iPOD test post
Testing a post from iPhone app.
Entries Tagged as 'IT Stuff'
Yahoo Pipes
If you routinely read a lot of feeds or many different sites on the internet, then Yahoo pipes may be for you. Granted it is very hard to get your head around at first, but then hang on as the possibilities are unleashed.
From Wikipedia: Yahoo! Pipes is a Web application from Yahoo! that provides a GUI-based interface for building applications that aggregate Web feeds and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps. The site works by letting users “pipe” information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be modified (e.g. filtering). A typical example is New York Times thru Flickr, a pipe which takes the New York Times RSS feed and adds a photo from Flickr based on the keywords of each item. The site is currently in beta.
A Brief Tutorial:
Google Voice Local Search
Google Voice Local Search is Google’s experimental service to make local-business search accessible over the phone.
To try this service, just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone.
Using this service, you can:
- search for a local business by name or category.
You can say “Giovanni’s Pizzeria” or just “pizza”. - get connected to the business, free of charge.
- get the details by SMS if you’re using a mobile phone.
Just say “text message”.
And it’s free. Google doesn’t charge you a thing for the call or for connecting you to the business. Regular phone charges may apply, based on your telephone service provider.
Note: Google Voice Local Search is still in its experimental stage. It may not be available at all times and may not work for all users. We’re fine-tuning the service to get better at recognizing your requests. It’s currently only available in English, in the US, for US business listings.
Church IT Roundtable
This is the week of the Spring Church IT Roundtable. Thankfully, it is in Houston at Sugar Creek Baptist Church, so no traveling! I thought you might like to see what 50 church Geeks in one room looks like.
Granting ‘Send As’ rights to an Exchange 2003 user
1. Run Active Directory Users and Computers and select the View menu and select Advanced Features.
2. Select the User object that will be Send on Behalf of(i.e. BlogDirector).
3. Right-click the object and select Properties.
4. Under Security Tab -> Click Advanced, click Add and type the username (i.e. joe.blog) that you want to grant Send As permissions to.
5. Click Check Names to make sure you have the name right and then click OK.
6. In the Permission Entry dialog, select “This object only” in the “Apply to” dropdown, and then check “Allow” under “Send As” in the Permissions list. Make sure no other permissions are being explicitly granted.
7. Click OK to all to close the dialogs boxes.
The Source of CFBC
I’m pretty excited to announce that we are now making the code for our back-end applications available via open-source to anyone who wants to use it. As David and Andrew began to develop more advanced applications and code, I challenged them to make these applications public sooner rather than later for other churches to use. As of last week the challenge has not only been accepted, but also completed!
The Lord has provided us with great resources at CFBC, and it is my desire to allow others to leverage these resources. Although anyone can use the code on “Source,” I particularly hope the code here will be especially useful to other churches and Christian organizations.
Currently we have our FIRO project online, but soon they will be adding other applications like Diago (our service management utility) and HelpDesk our custom built Help Desk and asset management application.
This site was designed for our code, but if you have an open source project that you feel would be useful for Churches, let us know and we may post it also.
Here we go again…
Well I’ve decided it’s time to get back on the stick and start posting again. Seems like when things get busy something has to go and the blog ends up being the one to go. Either things are settling down (not a chance) or I’m just missing the blog (more likely). The truth is I enjoy playing with the themes, plug-ins, upgrades, etc. of WordPress much more than the writing. Regardless, I’ve got a new look and a bunch of new plug-ins so here we go again.
5 things techs do that normal users don’t…
I found this great post at philcrissman.com
1. Try again. Most of the time, if something doesn’t work, a technically oriented person will simply try again. This covers web pages that won’t come up, documents that won’t print, rebooting the PC, closing and re-opening an application… There is a veritable whole class of problems which are “fixed” simply by giving them another go.
Typically, a normal user (the sort who does not consider him or herself to be very “computer literate” will not do this — at least, not as a rule. Thus when a problem comes along, this user is dead in the water, until their techie friend comes along and simply tries it again, at which point they marvel at how their friend has fixed their computer.2. Not Panic. There is almost never a cause to panic. Your data is not gone. The PC is not dead (at least, probably not — at least, not forever. Probably). The internet has not disappeared, you have not been “hacked” (uh, probably not, anyways).
The non-techie users tend to panic frequently. Almost anything is cause for panic.3. Read dialog boxes that pop up before clicking on them. This is a simple, effective, troubleshooting technique. You say that a dialog box has just popped up? It has two buttons, “Okay” or “Cancel”? Well here’s an interesting idea; have you tried reading what is written in the box? Is it an error? What does it say?
Again, a techie will do this without thinking about it, let alone considering it a “troubleshooting technique.” The tech would probably consider this so blindingly obvious it shouldn’t be on a list like this. But… You often see two other extremes regarding pop-up dialogs, these two approaches being:
- Click okay, no matter what.
