Penguin February 23rd, 2007
I came across this page about browser stats today. The interesting thing I found was how IE6 is still so dominant with 54% [as of 2/23/07].
Here’s the current breakdown:
With this in mind, if you’re developing a new web app, start with Firefox. Make it work for IE6 then make it work for IE7.
Related postsPenguin February 22nd, 2007
I had to weed through some resumes today, and here’s my suggestions on how to write good resumes from a hiring perspective.
Additionally, don’t include stupid part time jobs, like at Footlocker or something. Unless you were working for corporate. All the other part time stuff, nix from the resume.
Be sure to be clear with what you’re writing. Don’t use big words or make it sound more glamorous than it is. Most of the time, we can tell if you’re BSing and we’ll just ignore it.
Nothing says, “I don’t really care about this job” like a simple typo like iob instead of job.
Remember, the resume is just a quick introduction of yourself. It should say enough to get me interested in bringing you in to the office.
With these tips in hand, go back and rework that resume of yours.
Happy job hunting!
Related postsPenguin February 22nd, 2007
When your expectations aren’t met, second choice might be okay, but third choice is just the pits.
Ninja took me to dinner for my birthday this past Sunday. I had my heart set on chicken pot pie and I knew that Cheescake Factory had a pretty good one.
We waited the normal hour for our table by walking around the closed mall. We were finally seated and I scoured the menu for the pot pie, positive that it was there. When I didn’t see it, I just figured it was my poor eye-sight coupled with the poor lighting.
When the waitress took our order, I confidently declared “Chicken Pot Pie”, when she told me that they didn’t have it, I assured her they did. Alas, they had removed it from the menu. I was heart broken.
At a loss, I didn’t know what to order. The waitress came and went a few times and I decided on the chicken and biscuits, next best thing, I thought.
Ninja and I sat as we enjoyed each other’s conversation when the manager came around. I knew this was a bad sign. They were out of biscuits. He left us to peruse the menu once again.
While he was gone, I commented on how Cracker Barrel would never run out of biscuits. We both laughed.
I finally settled on the meatloaf, the next best thing to comfortable southern homey goodness. Of course, no matter how good the meatloaf was, it would never be chicken pot pie. It wasn’t even chicken!
We set certain levels of expectation for the things we experience, whether it be dinner, a new toy we just bought ourselves, or even websites. When those expectations aren’t met, we’re usually okay with our second choice. The marginal utility usually isn’t that big of a disparity. I would venture so far as to say that we’ve come to expect disappointment. But when we are relegated to our third choice, it’s over. Nothing can be done to satisfy.
As a business owner, I want to set the bar of expectation for our customers. There’s still some paint that needs to dry, and that’s why we haven’t launched big yet. I want to make sure everything is clean and tidy so that everything that works should, and we can set the expectation for quality and service.
Related postsPenguin February 17th, 2007
I made the switch. I used to be an avid Azureus fan, but now that I’m running Fedex Ship Manager, I need something a little more light weight.
If you’ve used bittorrent, Mininova is a great place for all your pirate needs. According to uTorrent’s RSS tutorial, it says that just plugging in Mininova’s rss feeds won’t work. You need something like RSSatellite. If you go to download it, you get a PHP file. This is how you use it.
If you have a webhost, you can serve the page yourself. Otherwise, you can use one of a few mirrors.
When you click on the mirror, you’ll get three input boxes. The first box, is the rss feed you are looking for, in our case, we’re looking for mininova, which is:
http://mininova.org/rss.xml
if you want to use a specific feed from mininova, say, for the show, 24, you would use this:
http://www.mininova.org/rss.xml?sub=3
You should be able to leave the “Find” and “Replace” input fields the mininova default. If you lost them, they should be the following:
Find:
http://www.mininova.org/tor/
Replace:
http://www.mininova.org/get/
“Okay…”, I hear you say confused. Now, hit the “Replace” button. If you have firefox2, you may see a google page that asks you to sign up for their reader. You don’t want either of these. What you want, is the green link the page serves up, copy this link. If you’re in IE, just copy your location bar.
