Have you ever copied some text from a web page or a document and then wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple by adding a new Windows hot-key (default is WINDOWS+V) that allows you to paste text to any application without formatting.

Loosely translated, it makes it possible to copy and paste from Office into tools like Windows Live Writer and web based WYSIWGY editors. Why you still need something like this in 2008 is beyond me, but I am glad that it exists.

Posted to Software and tagged as easy-things , windows

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I just wrote about a SharePoint opening on the Telligent product team and you might be saying yourself, “Self, I am a great developer, I am just not interested in SharePoint, I wonder if Telligent has anything for me?”. Generally, it is not a good idea to talk to yourself, but in this case, it could work out nicely.

In addition to the open SharePoint position, there are quite a few opening on both the Community Server and Evolution[1] teams.

Here is a list of some of the skills we are looking for (note, you don’t need to have experience with all of them, but knowing a couple of them really well is required).

• ASP.Net
• C#
• WCF and MSMQ
• Ajax/Javascript
• Unit Testing
• Flash
• SQL Server (developer expertise)
• Oracle (developer expertise)
• Active Directory, LDAP, and/or SAML
• Microsoft Presence Server
• REST
• Memecache
• CSS, HTML, Photoshop/Fireworks

Ideal candidates will be local to Dallas Texas (or willing to relocate). However, if you are a rock star and like your current dwelling, these positions can all be telecommuted. You must also be a US citizen and/or capable of working in the US without sponsorship. Recruiters need not apply.

If you are interested, please send your resume, summary of skills, and salary requirements to scottw@telligent.com.

[1] Community Server for the intranet.

Posted to Code and tagged as telligent

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We (Telligent) previously announced our intentions to enable Community Server and SharePoint to play very nicely on the intranet (definitely friends with major benefits). We will soon be releasing V1 of this work (part of Community Server Evolution), but it is already very apparent that we are just scratching the surface and we would LOVE to do more. However, to do that, we need your help.

We are looking to add another really smart[1] SharePoint developer to the team. Ideal candidates will have a good understanding and lots of previous experience developing (not just deployments) with SharePoint 2007. This is not your typical hack crap together on the intranet to make some C-level executive happy type position. You will be challenged to make the entire SharePoint user experience better.

Other requirements:

• You must be a U.S. Citizen
• Dallas Texas candidates preferred, but this could be a telecommuting position for the right candidate.
• Experience writing testable code in SharePoint

If you are interested, please send your resume, a summary of experiences, and salary requirements to scottw@telligent.com.

[1] If you don’t have SharePoint experience, but really want to dive head first into it, lets us know. We might be able to make something happen for you.

Posted to Code and tagged as telligent

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I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) LINQ in Action a couple of months ago and find myself constantly referring back to it.

Most people seem to immediately assume that LINQ is just LINQ to SQL, which means they either immediately love it or hate it. This is a shame because LINQ is so much more and regardless of your thoughts on LINQ to SQL, LINQ is a tool that once understood will change how you write code (in a very good way).

If you have not had a chance to really experiment with LINQ yet, I highly recommend checking out LINQ in Action (Official book site).

Posted to Code and tagged as linq , books

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If you have prior experience coding against SAML please ping me at scottw@telligent.com with your past experiences and rate details.

We are looking for someone to help finish up some product work we are doing and could really use someone who has been there before. This is likely a short term gig, but it could lead to a lot more work in the future for the right candidate.

Posted to Code and tagged as telligent

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Recently I started to use/listen to Pandora quite a bit. Initially, I had just listened via a browser, but over the last couple of weeks I have come across a couple tools that enhance the Pandora experience without a browser.

First, if you are not familiar with Pandora.

With Pandora you can explore this vast trove of music to your heart's content. Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs or artists into Pandora and let the Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings - new and old, well known and completely obscure - to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. Then sit back and enjoy as it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you.

Tools

OpenPandora – This is a very nice (free) application which sits in your windows task bar.  It has a slew of nice additional features such as Windows Messenger integration.

PandoraJam – A commercial (cheap $15) application for OS X. Notable features in streaming to Airport Express, growl integration, a recording option (doubt this is legal :), and some Mac style.

iPhone – The Pandora iPhone application gives iTunes remote a serious run for most useful iPhone application to date. It is very simple, but does the job surprising well over 3g.

If you have any other suggestions, be sure to leave them in the comments.

Posted to Software and tagged as pandora , os-x , mac , iphone , windows

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I received an email this morning from Amazon announcing their new "Amazon Green" initiative.

Help shoppers discover the benefits of going Green. Amazon.com has launched Amazon Green, a cross-category program that includes a list of products that customers have selected as the best green products offered by Amazon.com and a place for customers to discover Amazon's entire green product selection.

One the surface, even though it is clearly a sales ploy, I love to see them putting energy behind helping the environment. In addition, the social aspect asking users to vote on which "green products you wish everyone had" is a very nice touch.

However, irony here is hard to overlook. As someone who has made a lot of Amazon purchases over the years it is hard for me to take them very serious here. They still routinely use huge boxes and plastic filler packs for small orders. Even my Kindle arrived in a huge box.

