October 2008 - Posts

• Improving Kindle

  I have had my Kindle since June. The hardware and user experience is really good, but there are some things Amazon could do to make the owner experience much better. Here are my suggestions for taking the Kindle from Good to Great. Total Price - $300+ for the privilege of buying eBooks? I do not see the masses making this commitment. I understand you cannot just give it way, but it would be a no brainer if the $100 - $200 of books where included. eBook Prices - As an Amazon Price customer, I can have just about any book in two days for almost the same price as the eBook price. I am guessing publishers are a big part of this, but a $2 difference in pricing is insulting. Previous Purchases - Any book I have ever purchased on Amazon should be included for free. I already bought it and in just about every case spent more for the paper edition. If it is available on Kindle, it should be mine. Blogs - seriously, I would have to pay per blog? I know there are some bandwidth concerns here, but I should be able to pay a simple monthly fee that should cover any number of blogs I can fit on it. Social - To me, this is the biggest short coming. There is absolutely nothing social about this device. Why can't I share (in a limited way) eBooks with friends? I can easily do this with a paper book. Why can't I easily see what is on my friends Kindles? Again, this is a great device and I highly recommend it. Hopefully Amazon is listening to its users and future versions will get even better. Posted to Technology and tagged as kindle , books , amazon , social Similar Posts Installing Vista 64bit on a MacBook Pro Life on a Mac - Five Months Later X-Copy Database Options Posted Oct 26 2008, 11:16 AM by Simpable Filed under: Technology

• in.Telligent Day -2

  We are still three days away from officially starting in.Telligent, but things are starting to come together nicely. Yesterday we received word that the event has officially sold out at ~ 200 attendees. This doubles last years number. The product team spent a good 30 minutes last night driving around looking for http://www.sonnybryans.com/. iPhone GPS took us through a residential neighborhood and in the end directed us to an out of business location. We ended up at going to Red Hot and Blue (as usual). Product team presentation war room: The presentations are coming together nicely and we will be reconvening at Buffalo Wild Wings on Addison road shortly (stop by if you are in the neighborhood) Scott Dockendorf, VP of Client Services, does a make up dry run for his talks   Posted to Business and tagged as in-telligent , telligent Similar Posts A Remarkable Moo Cow in.telligent 2008 FriendFeed Posted Oct 18 2008, 01:43 PM by Simpable Filed under: Business

• Subversion on CodePlex

  My number reason for not using CodePlex regularly is the choice of source control. I had heard of the SvnBridge a while ago, but had not had a chance to check out. Tonight I wanted to grab some source from a couple CodePlex projects (StoreFront and MVC) and came across a really helpful post by Steven Harman which shows how to use a CodePlex hosted version of SvnBridge using the following URL Pattern. https://your-project-here.svn.codeplex.com/svn As Steven points out, if SVN is what you are after, I would still recommend Google code for new projects, but this will certainly make it easier for me to keep up to date on some of my favorite projects. Posted to Software and tagged as svn , codeplex Similar Posts Unfuddle == BaseCamp For Developers ASP.Net Quick Tips - Caching Castle Project Posted Oct 14 2008, 11:00 AM by Simpable Filed under: Software

• Pragmatic Beer - Dallas

  The Pragmatic Beer event we had last week in New Brunswick was a lot of fun. I am going to be in Dallas for in.Telligent next week, so I figured it would be a good time to take the show on the road. When: Wednesday October 22nd at 6:30 PM (CST). Where: The Flying Saucer, 14999 Montfort Drive, Addison, Texas 75254 Why? You like to write software, not just .NET software. You like to talk about how to write great software. You like others who like talking about great software. You like beer that does not rhyme with liller mite. Please leave a comment below if you can attend. Posted to Code and tagged as dallas , telligent , pragmatic-beer Similar Posts Pragmatic Beer NJ Developers Dinner - 10/25/2007 Installing Vista 64bit on a MacBook Pro Posted Oct 13 2008, 01:45 PM by Simpable Filed under: Code

• Blogging From Word 2007

  We recently had a customer ask if it was possible to make a blog post from Word 2007 to Graffiti 1.1. If you can see this post the answer is yes. If you cannot, then I am technically talking to myself on Friday afternoon. Posted to Software Similar Posts Disqus and Graffiti Changing for Simplicity Competing with Wordpress Posted Oct 10 2008, 02:44 PM by Simpable Filed under: Software

• Facebook’s (lack of a) Business Plan

  With all that is going on in the stock market and economy for the last couple weeks, this headline cracked me up. The market situation today is not the same as what happened in the dotcom era, but it is still comical for Facebook to state we will get to the business part of it later. There are very few long term success stories (Google) using the “figure it out later” strategy. With the bleak market outlook for the next couple of years, I think Facebook will be kicking themselves for missing a major opportunity in about three years.  Posted to Business and tagged as facebook Similar Posts On A PC Intel Capital invests $20M in Telligent A Remarkable Moo Cow Posted Oct 10 2008, 09:18 AM by Simpable Filed under: Business

