Category: Technology

All things geeky.

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Start the year off with professional development

Is training and professional development something you are going to get around to one day? Why not make it today? Resources abound for honing our career skills. iTunes has free podcasts from iTunes University. A quick Internet search should produce abundant articles and videos useful to whatever your line of work.

I am taking the next 30 minutes for professional development. In my case, I am going to begin learning Eclipse so that I can move away from Notepad++ and CFStudio5. This will be a step toward moving my development environment to a portable hard drive so that I can work on any machine anywhere I go. I know learning to use an editor sounds silly. In my case, shouldn’t "professional development" be about learning about new software testing techniques, algorithms, or another programming language? Not necessarily. Anything that you learn which makes you more efficient in your career or makes you more valuable to your company is professional development. Even if you already know and use Eclipse, watching these videos make teach you something you don’t realize you are overlooking. Retraining on a tool you already use and know can help break bad habits or reveal better ways to use the tool.

Update: See Darren Schall’s discovery on Eclipse workspaces as an example of using a tool for awhile and then discovering its hidden power.

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Today’s Technical Brain Cloud

Having a stupid moment and maybe you can help. I’m trying to count how many times an employee is scheduled using MySQL. I would like to have a column that for George says "3" and for Lucy says "2" but if I group on EmployeeID and use count(e.EmployeeID) I end up with 2 rows instead of 5. How do I retain the 5 rows of data and still get a count of 3 for George and 2 for Lucy? My output will show that George has schedule Sat-Mon, Tues-Fri, and Wed-Sun and will say "George is scheduled 3 times."

CompanyID AffiliateID EmployeeID EmployeeName Schedule
1   23   11   George   Sat-Mon
1   23   11   George   Tues-Fri
1   23   11   George   Wed-Sun
1   23   15   Lucy   Sun-Mon
1   23   15   Lucy   Thur-Fri

SELECT c.CompanyID,
     a.AffiliateID,
     e.EmployeeID,
     e.EmployeeName,
     s.Schedule
FROM companies c
LEFT OUTER JOIN subscription s
     ON c.CompanyID = s.CopmanyID
LEFT OUTER JOIN affiliates a
     ON a.AffiliateID = s.AffiliateID
LEFT OUTER JOIN employees e
     ON ae.AffiliateID = a.AffiliateID
LEFT OUTER JOIN schedules s
     ON s.EmployeeID = e.EmployeeID
          AND s.CompanyID = c.CompanyID
          AND s.AffiliateID = a.AffiliateID
WHERE (s.StartDate <= FROM_UNIXTIME(1227243599)
     AND s.EndDate >= FROM_UNIXTIME(1227157200))
     AND c.CompanyID = 1
ORDER BY c.CompanyName, s.AffiliateID ASC

I know this is not a complex SQL problem. I’ve done this in the past but today I am being dense and am stumped.

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Social Rules in the Digital World

We have social rules in society. For instance, we don’t sneeze into our hand then immediately shake someone else’s hand. Some people have difficulty understanding social rules in real life. To further complicate these social rules, they vary from culture to culture. Now, introduce the Internet and it’s latest craze, social media. To be in, hip, popular, and just not ignored on the Internet right now, you must be "social." For businesses, this means engaging your customers.

A great example is Comcast’s Frank Eliason and his use of Twitter. Frank created the Twitter account @ComcastCares and started using keyword searches with tools like Summize to find customer’s complaining about Comcast’s service and he tackled these problems directly, one on one. Rather than the customer reaching out to Comcast, Frank reached out to the customer and redefined customer service on the Internet. Now many companies use Twitter and blog searches to engage customers, retain customers, and repair their corporate image.

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh took the Zappos core value #6 "Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication" to an extreme by encouraging staff to embrace Twitter and blogging. Tony tweets as @zappos and blogs under the Zappos CEO and COO Blog. Even though he is a busy CEO, he takes time to respond to people like me. That’s engagement!

So what of social rules online? Just read comments at a major media outlet such as Knoxnews.com and see how the power of apparent anonymity can turn the uninitiated Internet neophyte, what I would assume is a normally decent human being, into a royal ass. I see horrible comments in such forums that I cannot imagine a person having the audacity to utter in mixed company in person. Twitter is undeniably one of the best examples of social media on the Internet. In 140 characters, you share with your followers (and the world if your Tweets are not set to private) the mundane in your life, the news, announcements, or whatever suits your mood. Seems simple enough, but there are unwritten, social rules which have formed around the service. Genuine Jeremy Floyd polled his followers and published Rules of the Road-Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Twitterverse. If you feel his list needs expanding, head over to his blog and add your social rules in his comments. You can also send him a message through Twitter @jfloyd.

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Santa Got a Blackberry!

If you didn’t know, Santa is all ago! I know, because he has personally Tweeted me. That’s right, you can find Santa Claus on Twitter! @SantaClaus is sending updates as he progresses around the world. @SantaClaus25 is discussing his Christmas Eve progress and sending direct messages to other Twitters. @Santa is reporting his locations and posting videos. It looks like The Polar Express Conductor may have retired for the season. He was @PlrExpConductor.

Merry Christmas to all! And Tweet well tonight.

