07.13.08
Posted in life, tech at 12:44 am by mridley
There’s a fun television show on the Fine Living television network. It’s called I Want That! and it’s probably not a TiVo season pass pick for anti-consumerism activists. The show is pretty much explained by its title - they showcase a lot of “cool stuff”. I thought I’d post some recent items I saw on the show that appealed to me. Enjoy.
GeoChron is a wall map of the world that actually functions as a clock. It updates the view of the world showing current daylight and takes into account the rotation of the Earth on its axis and other factors that impact the “terminator” on the globe. At the top of the map it shows the current time in each time zone across the world. It’s quite pricey and there are free software programs that provide equivalent functionality. But I like the idea of having a “wall map” clock that doesn’t take up screen real estate. I do work and interact with people all over the world and keeping track of global timezones in my head can be a pain, especially with daylight savings time in the Northern and Southern hemispheres being opposite. I don’t see myself buying one any time soon, but if I had an extra $1800 that I had to spend, I’d consider it.
Reversica makes a hardware mount for cabinetry that allows you to have a cabinet rotate 180 degrees on its axis so that you can hide, for example, a plasma television with bookshelves on the opposite side. When I build my super hero hideout I’ll be sure to get one. But since I currently rent I don’t think I’m investing $3,000 in custom cabinetry hardware to hide a plasma TV I don’t have. But once I do finally buy a place I may re-evaluate.
Read the rest of this entry »
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05.09.08
Posted in life, tech at 8:11 pm by mridley
For the past few years I have used speakeasy as an ISP. Although they are pricier than other DSL options, I don’t mind paying a premium for the excellent support and service they provide. A week or two ago my DSL went out. That almost never happens. I called Speakeasy’s 24 hour support line, but it was after hours and so there was a short wait until I could speak with someone.
Instead of making me wait on hold for 10 minutes, their call management system asked if I would like to keep my place in line and receive a call back when they could assist me. I have not had experience with that option before, but it sounded like a great idea so I pressed the button to do that. Sure enough, all I had to do was enter in my phone number and in a few minutes their system called me back and connected me to a support person who resolved my technical issue. For those who are curious, it turned out that some setting in the PVC had become mysteriously mismatched.
While I would rather not have to wait at all when calling customer support numbers, if I have to wait I’d much prefer to have the system call me back than to sit around listening to hold music. I hope many other businesses upgrade their call center telephony applications to support this feature.
On a side note, while I have been a happy speakeasy customer, Verizon FiOS is finally available in my neighborhood so I suspect I will be switching from DSL to fibre in the near future. I’m sure I will miss the speakeasy support, but the faster speed and lower cost of fibre is hard to resist.
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04.18.08
Posted in politics, tech at 11:46 pm by mridley
I saw this article in CIO Insight and I thought it was worth reading. The article is an interview with Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I enjoyed the book and I was interested in his thoughts on the subject.
A lot of “CIO type” interviews and articles are long on theory and short on practical reference. This article does include some concrete references to real projects under way. Notably the intelligence community’s answer to Wikipedia, Intellipedia. Also mentioned are Politicopia, a Utah project to create a wiki community where citizens can voice their opinions about pending legislature.
The article mainly discusses theory and a few wiki examples, so I’m not sure that it lives up to it’s “Web 2.0″ claim as many other “Web 2.0″ technologies are ignored. Still, it’s worth skimming. Not so much to learn anything groundbreaking but to get the cognitive juices flowing.
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04.17.08
Posted in tech at 10:33 pm by mridley
I mentioned my personal wiki the other day. I thought I’d post a quick note about using it as a Document Management System. I’m horrible at keeping on top of documents, electronic and physical. Although I have a filing cabinet, I can never remember where I have filed my mail and other personal papers. I do a fairly good job of keeping my My Documents subdirectory organized on my desktop PC, but that doesn’t help me if I need access to files when I’m not at home.
I have been researching open source Document Management Systems, but it occurred to me that I already have a wiki and with my People Keeper project I’m concerned about further fragmenting my personal data across multiple systems. So I decided to try using my personal wiki as a DMS.
I’d say the project is in “beta” at this point, but so far it seems to work well. The nice thing is that I don’t have to worry about filing documents under one location as it’s searchable and I can link to one document from as many different places as I’d like. The wiki already handles the case of multiple versions, so I don’t have to worry about version control. And it’s very simple to set up.
I’m using MediaWiki which isn’t really intended for storing general purpose documents. It considers everything an image. In truth though, it can handle whatever type of file you give it. I only had to make a few small modifications to the LocalSettings.php file. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in tech at 5:56 am by mridley
I mentioned the other day that I am working on a People Keeper project. I know a lot of people and I am horrible at keeping in touch with all of them. Especially those that live out of the area. I’d like to do a better job. This is true of both my personal and professional connections that I’ve made over the years.