So while I think it is a nice concept, if Amazon really want to show a commitment to the environment, I hope they eventually start from with in.

Posted to Business and tagged as amazon , green

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Dana Coffey has been posting some nice looking free Graffiti CMS blog themes.

I've converted a few free Wordpress themes for use in Graffiti CMS.  I'm offerring them here for download.  Note, that I left the original designer's credit in the footer of each.  Please leave those credits in tact if you use the themes.  I'd love it if you'd place a link back to my site as well in the footer, but I won't yell if you choose not to do so.

Posted to Software and tagged as graffiti , themes

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This week, I found myself needing a Windows computer with an x64 OS. The only hardware I have at home which is x64 (64bit) capable is my MacBook Pro, so I decided to rebuild my Boot Camp partition with Vista x64 w/SP1.

While MacBook Pro's are x64 capable, the process for setting it up is not as simple as running an installer. I had to do quite a bit of Googling and forum/blog reading to get it working.

Hopefully the notes below will make it much easier for others to setup and install.

1. Create big(ger) your Boot Camp partition.

This sounds like a no brainer, but I know quite a few people who opted for 30 GB partitions only to find themselves almost out of disk space very quickly. I am not sure why, but Vista is a huge install.

I have a 200 GB drive and wanted to dedicate 60 to 70 GB's to my Vista partition. The Boot Camp utility kept failing to create the partition because it said it could not move enough file even with nearly 130 GB's of free space (I moved things like iTunes to a USB drive). In a bit of desperation, I gave the machine a quick reboot and ran the utility one last time and it worked. I am not sure if/what the reboot did or if it will work on your computer, but it seemed to help me.

2. Make a usable install disk.

I will spare you most of the tech details, but in a nutshell if you are using a DVD/ISO you downloaded from MSDN with Vista x64 you will likely need to follow the steps outlined here otherwise you will not be able to choose the version of Vista to install.

3. BootCamp Drivers.

This was by far the most frustrating part. While x64 Vista will install on MBP's, Apple has only officially released drivers for Mac Pro's. As you will see in the next step, there seems to be a validity to this, but they could make life easier for a lot of folks if they just posted them.

To make things worse, Apple did recently (April) release a set of drivers to the public which specifically work with x64 Vista. However, they were only released as an update to the Mac Pro drivers.

Thankfully (although I doubt legally) the Boot Camp drivers were posted to RapidShare as a four part download (1, 2, 3, 4). RapidShare is insanely slow (on purpose) and annoying as hell to use, but it works. It will take about an hour to download the drivers, but unfortunately without them you cannot proceed.

After you download the drivers put them on a USB drive or burn them to a CD and install them on your MBP. Once you have them installed, you can download the updated set from Apple and install them as well.

You should now see Vista recognizes things like iSight.

4. Wifi Drivers.

I did not find others online with this issue, but for me, even with the updated Boot Camp drivers, my wifi card was not working. After not having much success finding a fix I decided to plug the MBP directly into my router and let Vista attempt to fix the driver which it somehow did (seriously, I was shocked, but it worked!).

5. Video Drivers.

My MBP has an NVIDIA 256 MB video card. Vista was able to supply its own video driver which seemed to work OK, but did not support Areo. I could live without Areo, but the exerpiece just did not feel right; besides I was now getting a crappy Windows Experience Index score.

I tried to download official x64 drivers from NVIDIA, but for whatever reason they would not install. So a bit more Googling around led me to LaptopVideo2Go.

WARNING: I hate installing/modifying things where I do not know why. It is dangerous and something you should avoid. For me, my BootCamp partition is a throw away, so it OK if it goes poof.

I downloaded the latest x64 NVIDIA drivers, installed them, and again got an error message. It turns out, I was not following the full instructions. Also listed on the download page is an updated ini file which convinces the drivers to install. A quick reboot later and everything was great.

So far things have been going really well. Using x64 I have full access to all 4 GB's of memory and the machine/Vista seem really fast.

Other notes:

• While Vista was installing it found and let me use my Apple Bluetooth keyboard. This was not expect and very cool. Unfortunately, once I installed the actual Bluetooth drivers the keyboard stopped working until I did a discovery. I wonder if this is a security issue?
• I deactivated system restore and found it cleared up a ton of space.
• I did use ImgBurn as the article suggests and I was quite happy with it. It does a great job burning DVD's.

Posted to Software and tagged as apple , mac , vista , x64

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I have been trying to resist writing too much about the new iPhone. As has been previously reported it has many warts which I hope will be cured soon. However, in the end, it really is a killer device.

As many of you know, I am a big fan of Google Reader, which is why this is such a weird post to write. As of Monday of this week, I have made the switch to NetNewsWire.

Google Reader is a killer web application and when comes to features that I use, it is 100% on pare with NetNewsWire. However, while the mobile and iPhone versions of Google Reader are impressive, NetNewsWire's iPhone App has a much better overall experience and one killer feature; you can (as of 1.07) control which feeds you want to sync[1] to your iPhone. This now makes it much easier to keep up with the feeds I want to read all the time and ignore the ones the others until I am sitting in front of my computer.

