Are your wigs in need of whitening? Do your dentures need to be dusted? Is your peg leg prematurely languishing? Do I have great news for you! Hello, and let me be the first to welcome you to LaaS Technologies. We are the true PaaS specialists – here to cater to your every whim and …
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Category:ideas
7 things employees wish they could tell their boss about salaries
LinkedIn had an interesting article Friday whose title I snagged for this blog post. The 7 items are: We don’t care about pay scales Forget policies. We talk. We think about our pay a lot. We will sometimes let you take advantage. When we have to negotiate … we both lose. No matter how much we earn, …
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apps on the network
{This started as a Disqus reply to Eric’s post. Then I realized blog comments shouldn’t be longer than the original post 🙂 } The app-on-network concept is fascinating: and one I think I’ve thought about previously, too. Hypothetically, all “social networks” should have the same connections: yet there’s dozens upon dozens (I use at least …
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a public – or white-labelable – rfe service a la uservoice, but easier to use
I’ve seen some services that utilize uservoice to handle requests for features, functionality, etc. And I have seen companies have formal Request For Enhancement / Enhancement Request / etc processes (generally culminating from support cases (hopefully from good ones)). What I don’t see, though, is a way to either limit who can submit requests (uservoice, for example, …
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programming your home by mike riley
{{Mike Riley}}’s entry in {{The Pragmatic Programmers}} series, {{Programming Your Home}} – automating with {{Arduino}}, {{Android}}, and your computer – was a lot of fun. While I am not really in a position to do many of the mini projects given in the book (wrong type of house plus we rent), reading some of the …
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first experiment follow-up
I’ve been attempting a “reactive”/”consumptive” reading experiment recently. The first book I tried it on was the {{Henry Petroski}}’s horrid {{To Engineer is Human}} (my review). That turned into a failure as I couldn’t stomach his writing, and so “reacting” to it was going to pretty much be an exercise in futility. So I’ve ditched …
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print-at-home plans
Someone needs to start a business selling print-at-home furniture/home-improvement plans that include parts lists (and, ideally, costs) from their local Lowes / Home Depot / TrueValue / Ace / etc. Most folks who want to tackle small projects don’t want to buy books or magazines that may (or may not) include what they’re interested in …
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you don’t need ideas – you need questions
Paul Graham asserts that startup ideas aren’t what’s important – and, in fact, think you need an “idea” is a major roadblock. Convert your thinking from “idea” to “question”, and you have a potential curiosity to explore, tweak, develop, and deliver. Your best work is going to come when you’ve thought about the problem but didn’t …
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what viability would a subscription-based social networking service have?
You see stories like this one, and you wonder how Facebook is continuing to make it. So many people I know are either leaving, or reducing their involvement (including myself), that is seems it is destined to be the next MySpace. Over the past couple years, I have seen companies advertise themselves by giving links …
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group admin in the era of facebook
Along the difficulties of initially building a good group/community, comes the hassles of managing said [virtual] community – especially on the book of the face. I am a coadmin on the Ontario & Western Railways Historical Society Inc Facebook group. My friend Peter is a coadmin of the Linux Mint group. Something both of us have noticed …
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a smart[ish] dhcpd
After running into some wacky networking issues at a recent customer engagement, I had a brainstorm about a smart[ish] DHCPd server that could work in conjunction with DNS and static IP assignment to more intelligently fill subnet space. Here’s the scenario we had: Lab network space is fairly-heavily populated with static assigned addresses – in …
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everything with a webui should publish rss
{{RSS}} is far from dead – it’s ubiquitous. What astonishes me, though, is that not all applications that have a WebUI don’t publish feeds via RSS (or {{Atom}} – same difference). OpenNMS and Nagios (via a plugin) will push alerts via RSS – which is fantastic: there’s no reason everyone shouldn’t be able to filter …
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what should a professional services group’s goal(s) be?
Should it be as a revenue stream? Or can it be far, far more? Every place I have worked since getting into professional services back in early 2008 has viewed the goal of the organization as making money by performing services. Whether or not the customer was happy, something useful was delivered, whether a relationship …
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there’s never enough documentation | there’s too much documentation
Documentation is vital. There’s never enough. And there’s always too much. In general, these are the areas I find documentation to fail: Not Enough Too Much/Many why-tos (instead of how-tos) tutorials on things you need architecture explanation design philosophy “how we got here” “why we are here” future plans / roadmaps deltas from standards recording …
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new documentation should always augment the status quo
In my line of work, I often need to create documentation for clients. Documentation in general is a Good Thing™. But good documentation’s goal should always be to augment and improve upon what already exists – not to supplant, downgrade, or muddle what already exists. A prime example of this has come up with a …
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on-demand, secure, distributed storage
In follow-up to a friend’s blog post on TrueCrypt, and in conjunction with some previous investigation and interests I have had, I am wondering how difficult it would be to run a tool like MooseFS in conjunction with TrueCrypt to provide a Wuala-like service as a plausibly-deniable data haven a la {{Cryptonomicon}}.
what if human cloning …
… instead of making a unique individual spawned from a synapse record instead created the reverse of a horcrux? For those who haven’t seen the {{Harry Potter}} movies or read {{J K Rowling}}’s books, a horcrux is an object (potentially “alive”) into which a wizard can split his/her soul to make themselves harder to kill. …
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zombies and vampires
Many people recently have asked me why I like [some] zombie and vampire stories (and, more generally, why they’re so popular right now), and after taking the time to think carefully on the topic and explain it to them in person, I thought I’d do my 3 readers a favor and write it out here …
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an rts or tbs game like aoe or civ, but where the player only influences via stealth and espionage
That may be the longest blog title I’ve ever had. I know I will never be a game developer. I thought several years ago it would be something I’d like to get into, but it’s just not me. However, I do enjoy playing certain kinds of games – especially the strategy and puzzle varieties. I …
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p2p cloud storage
I have yet to find a peer-to-peer file storage system. You’d think that with all the p2p and cloud services out there, there’d be a way of dropping files into a virtual folder and having them show up around the network (encrypted, of course) – replicated on some kinda of RAID-over-WAN methodology. I’m thinking {{Cryptonomicon}}’s …
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automation {gp}
The way people moved up the ladder in IT during my early days (starting in 1975) was to take on new projects that allowed them time to master the new software and become the local expert. As you became the local expert on many new software products, management became very comfortable giving you more and …
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publicizing compensation – why not?
Many (if not all) companies have provisos when you become a salaried employee that you not discuss your salary/compensation package with other employees. Most people have been raised in a mindset, largely because their parents have worked for companies like this (and maybe their grandparents, too – it is 2013, after all, and this is …
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what to offer to be the best possible employer ever
This will likely be an ongoing series as time progresses, but here are a handful of thoughts on how to really WOW your employees (or potential employees). Some of these ideas were garnered from my personal thought and observations, some from former employers, and some from other sources including “A Field Guide to Developers“, Fog …
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geeks night out
Last week I went to the Geeks’ Night Out at Beerworks in Lexington. One of the people I met was a junior EE major at UK named Robyn who, along with two of her friends, is looking to start a home automation company (The Unity Box) – but not in the realm of a company …
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farming whales
We farm tilapia. We farm chickens. We farm oysters. We farm deer. We farm shrimp. We farm bison. We farm ostriches. We farm kangaroos. We farm all kinds of stuff. Why don’t we farm whales?