Social networking applications are handy, but what I’d really rather have is a personal “CRM” system. I got the idea from two places. The first was from using Salesforce.com in a professional CRM context. It’s a really slick piece of software, but even though they have a free personal edition it’s not really intended to keep track of your friends and colleagues. The other thing that lead to the idea was reading The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. There is an anecdote in the book about a “connector” person who kept a spreadsheet with notes on all the people he knew. Birthdays, children and spouse names, etc. But a spreadsheet is too limited for my purposes.
In my last few jobs I haven’t done much software development, and I didn’t want my perl skills to go to waste and I wanted to finally make some use of the Mason book I purchased while working at Amazon.
So I have started prototyping out this People Keeper application. At the moment it’s a glorified address book. In fact, it’s not even completely functional at the moment. But once I get a basic functional prototype working, I’d like to put a slick AJAX interface on it and then incorporate other features such as mapping integration to create something of a GIS system for myself, possibly a text to speech VOIP gateway, and various other ideas.
I don’t necessarily expect to release it publicly, although if I actually get it to a polished state I might consider making it multiuser. As I progress on the project I’ll post more updates. Stay tuned.
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02.24.08
Posted in life, tech at 10:12 am by mridley
Quick observation. I have a profile up on a number of the social networking sites. The only two that I really use are MySpace and Facebook. I was late to the game in getting a Facebook profile, and only did so after prodding from my friend Sean Parker. But some interesting behavior has emerged.
I’ve read a number of articles that compare the two sites. The general media consensus that I’ve read is that MySpace skews younger and more “blue collar” (whatever that means in the context of Internet-connected citizens participating in social networking). Facebook seems to skew “older” and more “classy”.
But my experience is different. I wouldn’t say that there is all that much class or age difference between my MySpace friends and my Facebook friends. But there also isn’t much overlap. For whatever reason, not intentional, my MySpace profile is pretty much just my social peer group (and is locked down accordingly). Facebook, on the other hand, seems to be my business/professional network. Not exclusively, but it seems to skew more along the lines of LinkedIn for me.
I’m not sure why this divergence occurred. It wasn’t intentional. Just something I noticed this morning while checking both of my pages.
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01.31.08
Posted in tech at 7:33 am by mridley
My desktop PC has 4 hard disks. One of them has been unplugged for some time, as it died a long time ago. The other 3 have been in use for a few years. Unfortunately, one of my data drives has failed completely and the other is on its last legs with a lot of data errors and corrupted files. I could replace the storage, but it’s time for a new system and I am trying to figure out what I want. Possibly an Alienware system, but I haven’t decided.
In the meantime I’m less stressed out than I might otherwise be, as the stuff I really care about is securely backed up on Amazon’s S3 service. I realized I have never written about Jungle Disk which is doing them a great disservice, as I’ve been using the product since it was released. Jungle Disk allows me to map a virtual drive using WebDAV and back up selected parts of my system to Amazon S3.
After the trial period, Jungle Disk costs $20 and includes free lifetime upgrades. The actual storage costs are billed to my Amazon S3 account. There are plenty of online network disk storage services out there, but none of them have been right for me. Some of the content I want to back up is quite large. My music collection is on the order of 50 gigabytes. With most services, storing that amount of data would be cost prohibitive. Because S3 is so inexpensive, I’m able to backup everything I want and still pay under $10/month for the storage.
Not bad for some peace of mind.
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11.11.07
Posted in tech at 4:20 pm by mridley
I use the excellent wp-amazon WordPress plugin to insert Amazon associate links into this site. Unfortunately the version from the web site hasn’t been updated in a long time and it doesn’t work in the newer releases of WordPress. In looking at the support form I found a link to this patch.
I followed these instructions and lo and behold it worked. Posted as a public service to other WordPress users.
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10.08.07
Posted in business, tech at 5:45 pm by mridley
By clicking on a banner ad on the Washington Post, I found a link to the first annual Creative Economies conference being held October 24-25 in Tysons Corner, VA. I’m really interested in this subject (Wikinomics was mentioned on this site here and here). I’d love to go to this conference but unfortunately my schedule and my budget won’t permit. It’s frustrating to have something like this taking place so close and not be able to make it. Maybe next year. If you attend, let me know what your experience
is!
Tags: Creative Economies
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Posted in tech at 1:14 am by mridley
This site is now running Wordpress 2.3 which came out a couple weeks ago. I’m excited about the built in tags support. Not sure exactly how that works but since I have been tagging things by hand for ages I’m hoping this will automate that for me (yes, I am aware that tagging plugins have been available for years; I just never used them).
EDIT: If you look at the top of this post you will see that it is indeed tagged and that the feature does work. The theme I use for this site is a modified version of Ocadia which apparently doesn’t support tagging out of the box. I had to update it to put in the the_tags template tag code, but other than that the tagging works out of the box.
One change is that now instead of the tags linking to technorati’s tag search engine they link to this site’s tagging system. That’s different behavior than I’m used to, but I think it may actually be better so I’m going to leave that alone for now.
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