web 2.0 ish

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A Wiki For Life?

I’m a big fan of using wikis in the workplace (In fact I was part of a team that got Proctor and Gamble to start using Wiki’s for their Metamucil team back in 2003 when no one had heard of Wikis). Mike Wilson pushed wikis on me back then and I have never looked back. Our IT team uses one with a passion. Today while I was going over my “to do” list I realized that a personal wiki for everything me, would be perfect. I know Scott Hanselman pimped TiddlyWiki so I am giving it a try. I have three sections - MyIT, MyMarketing, MyLife (I believe Tiddly uses camel case, which is old school wiki style I love). It’s set as my default page on my browser. I’ll report back on if this works out.

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Written by Tim on February 9th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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Now Using Bloglines

For almost a two years I had been using RSS Popper. It integrated very nicely into Outlook, but recently I ran into some performace issues with Outlook and it turns out RSS Popper was the cause. I gave Google Reader a shot but it turned out to be way to slow. On the advice of The Nix Guy I turned to Bloglines. I’m loving it. It’s interface is very simple, the reader is fast and the way the post are rendered makes it for easy reading. My only wish would be some way to read internal blogs at work with it. Those blogs are behind the firewall so it would have to be some type of Grease Monkey script or Firefox Extension that plugged in.

Written by Tim on February 6th, 2007 with 3 comments.
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Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com


12 Truths about Google

This took longer then it should, but someone finally realized Google funds terrorist. Here is the truth about the Google corporation.

  1. They are an Advertisement company 100%

  2. They have no shame about selling ads on anyones site about anything, including terrorism, kiddie porn, and crack sites

  3. Google wants to decide what laws they want to help enforce, they are against slander against gays, but for kiddie porn

  4. Their site advertisement is a scam (yes, the Google ads on my site are worthless). Advertisers who pay for these must be idots

  5. Their Adwords (ads on google.com) are slowly following this trend, a few years ago ROI on these were acceptable, this is happening less and less

  6. Google only wants some fraud PPC, they make money on fraud clicks but they don’t want too much to drive away the advertisers

  7. People who do SEO are in cahoots with Google, Google helps them make a living and they keep hush about these truths

  8. Their search engine hasn’t gotten better in a few years, why? - See #1

  9. Google does good things for the Open Source community, but I bet they get sued real soon for not following the GPL. Most of the software uses GPL but where is the source code they are required to release to the public?

  10. They dislike in order: Microsoft, Ebay, Amazon

  11. They like in order: Yahoo!, Apple, AMD

  12. Google stock, Google Advertisements, and Google itself is a bubble that will burst. Google has a place but right now they are too big and going in the wrong direction.

    13. Written by Tim on December 7th, 2006 with 5 comments.
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Turn any RSS feed into a Podcast using Ruby

Ever wonder how to turn rss xml into a podcast mp3? Me neither, but it struck me as a really cool idea when I ran across Talkr.com, a online services which does this. I then found Audiolicious and found you can do it in 7 easy steps.


Audiolicious allows you to point it at any valid RSS feed and create MP3 Podcast. It converts the text to speech using Windows and Ruby technology.

Instructions:

  1. Unzip the Audiolicious zipfile to a directory on your computer.
  2. Install Ruby.
  3. Install the Microsoft Speech API.
  4. Install the Microsoft Mary voice.
  5. Test Audiolicious by running audiolicious.bat. The MP3’s will appear in the output directory.
  6. Configure Audiolicious by opening audiolicious.rb in your favourite text editor and changing the rss_feed and output_dir.
  7. Setup up audiolicious.bat to run daily using Windows Scheduler.

Written by Tim on November 30th, 2006 with 4 comments.
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How to make a Yahoo! sitemap file using Google’s Sitemap Tool

Yahoo! has been accepting sitemaps very similar to what Google is doing with their Sitemap feeds. One exception, they do not provide you with a tool like Google does, that might make too much sense. I guess Yahoo! was behind in the game and went public without offering webmastes any tools to submit a text file containing your URL list in a plain text file. Initially I thought I could use something like Xenu - a link checking bot that gives you a list of valid html pages with no broken links. However it puts a bunch of goofy jargon in the source code that makes it very very difficult to create text file of plain jane URLs. So I ended up using Google sitemap tool to first build my url list.

