Web Development and Technology Blog

I was just reading my favorite political blog, The Fix, and they had a post that Fred Thompson had put out his finance report for the last month of his “unofficial” candidacy. Since I just posted about his web development time frame and seeming sophistication, the line item of his $21,000 expenditure to New Media Strategies really stood out. I am a big believer that you anything is doable with time and money, and in this case it appears that the campaign made up for the lack of time by paying some extra money.

Read the full article at The Fix.

(Please contact me if want to pay me$21,000/mo. for your web presence, LOL.)

Well, I don’t know how many readers there are, but sorry for the drought then deluge mode of my blog posts. Apparently, Sunday night is my night to catch up. I long ago read if I blogged to do it daily, well I haven’t quite been able to keep up with that.

Anyhow, I did want to mention why I have been so busy and haven’t posted and also follow up on a previous post.

• First, the previous post about InstallShield and error 1327.  I was looking at the blog’s logs and have gotten a few hits to this post, so I must not be the only one having this issue. It continues to be a problem, and probably will be for a while, since people will use the version of InstallShield for a while, even after they come out with a new one that fixes the issue (which hopefully they will do soon). Of course, the new install pain is for Quicktime. I now have to register and then unregister VBscript.dll every time I load a new version, and Apple is aware of the issue, but of course they haven’t corrected it and you can’t blame this one Vista, you MS haters!

• Secondly, what I have been up to is working on learning Visual Studio at work so I can work on ASP to complement our new ERP program we have.  I have been doing PHP programming for a few years now, and have used Macromedia’s (nee’ Adobe) Dreamweaver for almost 10 years for all my design and development. So using a new IDE is a bit daunting, and interesting to read all the back and forth between the two and their camps. So far best I can determine is that Dreamweaver is not particularly ASP-friendly, but that VS is not a great designer interface.

But I guess both sides knew this, because Adobe hasn’t put a lot into ASP, I guess they figure if you are a MS shop, you will use VS. And Microsoft has answered the designer complaint with their Expression line, which I have only used to play with once. The crappy part for me, is that in my position, I will continue to have to use both, since MS doesn’t do PHP development (although they have opened up to do MySQL work) and Adobe hasn’t improved ASP support with CS3 from what I can tell.

I will be curious to see what VS 2008 has in it, since MS said Beta 2 that was released this week had some of the design and CSS improvements that came from the Expression Web product. Hopefully, I will know by the end of this week, since I actually think I have learned enough C# to actually do some real coding this week in ASP.

I started this post a month ago, so it isn’t exactly news, but nevertheless. (BTW, I said I would veer away from politics, but I guess outside of my family and technology, there isn’t much else I spend as much time reading and cogitating over.)

At he end of June, former US Senator Fred Thompson appeared to be on the verge of officially announcing that his flirtation with running was more than that, that he would be a candidate for the GOP nomination.

Personally, I was pleased. I found him to be an intriguing figure (I met him in 1998 at the Biloxi SRLC) and certainly as truly conservative, at least for the things I want, as any of the other candidates. (I won’t go on about my predilections, but suffice it to say if you want to see flip-flopping as high art, search for Mitt Romney on Youtube; and I was never a fan of McCain, since he appears to be totally opposed to our Senator McConnell on one of the more important issues – free speech; but I digress.)

But from the tech side what I found interesting is how he was able to build his team up and get a web site that was pretty nice looking in only a week. I realize he probably was laying the ground work for a bit longer. However, only 4 years ago, the web site would have been an afterthought and certainly wouldn’t have been so high on the agenda. Moreover, I was impressed with the quality of the site in the time frame it appeared from germination to execution of his nascent campaign.

I hope, at least from the techy side, he continues to use this forethought to his advantage. The GOP seemed to have been the first movers on the Internet, as a way to gain an advantage over the mainstream leftist media, but since Dean in 2004, we seem to have lost our way and our current presidential candidates and the national committee may be throwing money at it, but certainly aren’t making all the right moves that the Dem candidates are (see Clinton ad, Obama MySpace).

Ever since I was a small kid, I was a Richard Nixon fan. In fact, I used to tell people I was born 25 hours after his resignation on August 9, 1974 (my birthday is coming up, please feel free to send gifts, LOL) and that I probably came out crying because I was born during the Ford administration. I don’t even think my dad knew why it was such a fan, although he never discouraged my pro-Nixon views, he looked at everything in terms of economics, so the economy was better under Nixon than it was under Ford or Carter, so that was probably why he liked him.

Anyway, I was reading a recent e-mail from the Nixon Library about the controversy that still swirls around his presidency and legacy. In the letter, they are discussing the attempt to ensure all the records from the presidency are preserved and archived, and a big part of this is that the library is now a part of the National Archives. Up until now it had been an all private foundation supporting and running it, lest that evil Nixon use the US Treasury anymore by spewing his propaganda, so his opponents said. As the letter rightly points out, most two-term presidents since Eisenhower have some ignominious distinction in their eight-years and they haven’t exactly been totally neutral in their presentation even though they are taxpayer funded libraries.

Honestly, I haven’t been to any library but Nixon’s, although I would love to go to LBJ’s, Clinton’s and Reagan’s; but, it is a fascinating insight into the continuing academic consternation over what to do with our only president who ever resigned.

I just got an e-mail celebrating Spiceworks 1 year birthday, and I can’t rave enough about this ever-evolving network monitoring/inventory and help desk tool.