This is the link you’ll be using in uTorrent.
So, the 24 link should look like:
http://open.backslash.org.uk/RSSatellite.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mininova.org%2Frss.xml%3Fsub%3D3&find=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mininova.org%2Ftor%2F&replace=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mininova.org%2Fget%2F&truncatebeforeslash=0
Happy downloading!
Related postsPenguin February 16th, 2007
After much deliberation, I settled on Fedex as our current shipping provider. Originally, I had anticipated that it would cost about $5 to ship. After setting up the account and doing the initial numbers, it looks like it’s more like $7.
As much as I would like to bring shipping prices down, until we get the volume, we’ll just have to bear it.
My apologies.
PS. It’s flat rate shipping, that means no matter how many prints you order, the shipping rate will not change.
Related postsPenguin February 16th, 2007
Thanks to Zach for the heads. There was a bug where when you updated the quantities in your shopping cart, the Google Checkout button would disappear. It turns out, it was a problem with the ajax call and it should be all good now.
Related postsPenguin February 15th, 2007
Last night, Ninja and I got a delightful IM from one of our good and long time friends, JsC (Jesse; a quick note about his name before we get to the meat of the post).
In the early days of the intarweb, while AOL was still king, we had a not so little thing called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). JsC introduced it to me one weekend he was over, and I was hooked. Having a short name myself, I liked the idea of trying to shorten names into three letters that, somehow, would phonetically sound like the original. Hence, Jays-See, JsC. In retrospect, it should probably be jSC, juh-Ess-See. But whatever.
Anyway, JsC IMs us last night with an idea to change the world. I won’t get into the details of the project, but it’s basically Books for Chinese Tots. It’s a really great idea and I was onboard the moment he shared it with me. In my usual fashion, I started thinking of possible hurdles he would have to overcome in order to make this thing work.
It also got me to thinking of my own little project that I’ve been kicking around in my head.
My goal, or plan, is to enter full-time missions when I’m 30. It’s sort of an artificial deadline I set for myself to prepare mentally and spiritually before I enter the field. Part of it is also where in the field that would be.
My current idea, is to start a software NPO (non-profit organization) that develops open source applications for third world small and micro businesses. Obviously, there are already a few applications on the market, but there are others that need to be built. The main thing the NPO would do is provide training and installation.
The biggest problem is finances. How does the NPO generate capital to provide all this free training/support? How do we pay developers to produce good software?
So, those are just two examples of plans to change the world. How about you, how would you change the world?
Related postsPenguin February 14th, 2007
So, after many a delay and many a bug, we’ve finally got the beta out the door. It’s only about two weeks late, but we’ve managed to hit Valentine’s Day. Yay!
If you haven’t already, check out Ninja’s first piece, First Kiss. In order to purchase it, you’ll have to sign up for Google Checkout. We didn’t have a chance to set up a merchant account, so this was the next best thing.
I’d also like to apologize for some of the pages that aren’t styled yet. Ninja should be prettifying them in the next few days. As for me, I’ll be getting a few more features implemented in the next few days or so. As always, I’ll post updates here.
Enjoy!
Related postsNinja February 14th, 2007
I’ve been mostly confined to my room w/ just a laptop, nappies, and congee. I had plans of cleaning, but I didn’t clean as much as I would have liked (random headaches and dizziness).
While sitting in bed, I stumbled across this letterpress blog, The Fine Print, from Pressure Printing.
Enjoy!
Related postsPenguin February 13th, 2007
I’ve been working on some client side data validation and I needed a quick and easy way to test all my regular expressions. So I came up with this little client side javascript regexp testing package.
Javascript Regexp Tester and Cheat Sheet
A cheat sheet is included for easy reference, as are sample patterns to test against.
Everything is built embedded, so you can just right click on the link above, save as, and run it locally.
Happy coding!
Related postsLimited edition lithograph prints. Signed + numbered.
