of catapulting my JavaScript knowledge to the forefront of Web 2.0. Or something like that.
I’ve been reading the book off and on for the past couple weeks, and I really like it. It’s well organized and is fairly comprehensive for the prospective Web 2.0 coder. It covers not only the mechanics of how to make things flashy in JavaScript, but also how to design and develop for scale and supportability. Issues such as code refactoring, the Model-View-Controller approach, effective UI design, and code profiling are covered as well as the nuts and bolts of the JavaScript required to display it all.
If you’re looking for a good introduction to Ajax-style development, I highly reccomend this book. I do think that I may pick up O’Reilly’s JavaScript: The Definitive Guide for a more thorough coverage of all the details of JavaScript. And I’m curious to check out Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action as well.
Tags: AJAX
Permalink
Posted in business, life, tech at 5:22 pm by mridley
It’s not well advertised on their web site, but Salesforce.com offers a free Personal Edition of their salesforce automation software. I signed up for an account a while back because I was curious what the package was like. Salesforce.com gets a lot of ink in the trade press for their innovative software as a service hosted model for enterprise applications, but I’m not a sales person so I had never happened to have reason to use it myself.
I’ve had my account for a while, but I never really did anything with it. See the part above about my not being in sales. I don’t like signing up for test accounts and not actually testing anything, and I kept trying to think of something I could use the Salesforce account for.
It turns out, I have found an application for Salesforce in my life: job hunting. I have recently become unemployed and have been on the job hunt. My typical method is to save copies of all resumes emails I send out to a special folder, along with reply correspondence. I make notes of the phone calls I have with recruiters and hiring managers on various slips of paper and backs of envelopes, which I then promptly misplace.
Salesforce is software to help sales professionals keep track of leads, document conversations, and drive sales productivity. Well, I am selling myself in this case, so why wouldn’t it work for me? So for the past few days I have been using my Salesforce.com personal edition account to keep track of all the various companies I’m in contact with. It’s probably overkill for my purposes, but it’s a fun test of the software.
Overall I’m impressed. I haven’t spent much time looking at their online help (which is excellent), but I’ve been able to get the system to do what I want it to do. I’m sure I’m using only a small fraction of the features, but it’s already helping me keep track of who I’ve talked to on a given day, when I said I’d follow up, etc.
I plan to keep using it until I find a job, and if I come up with any other great revelations about how the software works toward this goal I’ll let you know.
Tags: Salesforce.com, Job Hunting, Recruiting
Permalink