Less than a year ago, I read a review of it in some tech magazine and was intrigued. It said it would use Google AdSense to serve ads inside a network admin desktop tool, that would then be free to users, primarily small-business network admins (such as myself).

The AdSense part was an interesting angle and using Ruby to get some Ajax sparkle was cool; but the price was what got me. I had looked at other tools for network monitoring and help desk applications, and all of them either had too much stuff, bad UI, or most importantly, were way out of the company’s budget.

I downloaded the application, in like version 0.7 or something, and out of the box it found most of my desktops, servers, network printers, and did some cool stuff like tell me toner amounts and service tags (we use mostly Dell). But it was basically inventory in the beginning. Moreover, I don’t spend all my time on my network duties, so I didn’t get a ton of use. However, since they released 1.0 (up to 1.6 now), they have put a ton of new features in, so that now it is a part of my daily life.

The biggest added features are the help desk. I can create tickets and the end user can update them via a web site or they can create them via an e-mail. It is a great way to track issues, by machine or even for a piece of software. Also, at the beginning it wasn’t multi-user, but now my boss can log in, see the tickets I have open, make comments, assign them to me, etc. Another feature I really like is the community. Tons of other IT guys help you out with the software, or with general IT problems. (I am always finding new features, so I could go on for a while, but those are the 3 I use the most.)

Spiceworks keeps improving and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for an easy help desk and network inventory program.It’s feature set now is as good as or better than many paid products, and they keep adding and making it better. Try it out on your network via the link below, you don’t have anything to lose.

When I started doing this blog, I wasn’t sure what I would write, but I certainly didn’t think I would be getting ideas about new, cool sites and software from my family, since most of them do what they can on the ‘Net, but not much more. However, another case in point of a cool, useful site that we have started using is Cozi.com.

I actually found the site from a review on some blog (I know it wasn’t TechCrunch, I looked) suggested by my RSS Reader, Rojo.com. It said it was a good shared calendar option for families that have lots to keep up with. Well, with Jacob working and Bri in marching band, I can never keep up with who is where. Luckily, Stacy does most all of this, but being the tech head I am, I thought if they could all put it in this calendar then I could see whenever, and wouldn’t have to ask 12 times a day.

Cozi has a few extra features, besides calendaring, like shopping list (which you can have texted to your phone – a cool feature), messaging and photo screensaver; but for me the calendar is the killer app. Even better because they have an Outlook plugin that allows me to sync me work calendar up with it, so if I have to be at a meeting, they can see.

It is free and even better, when I contacted them with questions, I got a response in 5 hours. I can’t get that kind of response time for most enterprise software that I am paying for. So if you have a family on the go, check out Cozi.com.

If you have looked at my wife’s gallery, you can tell she takes a LOT of photos. In fact, on our trip to Hilton Head, SC a few weeks ago, we took about 600 pictures on her Kodak Z612. I am mostly happy to have them on disk, and now the web, but Stacy likes to have them printed and be able to show people. That meant, either we invest tons of money into ink for our Epson R200 (which does great, btw, but can be very expensive) or we search for a good, cheap on-line printer.

The big names, Kodak, Shutterfly etc are all about the same price. The stores that sell on-line (Wal-mart, CVS, Target et al) are only cheap if you send away, not if you get them in store, so we kept searching.

Stacy found this site, Winkflash, that was advertising 6 cent prints, so we tried it, figuring even if the prints were horrible, we weren’t out much. Well, alas, the prints looked just as good as any others, and they have continued to offer good deals. We would highly recommend them, they are cheap, quick shipping, and great results.

Also, Stacy has decided to move copy her blogging over to my site, much to my delight, so you can now read her blog at: Pearsonspace.com/Stacy.

7/23 Update
Stacy isn’t “moving” just posting both places so her non-MySpace peeps don’t have to go to Myspace to read, and vice versa.

My cousin, Glen, had the idea to create a Wiki. We recently suffered a loss in our family and one of the ways people dealt with it was by using the blog of the person who had died, so this seemed like a natural extension.

Now, outside of Wikipedia, I have yet to see how exactly this would be useful, and definitely have yet to see how people are using it in the enterprise; but in this case I think it could be a very good idea.

The site isn’t the best and the rich text editor needs work, but if it gets my not-all-tech-savvy family to post info, it must be doing something right.

If you are interested here is the Pearson family wiki.

(BTW, I am putting this in my Web 2.0 category – I am still somewhat undecided about what that is, is it the technology (RSS, Ajax, RIA) or is the community-stuff (Blogs, MySpace, Wikis)..feel free to give me your thoughts.)

My wife has started putting up pictures on my site (you can see here), so that everyone can see them. But I noticed that some were big and she had so many it was a pain for her to edit each one individually. I had recently found this site Picnik.com and so I went back there to look at it. Not only does it work great, but they have now added the ability to get a Firefox extension or IE add-in (which I haven’t tried).

The extension makes it so easy to right click, send the picture and edit it. Now if only we didn’t have to save and re-upload, but hey, much easier to use than launching Photoshop for every picture.

I have started several posts and never finished. I never realized how much work a blog would be. Coming up with what I wanted to write, which I thought would be difficult part, has been easy. But fnishing my thoughts and finding links and pics, that is another story.

Not to mention, I went on family vacation (for info see my wife’s blog) and have been working a ton to get our new ERM (or what ever business management acronym you want to use – BPM, CRM whatever) to work (you buy off-the-shelf to work right out of the box, at least that is what you think) at my regular job.  But I will be back.