Uncategorized Thoughts
Flying on the airplane the other day I was trying to think of some cool ideas for software that would already have been developed 10k times over… Then it dawned on me; Bill Gates had it easy.
Back in the early 80′s, it seems to me that it was rather easy to come up with a unique (truly unique) idea in personal computers. One could argue that because graphical user interfaces weren’t common that it would be hard to imagine something so futuristic as google… But, never-the-less, it seems to me that there was SOOO much room for brilliant software inventions.
Now, when you try to think “what could I make that no else has?” you’re left stuck with ideas like
- Eye scanner (with some AI) that detects rapid eye movement in combination with mouse clicks to eventually replace mouse-clicks with simply looking at the screen
- Windows modification that changes the position of shadows and the over-all ambiance of windows, buttons, etc. based on the location of sun-light within the room.
- AI-based program that monitors general interests over time and displays news-worthy events based on established interests.
- THE LIST GOES ON…
WTF! Not only have all of those ideas probably already have been thought of by someone at MIT, but I couldn’t imagine the education I would need to accomplish them, much less the time or funding. (more…)
I’ve been working out of home for 4+ years now. When I tell this to people I get mixed responses; some say “wow that must be nice” while other says “wow I bet that’s tough”.
When they say “nice” they are referring to:
- Not having to commute
- Simply walking upstairs to make lunch
- Within reason, being available for the unexpected
When they say “tough” they are referring to:
- Not having a separation between work and home.
- Potentially distracted from work during the day
- Never leaving the house
Personally, I love it. I find that distractions are usually minimized a great deal (at least far more than sitting in an office). Think of how many times in a day you get someone peering over your shoulder to ask you a question, or how often you walk to the bathroom and get side-tracked on the way there. I suppose it also makes a big difference that I enjoy what I do, though.
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Yesterday I called up Microsoft Support to discuss the calendaring sharing issue I am experiencing. At first I was directed to Exchange support. They quickly established that it wasn’t an exchange problem because the calendar sharing permissions work fine in OWA and Outlook 2010. So, they forwarded me to Outlook support (the next day, when Outlook support was open).
The lady that called me from Outlook support immediately began asking me questions about my exchange environment. When I got around to the fact that our exchange server was a VM using VMWare Server 2, she immediately started to back out of troubleshooting by saying that Exchange is supported in an virtual environment. She showed me a MS KnowledgeBase article that indicated the Exchange 2007 wasn’t supported in in virtual environments.
“But this is Exchange 2010″, I say. At which point she tried to tell me that they were practically the same thing and that the article also includes Exchange 2010. After I pointed out that the article is obviously very knowledgable in what it is referring to (it even points out the service packs that don’t support virtualization in exchange 2007), she put me on hold.
For the most part, navigating the Exchange Management Console has been very intuitive. The location of the Send Connectors, the Receive Connectors, the Mailboxes; they all make sense and are (within reason) easy to find. One seriously lacking administration feature is permissions. There is no built-in permissions-editing tool in the EMC.
Here I’ll show you a few things I found.
1) A tool which, in concept, is useful, but in practice, is dreadful.
2) A script that I made, which sets default permissions for calendars in all mailboxes.
3) A problem I found with sharing permissions in Outlook 2007.
A couple days back I installed Outlook 2010 Beta because I read an article about it that described a couple features that I could really use. So far, I must say, I am reallyimpressed with the product. Although the interface hasn.t been changed that much, the changes that they did make to it sure do look nice.
So, here.s the doozy feature: Support for multiple exchange accounts in a single profile. This is a huge deal for me. I have several exchange accounts that I have to keep up with and the current version of outlook (2007) just doesn.t make that very easy.
I never really understood why support for multiple exchange accounts per profile wasn.t provided before. The 2007 version already allows you to view multiple calendars and multiple address books. So what.s the big deal? I can only assume that the big issue was related to the API. For example, every call to the .add item to calendar. function of the API now needed to be .add item to XXX calendar. (specifying which account to handle). Even so, I would think backwards compatibility could be handled well enough by specifying a default calendar when dealing with legacy outlook API applications. (more…)
A while back I ran into some issues with my system getting BSOD’d… The dell online chat representative (after remote assisting me) suggested that I re-install windows. After I did that I could no longer properly use my bluetooth headset devices.
Today, I spent about 30 minutes with another dell online chat representative trying to fix this issue (watching them remote assist my computer)… In the end, they told me they could not figure it out and could only suggest that speak with an On-Call representative (which costs money, of course). They told me that everything was fine with my system and that the problem must be with my bluetooth headset, which was not supported by them because it was not Dell. (more…)
Yesterday I received my new Acer easyStore server. For a while now I have been needing a new server and this one caught my eye with the competitive cost and the extra memory. For the same price of the HP home server I was able to get an extra 1.5 gigs of memory, which is perfect for me because I plan on doing more with it than just storing files. In this blog I describe the experiences I have had setting up my home server, such as my smooth initial setup, my troubles with PHP and MySql installation, but my overall satisfaction with the product.
I have now worked on several PHP web-based projects and have learned how the Joomla API works as well as how to build custom components for Joomla. I have even done some minimal work on C#/.Net. However, I haven’t once touched java in about 5 years. So, several days ago I began re-kindling the Java “flame”. So far things have been going along quite smoothly. I have (much like PHP) noticed some major changes in Java. Mainly the IDE’s (again, much like PHP) that are available to develop with. When I worked heavily with PHP the IDE’s were not nearly as well developed as they are now. There was no Eclipse PHP or Eclipse Java. There was nodebugging PHP. Even syntax highlighting was JUST starting to become popular. Now all of these concepts are well and established and it seems like it is a lot easier to work with. (more…)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how best to organize my work. Since I have been laid off I have had to work very hard at getting side-jobs to make the money I need to make. With this, I have found that I have to sell myself as someone who can work in just about any area of the software world (whether it be C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, etc). After all, there are thousands of bids going into every single job position and there are probably even more bids going on the free-lancer websites. With so many bids on so many jobs/projects I can’t really focus on one specific area. So, I have spent a large deal of time brushing up my “almost-forgotten” languages such as PHP and Java.
However, coming from 6-7 years in the C#/.Net (Aka: the microsoft)Â world, it can be difficult working in these other languages that are far more suited for linux environments. Let’s also not forget that I like my games (like Counter-Strike, Diablo, Prince of Persia, etc). It just so happens that these games don’t work very well on linux environments. I started pondering how it is that I can solve this issue without having to have two seperate machines. My friend (the same friend that bad-mouths my windows desktops) mentioned that he uses VMWare for working with multiple operating systems so I decided to give it a try.
Before two months ago (about the time I got laid off) I had never even heard of “Joomla”. Very odd name… I stumbled onto the CMS (Content Management Software) from a friend of mine who wanted help with their website (http://www.sizzlencuisine.com). She had previously been working with other website designers and wasn’t very happy with their progress/communication (what a shocker). I have now spent a few weeks working very diligently to learn what Joomla is about, how to develop a website with Joomla and even how to develop a custom Joomla component (which I now have available for sale on my website). It has, overall, been an intriguing and experience and one that I find worth sharing. (more…)
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