See Google Sitemap help for detailed instructions . Here are the steps you need to make this happen.

  1. Download Google’s sitemap tool from sourceforge.

  2. Run this code to generator a sitemap:

    $ python sitemap_gen.py --config=

    This will generate an sitemap.xml.gz file in the location you specified in the config.xml file. You then need to :

    $ gunzip sitemap.xml.gz

  3. Next, open this sitemap.xml using your favorite text editor - I use UltraEdit. Do a search and replace with nothing for:




    Use a regular expression to search and replace with nothing for:
    *

    *

Then you should record a macro to delete the extra line breaks and leading space. I’ve attached the Macro I used in Ultra Edit. Download the Google_to_Yahoo.mac macro. Pretty straight forward. Let me know if you have an eaiser way. I do have over 5,000 URL’s so doing by any other way then automation was out of the question.

Written by Tim on November 29th, 2006 with no comments.
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IE 7 - Native xmlHttpRequest Not So Good

When I found out IE7 was going to implement a native javascript object, xmlHttpRequest, in addition to their own Microsoft.XMLHTTP object, I was thrilled. This meant once IE 6 was phased out of the world, all my ajax stuff wouldn’t need to check browser before proceeding. For the most I use ajax frameworks (http://www.ajaxpro.info/) that already have this built in but I do write my own xmlhttp request on occasion.

For an internal application I have an ajax search functionality built that queries a database and returns customers names on key entry. So I type in “Acm” I get a listing of:

Acmanda
Acmat
Acme

This is very similar to Google suggest, but I display the results in a fixed height div tag with auto scroll enabled. The ajax returns li tags with href tags around the company names. This works on IE 6, FF, and Safari. However in IE7, there is some real slowness to this. When I use Fiddler I see the Request returning from the AJAX calls but the results do not show up. I tried setting the page cache to nothing, but still no luck. I then ran into several articles questioning the XmlHttpRequest javascript object.

I also found out IE 7 is slow on some Google sites where a ton of XML traffic is being returned, like their Google Maps.

I started playing around with IE 7’s options, turning off Phishing filter, testing, no luck and so on. When I turned off the native XMLHttp support as seen below, my application ran perfectly fast on IE7. IE 7 is set up to fall back to the Microsoft.XMLHTTP Active X object if this gets turned off.

So this makes me wonder.

OR

This has egg on the face written all over it.

Did you know you could browse IE with handheld computers? Modern technology makes everything more portable, like barcode readers and mobile computers. Zebra card printers are now portable, too, so you can print on the go!

Written by Tim on October 25th, 2006 with 11 comments.
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Why Refactor Code

I ran across a great example of why to refactor code. We have a system that users fill out some forms and processes are kicked off that route that data to a database and send out emails to different people based on certain user input. Before we rewrote the system in January of 06, to change who got a certain email took at least a 1 hour of coding time and an half an hour of QA. It was way out of wack. We totally rewrote the system in January but because of delays to other parts of the project the system didn’t go live until August of this year. So for 8 months we could have sat on our new code which worked. Instead every 2 months we revisited different code blocks and refactored. At most we spent less then an hour refactoring. This particular code block ended up getting refactored 4 times.

Today, I got a request to route emails to different people, based on new business rules. The end result took 2 minutes of code changes, and 3 minutes to QA. We use Watir to run automated test. Because we use source control I did some auditing. Looking back these are the number of lines of code that would have needed to change for today’s changes.

Refactor Date Lines of Code to Change
March 51
May 22
July 15
August 8

Refactoring code rocks!

Written by Tim on September 28th, 2006 with 4 comments.
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Web Application’s Ten Essentials - Part 1

1 - Source Control

Source control benefits every make of developer, from a 1 person shop, small teams, to giant software teams at Google and Microsoft. Developers check out to their local machines, develop, run thru test cases, and finally check in. For 1 this improves quality, developers are less liking to consciously check in buggy code to central repository.

