Spot us
One of client’s at Hashrocket, Spot Us, has posted a video on his blog that he recorded this morning during our demo, showcasing the work that was completed in 3 days of development!
Don’t get me wrong, the great work by the designers was key to getting this done, and there is a week of face to face time where the client (in this case David Cohn) and the lead developer(s) lock themselves in a room for 5 days, and make the tough decisions of what can really be done in 3 days. Please take the time to watch this 15+ minute video if you want an inside view of some of the work that I am a part of.
Great work Lark, Desi, Carm, Tammer, and Joe!
Creating Free Ringtones from iTunes
After reading about it on the Apple Blog I thought I would share it here too.
To create a ringtone from any song in your iTunes library, do the following:
- Right click on the song you are going to make into a ringer and select “Get Info.”
- Go to the options tab and go down to the “Start Time” and “Stop Time” check boxes. Check both boxes and input the time you want your ringer to start/stop. The ringer has to be 30 seconds or less. Click OK when you’re done.
- Right click on your newly “clipped” song and select “Convert Selection to AAC.” The song will be re-encoded using the start and stop times determined (If your menu item does not read “Convert Selection to AAC” and reads “Convert Slection to MP3″ (or some other format) please go to iTunes > Preferences > Advanced > Importing and change the “Import Using” drop down menu to “AAC Encoder”).
- After the song is done encoding navigate to your iTunes Music folder, locate your song, and drag it to your desktop (You can just right click and say “Show in Finder” if you are using a Mac). After the song is on your desktop go back to iTunes and delete the clipped version from you iTunes library (It won’t delete it from your desktop, it will only remove it from iTunes).
- Go back the song on your desktop and right click on your song and chose “Get info.” Go to the name and extension section and change the extension from .m4a to .m4r (or you can just change the extension right from your desktop)
- After the extension is changed simply double click on the file to add it to your iTunes library under the ringtones section. Sync your phone with iTunes and you’re done!
- Remember to go back into iTunes and uncheck your custom start and stop times for the original version of your song.
LOVDbyLESS: Open-source software for building social nets
Bloggers have wordpress, mephesto, typo and other open source solutions. Yet there isn’t an open source social network platform, until now. Built with Ruby on Rails this open source project has all the basic features you will need to setup a basic social network.
Less Memories
BEHOLD the power of rails, and how a trained artisan can wield it’s power. A pretty useful web application in 7 hours! No kidding! Check it out and then go get your education on.
DevChix Fundraiser! – Unix Magic posters
DevChix, “a group founded to help support women of all ages interested or active in development”, is having an auction! This is a friend of my from the RubyJax group. She has a cool foundation promoting women in software development.
RubyJax
As my wife mentioned on the family blog, I attended the inaugural RubyJax event last night. I have to warn you that I am easily excited, but the group is chock ful o’ some people I am excited about getting to know better.
One of the main reasons I made the decision to leave Symantec and the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was because I felt that the company was very stale from a technical perspective and I when I looked around at the opportunities if I were to switch jobs locally I would be forced into doing something that I didn’t love for the sole purpose of putting food on the table.
That type of work and I don’t mesh.
As my wife and previous or current co-workers can attest to (besides the short stints as a contractor for NASA and as C++ UI developer at Symantec… where I was bored out of my mind) I am a work-a-holic. When I am knee-deep in problem solving or developing something new, I loose all track of time and usually end up neglecting things I shouldn’t. So excuse me while I take this second to say thank you to my beautiful wife for understanding me, and putting up with it all.
That being said, I am extremely happy to be connected to Lark, Steven, Big Tiger, Obie, Chris, Desi and all the others 
(who I couldn’t find blogs for), and to have some people that will cause me, just being being in the conversation, to better myself.
And a BIG THANKS to Team Gaia for providing the location (even if it was on the wrong side of Jacksonville). And another big thanks to who ever it was that let me drink their beer, and paid for the Pizza, my turn next time.
Time to go make something useful in Rails.
What the hell am I doing wrong?
I was reading QuadsZilla’s post about the week he is having on the SEO Black Hat, and have to admit that it sounds like I am going about this whole software development thing the wrong way.
We were even hanging with Wiesn Playmate Anna Scharl (Miss October for German Playboy) and her sister most of the time we were out; they’re both sweethearts.
Tonight I’m going to the Opera and tomorrow I’m doing some 3-hour caving expedition. Ahh, the life of a spammer. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.
I have been working in this industry for 8 years, working on web sites for reputable companies, making decent money. I would say that I would be the kind of person that any organization would want to have, but I find that I enjoy working at smaller start-ups, due to lack of waste more then anything, and I need a little more stress then your average person to get things done.
But if I can use my talents to startup some stupid website and just milk money away from Google and the unknown people out there, is there really a downside? Is it illegal? I can provide better for my family and not do something illegal. Why would I not?
My instinctual answer is that I wouldn’t want to do it for the sake of not helping to proliferate crap on the Internet. But (not that I would really want to) if spending 1 month a quarter coming up with some stupid website and then go spend time with my family and just watch the money come in… why is that not a good option?
I would love to hear from others that have had this same thought, and where they are on why the continue to work at a “real” company versus going out on their own taking advantage of the framework that Ad revenue has presented to us. 
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If you would like to find out more about Quadzilla, and a little insight into what makes him tick, listen to this interview that he did on Shoemoney’s Net Income Show.
(Note: that this is a picture of the Shoemoney guy not Quadzilla)
IBM offers Krugle, Koders search-off
As customer demands narrow-down, and the value you get from each engagement goes up, smaller, specialized vendors can gain a big advantage.
Beebe4 
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