• Lucene Opportunity

  We (Telligent) have used Lucene.Net quite a bit over the last couple of years. We are getting ready to start on a pretty ambitious update using Lucene.Net and we are hoping to add someone to the team who has expertise in this area. Similar to some of the other positions I have posted this one can be fulfilled remotely if you are the right candidate. Here is a quick run down: Full time or contract (although this will be ongoing work, so we prefer FT) We prefer Lucene.Net experience, but if you really know Lucene and have a desire/willingness to jump to the .NET side of the world let us know. You must legally be employable in the US (generally this means you must be a US citizen). If you lived in the Dallas Texas area that would be ideal, but again if you have skills and a decent internet connection we can make this work. If you are interested, please send your resume and summary of skills to scottw@telligent.com. Posted to Business and tagged as telligent , lucene Similar Posts Senior Developer Position(s) SharePoint Developer II iPhone vs. BlackBerry Posted Oct 06 2008, 05:36 AM by Simpable Filed under: Business

• More Tips For Working Remotely

  Josh posted a list of tips for working remotely. Here are a couple of additions. Evolution  OK, so I am biased towards our own internal social knowledge solution, but this really does improve the remote work place in a big way. Important information is stored and accessible in a central location, self organizing groups are readily at your disposal, and it easily plugs into your most typical communication tool, Email. When in Rome… When looking for a long term remote assignment, I would recommend one with many others working remotely. The communication flow is very different when you are remote and can (obviously) be a challenge. When everyone is remote and understands the challenges the process can be much better. If you are the only person who is remote on the team, I would highly recommend grilling your future team about their means of communicating. SharedView, LiveMeeting, WebEx, etc This is one I have not taken advantage of enough yet, but I plan on using more in the coming months. Meetings suck, but there are some things than can only be explained with a whiteboard. When there are no whiteboards, SharedView and friends help out quite a bit. SharedView A second listing, but I wanted to call it out again because of how fast it is to setup and use. Starting a session is a single click and joining one just requires entering a LiveID. It is not an ideal too for demoing an application to a potential customer, but for team communication it rocks. Email It is very easy to get out of the loop when working remotely. Your communication skills and responsiveness need to be way above average. You don’t need to live your inbox, but if you are the type of person who routinely has 100’s or 1000’s of emails in your inbox you will struggle to keep up (at least at Telligent) Home is where the… Friends and family always say, “it is great you don’t even have to leave the house to work”, but what they don’t get is I don’t have to leave work to go home. I am still quite bad at this one on many days, but it is important to set boundaries for when and where you work at home. Posted to Life and tagged as telligent Similar Posts ASP.Net Quick Tips - Web.config iPhone vs. BlackBerry Unfuddle == BaseCamp For Developers Posted Oct 02 2008, 07:24 AM by Simpable Filed under: Life

• Pragmatic Beer

  Don and I have been having “Dev Dinners” every couple of months over the last couple of years. We usually draw small crowd of bright .NET people and talk shop. However, this time we want to shake things up a bit and get more realistic. So we are going to borrow a bit from James Avery and just call it a Pragmatic Beer event. To keep things agile (and because I have not been to Harvest Moon in quite a while) we are going to meet tomorrow (Thursday, October 2nd) night at 6:30 PM at the Harvest Moon. Please leave a comment if you can make it so we know to look out for you. See you there. Posted to Code and tagged as nj , event Similar Posts NJ Developers Dinner - 10/25/2007 iPhone vs. BlackBerry in.telligent 2008 Posted Oct 01 2008, 02:16 PM by Simpable Filed under: Code

• ASP.Net via Amazon in the Cloud

  I have been investing some options for leveraging ASP.Net in the cloud. Today I received an email from Amazon that made me do a double take: Dear Amazon Web Services Developer, We are excited to let you know that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server starting later this Fall. Today, you can choose from a variety of Unix-based operating systems, and soon you will be able to configure your instances to run the Windows Server operating system. In addition, you will be able to use SQL Server as another option within Amazon EC2 for running relational databases. Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server provides an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. By choosing Amazon EC2 as the deployment environment for your Windows-based applications, you will be able to take advantage of Amazons proven scalability and reliability, as well as the cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model offered by Amazon Web Services. Our goal is to support any and all of the programming models, operating systems and database servers that you need for building applications on our cloud computing platform. The ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability. We are currently operating a private beta of Amazon EC2 running Windows Server and SQL Server. Please go to aws.amazon.com/windows if you are interested in being notified later this Fall when the offering is released broadly. Things in the ASP.Net cloud world just got a whole lot more interesting. I am really looking forward to seeing what options will be available from Microsoft and Amazon over the next couple of months. Posted to Software and tagged as asp-net , amazon , cloud Similar Posts Enhancing Desktop Computing with the Cloud Changing for Simplicity ASP.Net Quick Tips - Caching Posted Oct 01 2008, 10:23 AM by Simpable Filed under: Software