- Don’t click anything. As long as there is a strange dialog box up, the PC is broken. Find an expert who knows what to do. I’m not trying to be mean, but… there you have it.
4. Check to see if everything is plugged in. What, you can’t send email? Is your network cable plugged in?
Not much more needs to be said about this except that… there is a certain class of user who will never check this. Again, they will thank you for “fixing their computer” when you find and re-connect the offending cable.
5. Look up the answer. We all know that if we don’t know what to do, we just open Google (or your favorite search engine/tech forum) and type a problem description into the search field, and try to find an answer. We assume (possibly naively, but whatever works) that there is an answer out there, that we can find it, and that we’ll be able to implement it.
Again, the typical user will not do this. The answer, they will presume, is too hard to find. They will probably not understand it, or be able to implement it if they found it — so why bother? (This is if it even occurs to them to search.)You may consider yourself a “non-techie”, but be saying to yourself, I would try all of those things. Great! Stop considering yourself a non-techie, and stop being afraid of computers — you’re probably doing exactly the same first steps as an IT tech would do.
Now, if you still can’t find an answer, you have two options: 1) Just keep looking (the “IT” way), or 2) Get help.
There’s nothing wrong with getting help; but you might as well try to figure it out first.
How I Work: Bill Gates
How I Work: Bill Gates - Apr. 4, 2006
Not much of a paper chase for Microsoft’s chairman, who uses a range of digital tools to do business.
Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect, Microsoft, U.S.A.
April 4, 2006: 8:11 AM EDT
NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - It’s pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft (Research) was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We’re finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.
If you look at this office, there isn’t much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.
The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I’m reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I’m working on something, and to bring up a link that’s related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.
At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).
I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I’ve ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren’t on my permission list or individuals I don’t know. That way I know what people are praising us for, what they are complaining about, and what they are asking.
We’re at the point now where the challenge isn’t how to communicate effectively with e-mail, it’s ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most. I use tools like “in-box rules” and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance.
I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.
Outlook also has a little notification box that comes up in the lower right whenever a new e-mail comes in. We call it the toast. I’m very disciplined about ignoring that unless I see that it’s a high-priority topic.
Staying focused is one issue; that’s the problem of information overload. The other problem is information underload. Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.
I deal with this by using SharePoint, a tool that creates websites for collaboration on specific projects. These sites contain plans, schedules, discussion boards, and other information, and they can be created by just about anyone in the company with a couple of clicks.
Right now, I’m getting ready for Think Week. In May, I’ll go off for a week and read 100 or more papers from Microsoft employees that examine issues related to the company and the future of technology. I’ve been doing this for over 12 years. It used to be an all-paper process in which I was the only one doing the reading and commenting. Today the whole process is digital and open to the entire company.
I’m now far more efficient in picking the right papers to read, and I can add electronic comments that everyone sees in real time.
Microsoft has more than 50,000 people, so when I’m thinking, “Hey, what’s the future of the online payment system?” or “What’s a great way to keep track of your memories of your kid?” or any neat new thing, I write it down. Then people can see it and say, “No, you’re wrong” or “Did you know about this work being done at such-and-such a place?”
SharePoint puts me in touch with lots of people deep in the organization. It’s like having a super-website that lets many people edit and discuss—far more than the standard practice of sending e-mails with enclosures. And it notifies you if anything comes up in an area you’re interested in.
Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my productivity is desktop search. It has transformed the way I access information on my PC, on servers, and on the Internet. With larger hard drives and increasing bandwidth, I now have gigabytes of information on my PC and servers in the form of e-mails, documents, media files, contact databases, and so on.
Instead of having to navigate through folders to find that one document where I think a piece of information might be, I simply type search terms into a toolbar and all the e-mails and documents that contain that information are at my fingertips. The same goes for phone numbers and email addresses.
Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It’s fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need. It also has a note-taking piece of software called OneNote, so all my notes are in digital form.
The one low-tech piece of equipment still in my office is my whiteboard. I always have nice color pens, and it’s great for brainstorming when I’m with other people, and even sometimes by myself.
The whiteboards in some Microsoft offices have the ability to capture an image and send it up to the computer, almost like a huge Tablet PC. I don’t have that right now, but probably I’ll get a digital whiteboard in the next year. Today, if there’s something up there that’s brilliant, I just get out my pen and my Tablet PC and recreate it.
Days are often filled with meetings. It’s a nice luxury to get some time to go write up my thoughts or follow up on meetings during the day. But sometimes that doesn’t happen. So then it’s great after the kids go to bed to be able to just sit at home and go through whatever e-mail I didn’t get to. If the entire week is very busy, it’s the weekend when I’ll send the long, thoughtful pieces of e-mail. When people come in Monday morning, they’ll see that I’ve been quite busy— they’ll have a lot of e-mail.
Great GUI-less programs built into Windows:
Here’s the ultimate Windows XP/2000 command list that will make any Linux user feel at home at the command prompt.
Although most of these are well known, some are new to me, and potentially very helpful!
Good Books