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A negative of installing a new motherboard

I am pleased to have my workstation working again. I miss the portability of working on Tommy’s laptop but nothing compares to having multiple monitors for productivity. When will they make a laptop with a screen that can fold out so that the laptop itself will have 2 or 3 screens? Imagine. Fold up to reveal the keyboard and one screen. Need more real estate? Fold the screen to the left and you now have 2 screens and a keyboard. Need more? A 3rd section folds out to the right and now you have a keyboard and 3 screens and portability! Oh how I dream.

Anyhow, seems my machine is still not up to par. Windows just informed me that I have to install service pack 3, again. (since installing the new motherboard required reinstalling Windows core files)

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Having fun with Jott

Jott is one of my favorite web services. I use speed dial on my phone to call Jott, I speak the name of the person I want to send a note to (usually ‘myself’), I record my message spelling out difficult words "My name is McCaughan M-c-c-a-u-g-h-a-n", then I speak the date and time for when I want a text transcription of my words sent to my email and phone as sms. Jott’s magic is not in its speech to text software but in its human backup. Computers do the bulk of the work but humans (India I think) listen to difficult messages and provide a fairly accurate transcription although sometimes there are errors. My first reminder today:

Get a plunger.

Okay. I am pretty sure I never said to get a plunger. I can go to the Jott website and listen to my original message to figure out what I really meant. I also like to have fun with the messages sometimes:

Get a plant light, save the plants. Save the plants, save the world.

You can also use Jott to post to Twitter, Remember the Milk, and 40 some odd other services.

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Today’s Technical Challenge

About every 5th character I type, regardless of application (be it Twhirl, Firefox, MS Word, CFStudio..) the window I’m in loses focus. This means I have to click back into the window that I’m trying to type. Terribly annoying but I can deal with it because I have to be on my code today instead of on troubleshooting. I’ll run some antispyware checkers in the background while I work. This is terribly frustrating.

Update: This computer has an ethernet card and a wireless networking card. I’m using the ethernet so the wireless is unnecessary but the wireless connection manager kept polling for available networks and that was stealing the focus from the other applications. Disabling the wireless networking connection did the trick.

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Today’s Technical Challenge

This one is aside from the normal programming endeavors. Tommy’s laptop, Vista installed, is refusing to logoff the current user. It has been saying "Logging Off.." for hours. Various forums have suggestions about an IE update to fix the problem, driver updates, unsigned drivers, blah blah blah. None of that matters if you cannot get the machine to some kind of command prompt or other useable interface. I’m going to try pulling the battery out and removing all power.

Update: Removing the battery and power cable, then waiting a few minutes before reconnecting power fixed the problem.

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Today’s Technical Challenge – New MB for Existing XP

My motherboard died on my computer with all the software required for my consulting efforts. Why did it die? Because the capacitors on the motherboard were manufactured with an incomplete and flawed electrolyte formula that was acquired through some bad industrial espionage. I have since been given a new (old, I mean newly manufactured but we are talking Socket 462) motherboard. After installing it last night, Windows gets to mup.drv in the bootup process and restarts the machine. So today’s challenge (and one necessary to access my invoicing software) is to get Windows repaired so that it, and all the installed software on that hard drive, work with this new motherboard. Of course, I do this in conjunction with pumping out code. Days like this make me wish I had an IT department. I miss Nate.

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Error messages you don’t want to see

When booting your computer for the first time after installing a new motherboard, one should not expect to see 1) CMOS battery low nor 2) CMOS memory wrong size

Update: The CMOS simply needed to be reset. The battery was fine. The computer boots without problem now but Windows gets to mup.drv and the computer restarts without ever reaching the Windows splash screen.

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I want Sandy goes down

At the beginning of this week, we learned that Pownce is shutting down. Pownce in many regards was superior to Twitter but never claimed the community that Twitter built which gives Twitter its power and the ability to turn down $500million in stock (see also the NYT) offered by Facebook.

At the end of this week, we learn that I Want Sandy is shutting down. I Want Sandy was a convenient reminder service not terribly dissimilar to Jott. Interestingly enough, the intellectual property has been purchased by…wait for it…Twitter!

While the company [Values of n] and services will be shutting down, Stikkit and Sandy‘s DNA will live on; the intellectual property behind both has been acquired by Twitter, Inc [http://twitter.com]. While Twitter has no immediate plans to incorporate Sandy or Stikkit’s feature sets into its core product, those who know our apps well may notice familiar-feeling bits and bobs appearing in your Twitter experience. [Source, Get Satisfaction – I Want Sandy, A fork in the road (An important announcement about I want Sandy)]

That same announcement explains that the owner Rael Dornfest took an engineering job with Twitter. It Died notes this and has further commentary.

Dornfest wasn’t charging for these services, but they were quite good at their purposes. He opted to take a job with Twitter, sell them his intellectual property, and shutter the site. [Source, ItDied.com, In Defense of Shutdowns]

Until December 19, 2008, you can export your data from Sandy.

Sandy, R.I.P.

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Straight to /dev/null

I’m banging out code today and making good headway. In the meantime, everything I have sent to the cloud seems to be going to /dev/null. Guy Kawaski has answered everyone’s Tweets but mine. Twitter posts usually see lots of traffic but not this one. My technical questions on IRC have gone unanswered. I feel a bit in a vacuum today. Are my tubes clogged?!