sudo sandwich
June 29th, 2007Camera Phone Shopping List Builder?
June 7th, 2007Given my history for “new ideas”, I fully expect that this service already exists…but if not I hereby release this idea to the wild so people with more resources can bring it to life. I want is a service where I can:
- Take a photo of a product’s bar code/UPC using my camera phone (for example, a deodorant stick that’s running low).
- SMS (or whatever) the photo to a service.
- The service will identify the product and add it to my list(s).
- I use another app on my mobile device to view/modify the list of previously sent items.
I would definitely use this to build shopping lists, and I see plenty of room for other features. Please tell me this is available!
Tech-Ed content for all
April 24th, 2007Microsoft will open up Tech Ed content to non-attendees. So far it’s broken into Webcasts, Virtual Labs and Podcasts. I have to say I’ve been impressed with the increased quality and quantity of Microsoft’s free developer training materials over the last couple of years.
Online on the range
April 19th, 2007The most “wired” states (by one measure at least) are all rural:
The top five states that are online are also all largely rural: Alaska (72%), New Hampshire (70%), Utah (70%), Minnesota (69%) and Wyoming (68%). The USA national average is 59%.
Less populous states also have a higher density of entrepreneurs. These figures all make sense, but could be easily ignored/forgotten from my Silicon Valley/Bay Area tech cocoon.
Google (or other search engine) feature request
April 3rd, 2007Who knows? Maybe this already exists, but any search engine that could provide this would make me (and I am guessing MILLIONS more) very happy.
Basically - instead of searching for text, allow me to CutNPaste an error dialog. This will save me a lot of time from transcribing (common) error messages, and will probably provide more accurate search results. For example, this dialog:
I’m sure many others have seen this exact error dialog, and there are proably 2-3 simple solutions. Google, take me away!
VS Live In San Francisco
March 22nd, 2007I will be at VS Live in San Francisco next week focusing on the Team System and SQL Server 2005 tracks. I’m most interested in getting ideas & hearing about others’ experiences with automated testing of SSIS ETL packages. If you’ll be there and are interested in such discussions, I’d be happy to meet up and talk further– just drop me a line in the comments or via email: tito/at/titoperez/dot/com. SSIS and (especially) VSTS are relatively new to me, and I’m part a nascent BI/DW project using both.
Of course, I’m still open to ideas from those who won’t be there, too.
Terms of Use/Privacy
March 19th, 2007I read about GotVoice from this positive review on techcrunch, and thought I’d consider giving their service a go. Before signing up, I wanted to read their Terms of Use [PDF here]– specifically any thing related to privacty, etc… Initially I was glad to see on the first page front and center the section headed “PRIVACY AND PROTECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION”.
This enthusiasm was quickly tempered by the instruction “See the Privacy Statement below for disclosures relating to the collection and use of your personal information.” Ok, no big deal. I used Acrobat Reader’s find(”Privacy Statement” to get to:
FOR INFORMATION REGARDING THE GOTVOICE .COM PRIVACY STATEMENT CLICK HERE.
I’ll call this the “Oakland Link” because, unfortunately, there was no “here” HERE. Of course, I tried clicking on “HERE” to no avail. There were other hyperlinks throughout the rest of the PDF. Needless to say, I won’t be signing up with GotVoice, at least until I can actually find their mythical “Privacy Statement”
roundup
March 19th, 2007Joy Mundy webcast: Using SQL Server 2005 Integration Services to Populate a Kimball Method Data Warehouse
Performance Dashboard for Microsoft SQL Server, Part I
On the heels of the release of Service Pack 2 for MSSQL Server 2005 comes what will, perhaps, be the most warmly received Reporting Services “report pack†to date, the Performance Dashboard for Microsoft SQL Server (“Performance Dashboard Reportsâ€). The Performance Dashboard Reports are a set of custom report files designed to be run from within SQL Server Management Studio.
Top 100 Most Influential People in IT
webcast: Designing A Data Warehouse: Part 1 Dimension Type briefly covers different dimension change typs (SCD Types 0,1,2,3) and inferred members
What makes an enterprise wiki?
Build Date Generators and Manipulate Date and Time Data in SQL
patterns & practices Visual Studio Team System: “insightful and practical guidance around using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System”
roundup
March 16th, 2007Using SQL Server Files for Unit Testing in VS2005 TS
One of the nice features of VSTS is data-driven testing. It’s as easy as hooking up a couple of attributes to the test classes, which then allows tests to be run for multiple sets of input data. The problem is when you want to include data with the test project.
(a solution follows)
Using capistrano to manage EC2 instances (amazon.com’s “virtual computing environment”). The comments also have some interesting discussion about the considerations made in choosing to use Amazon’s services for a startup. See also: Building a Web Application with Ruby on Rails and Amazon S3.
Dare Obasanjo pondering the future of Amazon’s S3 & EC2 services:
What I suspect is that without some catalyst (e.g. the next YouTube is built on S3 + EC2)these services will not reach their full potential. This would be unfortunate because I think in much the same way we moved from everyone rolling their own software to shrinkwrapped software, we will need to move to shrinkwrapped Web platforms in the future instead of everyone running their own ad-hoc cluster of Windows or LAMP servers and solving the same problems that others have solved thousands of times already.
My first RoR project: Freevite
March 12th, 2007The “real world” project I’ve come up with to learn Ruby on Rails will be ‘Freevite’ - an online event coordination application. A quick google turned up this project announcement (using perl no less), but it doesn’t appear anything became of it. I expect to make a lot of mistakes on the way, but I expect this to be an application I will use and therefore (hopefully) improve.
The design should be straightforward enough in its first incarnation, and I expect most of my initial learning will be finding the best way for me to develop the application on a hosted server account. The first (only) RoR tuturial I walked through, I did using vi over a SSH terminal. I expect that will get real old, real fast.
Next Step: Find development & deployment tool(s)