For those of you using Windows all is not lost. NewsGator (the current owner/creator of NetNewsWire) also has a free windows client FeedDemon which provides the same general overall experience[2].

[1] NewsGator provides synchronization across devices for free.

[2] I am personally not a fan of the FeedDemon NewsPaper approach so if you have to chose one, I highly recommend NetNewsWire.

Posted to Software and tagged as iphone , mac , rss , netnewswire

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I have been searching around for an application which manages resumes and interviews, but I have not been able to find one. Here is what I am looking for.

1. Resume is submitted to HR (email, form, etc)
2. Resume and other information is added to the "Application". This generates a Url which represents the candidate.
3. One or more people are selected to interview the candidate. Only the administrator and those selected to interview the candidate can see his/her resume and other information.
4. Interview responses/notes are stored with the other candidate information.

Bonus points if other private (such as salary requests and references) can be stored with the resume information but are only viewable to administrators.

I didn't expect to find 100's of applications to choose from, but I did expect this problem to already be solved.

Anyone have any recommendations?

Posted to Software

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I have been working at Telligent for a little over four years now. When I started, there were just four full time employees. We were very aggressive from the start with our goals and what type of software we thought we could deliver.

If you take a look at our most recently released roadmap you will see things have not changed all that much in four years, except they are much bigger. There are now three major "lines" (Community Server, Evolution, and Harvest and this does not even include projects like Graffiti (and something else we have been baking on the side).

Looks like it is going to be another crazy year.

Posted to Business and tagged as cs , telligent

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I am a big fan of Evernote and I have been trying to use it more often for centralizing and managing content that matters to me the most. In many cases, this is content to which I receive in my aggregator.

Evernote makes it really easy to take content from your browser and send it to Evernote (clipper, web toolbar, and even a FireFox extension).

Aggregators have also gotten much better at allowing users to flag content which is important to them. While this is certainly helpful, as mentioned above, I am trying to centralize all the information that is important to me in one place.

Both Google Reader and Newsgator allow you syndicate your flagged content. My first thought was to simply share that RSS feed with Evernote, but unfortunately, Evernote does not yet have an RSS import tool (hopefully this changes in the future).

Looking through the Evernote site, I found an option to email content to my Evernote account. So my next thought was to find a simple way to email enable my RSS feed. I considered a variety of sites which will do this for you, but in the end they all had some minor and annoying issues:

• The sites added their own branding and unsubscribe lingo. This is actually fair and a good idea if you are looking to email enable a blog, but I did not want this showing up in my information store.
• Little or no control over how/when items are emailed. For example, Feedburner will only send emails once a day. I can handle some delay, but I wanted to minimize it and I needed it to send out the emails more often than daily.

As a developer, my next thought was, write something simple. But before I fired up Visual Studio, I googled a bit and found this handy tool, Rss2Email.

rss2email is a free tool for delivering news from RSS feeds to your email program that works under Windows and UNIX.

I followed the install steps, created my local account with my Evernote email address and now once an hour the content I find most useful from my list of blogs is pushed into Evernote.

I chose to set mine up on OS X, but it will work just as easily on Windows. Here are my basic steps:

1. Follow the Unix steps mention on the getting started page. (I used curl instead of wget)
2. Create your feed database
3. Add your "favorites" feed. (note, by default Google uses Atom, so you might need to pass your feed through FeedBurner which will create an RSS version of it for you).
4. Setup a chron job to execute the run command.

Again, I hope this becomes a built in feature for Evernote, but in the meantime, this saves me from storing information in two places or the need to open an item in my browser to add it to Evernote.

Posted to Software and tagged as mac , rss , evernote

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Josh gives the low down on what you can expect to see in Community Server 2008.1.

Quick Summary:

• Themes - Hawaii is getting a really nice make over.
• Q&A - This is a killer forums feature which needed a little love to put it over the top. If you use your forums for support, this will be a game changer for you.
• Wiki - This is our V1 wiki. It is very usable and will be base of some really innovative things in 2009.
• Mail Gateway - this is an older feature, but it got a much needed tune up. We are using it religiously inside Telligent today and it has really changed things for us in a big way.
• Evolution - Community Server for the intranet. Again, this is very solid, but I am already giddy thinking about what is going to be in v.Next. :)

Posted to Software and tagged as cs , telligent

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I came across this link on the bottom of TechMeme earlier today, "Dell takes on Mac Mini with Studio Hybrid".

The system is described as the company's "first step" in eco-friendly PCs and uses notebook components to dramatically reduce both its size and power draw;

Personally, the design isn't doing anything for me, but I love basic concept of a small consumer friendly machine which takes the best from a laptop and puts it in a desktop. This typically happens the other way around. Throw in the eco-benefits and this could be a winner.

Disclaimer: Dell is a client of Telligent.

Posted to Technology and tagged as telligent , dell , hardware

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