2 - Test Cases

To make some simple test cases think…What is the web suppose to do? Right down the steps on paper or even dare buy test case management software. The great thing about well written test cases is that anyone can run thru them. I’ve given my wife (who is not so techy) test cases and had her find functionality that had been broken during development. In team environments test cases are essential. Most regression bugs I have seen are caused by developers not being aware of changes to the source code can effect source code else in the code i.e. function parameters changing.

3 - Bug Tracking System / Feature Tracking System

All developers write code that have bugs in it, because developers can’t image all the way end users will break their applications. It happens, and the one thing that will kill the success of a web application is bugs. Web applications are expected to have less bugs then desktop software. For desktop software, clients have to come install new software, make sure proper privileges are set up on the machine, reboot, and so on. Because Web applications are able to be pushed live to a server (or cluster) and bug fixes automatically show up, web applications bugs are easier push out and therefore should be less buggy.

What your bug tracking software must have:

3 - Staging Environment that mirrors Production Environment

In the .NET world this is pretty easy to do. I don’t believe you can get different versions of .NET 2.0 or MS SQL 2005. However, make sure all patches that applied to the production box make their way to stage. In the LAMP world this is a bigger concern. I’ve seen numerous times where a stage machine will have a different config of php.ini then production. “You mean global variables are turned off?“

4 - Refractor Code Regularly

The question is if you didn’t have bugs would you refactor code at all? The answer should be yes. Writing code is like shooting basketballs. The more you do it the better you get. I look at code I wrote 5 years ago and cringe. This doesn’t mean you keep making code more and more abstract cause that can kill maintainability. Joel’s article about JAVA should really be about code refactoring.

5 - Wiki it

Wiki rocks for web application development documentation. They are great place to cover yourself based on the hit by bus theory.

Written by Tim on August 10th, 2006 with no comments.
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Google to start selling Radio Ads

In January 06 Google bought DMarc Broadcasting to help jumpstart themselves into the radio advertisement game. Since then there has not been much news from this side of the business. Today, I received a Google survey for some free adwords dollars. The entire survey was about radio advertisement. I think this is pretty good evidence that they are ramping up on this. Don’t be surprised to see Google selling radio ad spots thru their adwords center in the not to distant future. The last time I got a Google survey, it was about print advertisement, 2 weeks later they revealed it in beta form.

One of the more interesting and revealing questions was that Google was planning on putting advertisers directly in touch with production talent for creating radio advertisments. I am betting they have some sort of GUI interface were you put in copy, type of voice to be used, pause points, emphasied points etc… and Google pushes it to a production house.

Here are a few screen shots of the survey and the questions they are asking advertisers.



There are various buinesses on can do online. Providing data recovery is one of them. Another one would be selling certificate templates. Yet another would be being a part of something antivirus software affiliate marketing. Also tutorial courses can be given in various certifications such as 350-001 and 642-444. All of these are very promising businesses. Using 70-284 course one can develop the site in no time and market their skills.

Download testking mcitp dumps to learn how to sell radio ads! Our testking ccda tutorials and testking ccnp labs will provide you step by step guidance on how to build strong business relations for future as well.

Written by Tim on July 12th, 2006 with 63 comments.
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Vintage Microsoft Magazine Ads

I rumaged the internet to find these Microsoft print ads. I know their not Apple quality but still cool to see.

I never have really done anything with 16 bit software except hack an old King’s Quest Mod a long time ago, but I bet Microsoft tool is what I used ;)
This was an early ad for Windows 95 - I hope Microsoft fired that Marketing Company, this ad is horrible.
123 vs Excel, this might have been Microsoft’s first software war. I’m actually glad Excel won, I wasn’t a big fan of 123.
Flight Simulator This was No Doubt their best game for years, way a head of times. I played this for hours.
Remember when Wall Street liked Microsoft, Now their stock falls even when they exceed expectations.
Multiplan - This later became Excel for you kids out there. It was also Microsoft’s first GUI attempt.
Will Microsoft become the first to create the first truly mobile computer for personal use? Technology can really take us anywhere, as devices with a touch screen monitor can attest to. Who knows how far advanced computers, barcode scanners and business electronics can get!

Written by Tim on June 2nd, 2006 with 6 comments.
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