Google Wave
Posted by Dave on June 1, 2009 in General, Work, IT
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I haven’t blogged for so long, I’ve been slacker than Scott!
To break the drought, I should blog about something worthwhile: Google Wave.
I applied for it today and wrote them a heiku.
Google wave sounds good
Maybe I can try it out
I would be thankful!
IT and the greater depression
Posted by Dave on December 29, 2008 in Controversial, Work, IT
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The hard economic times that we are coming into, that may be called “The Greater Depression” by some, will affect many industries, but I thought I would comment on my thoughts regarding IT in such an environment.
Already the steel industry world wide has cut production by 1/3, and a secondary / tertiary industry such as IT will feel the brunt of global slow downs more. We can only service that which there is business for!
I would see that some of the following could take place:
- Job losses as demand lowers, and borrowing slows
- Price drops in general services, as jobs fall, and deflation takes place
- Falling wages because of said deflation
- More people will produce lower quality, cheap work for desperate money
- Higher demands on employees
Thankfully with no IT union there should be no strikes or price fixing which will only make matters worse. The rewards will be with those who can hold down IT work during the next five years, since they will have a much better wages in the following boom for the experience for the good looking resume.
The sectors that will continue work are most likely to be:
- Government work, since it will be least likely to cut with socialists in federally and in the states
- High quality work that is in demand and has the least skills in, such as rapid deployment and specialist such as medical / mining, and true n-tier, OO programming
- Low quality, cheap work
Finding quality IT providers may become more difficult. The things to look out for will be years in the industry, and good testimonials from happy customers. Good businesses may go under as they are undercut, making it harder again.
Keeping a job in IT will be very hard. Jobs will drop with no industry to support, so several things will be needed. For the cheap work, it will be like the last depression, where the first in will get the job, so promptness will be the key. For higher skilled work, experience, quality references and then qualifications will be what scores the work.
Website Buyers Guide
Posted by Dave on December 27, 2008 in PHP, XHTML, Microsoft, Web Design, General, Linux, Work, IT
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There are many caveats and pitfalls with websites that people need to be aware of. Having been in IT for over eight years, here are a five main things to watch out for that I have found.
Used Terms
Domain: is the name for the site you type into the address bar, such as http://thewebsiteguy.com.au. These are leased for between one and five years, and the .au domains are regulated so that only elegable people can register one.
Website: can refer to the completed product as a whole, or the files for the site that can be hosted on a server.
Hosting: the website needs to be put on a server somewhere so that people can access it. The domain is configured with some hidden information in it to tell your computer which server to talk to, so you can see the site.
1. Ownership
This is probably the most important. When you buy a website off a company you would expect that since you bought it, you own it, but think again. You probably got no written agreement regarding this, and by law a contractor who does any work, automatically owns the IP for it.
I know of a Queensland company “A” who was recently caught out with this (not a direct business contact). This certain company purchased a website off web company “B”, and changed over to a new host. When they did some changes, the old web host “B” threatened legal action for removing the old company’s details and cited that they owned the IP for the site since they made it. Company “A” promptly got a redesign of the site done, just so they could make certain changes to their own website.
Always make sure you own the design and can have very clearly what you can and can’t change on it. e.g. You may have an agreement to link to the web company etc.
2. Technology
There are many languages and methods of making a website, and even though the end result looks the same, if you ever need to change hosting companies (there are a large variety of reasons this may happen), can you do it? Open source languages such as PHP, and MySQL can run on any server, but commercial languages such ASP and .Net only run on Windows servers, and hosting tends to be more expensive.
Further to this, some websites are completely proprietary and will not work outside of their hosting, and if you change, you will need to buy a completely new website.
3. Goodwill when moving on
If you need to change web hosts, will your company help you in the process? A particular client changed over to hosting with The Website Guy, and their old host refused to transfer the files for the old site, and refused to help point the domain (which they registered and controlled) to the new server.
It is very important to find out from your web company what happens if for what ever reason you want to change companies.
4. Site Design
Do you like the look of other sites the company has made? You shouldn’t feel afraid to ask for a mock up picture of what the site will look like before they start work, so that you will be happy with how it looks. Note also that the company may not want to do this without any money changing hands or a work order being signed, since it is a large enough amount of work to do without a guarantee of income.
Also don’t reject the idea that one company can design the site, and another can host it. Either of the two, especially the last, should be able to help with setting it up.
5. On Going Costs
This isn’t just the hosting, this is other things that come up too. If you want work done to your site, what is the hourly rate, and how accessable and friendly is the service? A normal rate should be around $80-$125 / hr. Under that you should question their skill, and over is a rip off. You should be able to contact them by phone and E-mail, and they should be willing to help with these things.
Slackness in posting!
Posted by Dave on December 9, 2008 in General
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I may as well post today so it is not more than a month since the last. We moved very recently, so that has taken up a large body of time, but I promise that a few cool posts are to come. I will restart the PHP series and also comment on my thoughts of the financial crisis and the IT industry.
iPhone Speling mistkes
Posted by Dave on November 9, 2008 in Funny!, General
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A friend recently acquired an iPhone, and started a gchat with me from it. Here’s an excerpt from the conversation. Note that he is chatting from the iPhone.
Vista can’t create partition
Posted by Dave on October 30, 2008 in Microsoft, Work, IT
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I had an EXTREMELY annoying error today on my laptop. I have a number of partitions to seperate Windows, data etc so that I don’t have to backup any data to reinstall Windows (which I frequently do for many reasons) and to help reduce fragmentation etc.
Picture: Vista’s disk manager. Note that Vista home means Vista Ultimate USED at home.
I had to install a second partition of Vista for doing some other work so not to slow down my main partition, and Vista complained that it couldn’t format a partition because “there is not enough available space on drive.” What?? There’s 20gb free, and there’s not enough space to format it to 20gb (19.58 to be technical)? I tried less space, formatting raw, formatting in the Vista installer and none worked. It would let me format space at the end of the extended partition, but not at the start.
The end solution is to boot up the XP install disc, format the partition to RAW or NTFS, then reboot into Vista or the Vista install process and it will then format it.
One more thing to the list that Linux is better at.
Geek my wife
Posted by Dave on October 28, 2008 in Funny!, IT
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Belinda has been doing awesome things lately. Yesterday, she found her way to thinkgeek.com and spent around an hour browsing…FOR FUN, and had done a few good geeky things such as trying to use her mouse on my computer from hers, and attempting to use an invisible mouse to point to objects in the room etc.
The best so far was tonight, when a friend of hers commented on the slack operation of the soap dispensers at Maccas (giving only miniscule squirts), when Belinda responded with “It looks like they’ve got it in economy++ mode”.
Alternative for enum in PHP
Posted by Dave on October 2, 2008 in PHP, IT
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Since I love C# and I am stuck using PHP for a while, I came up with an alternative to enums in PHP tonight. Consider the following class:
class FormFieldType
{
const Text = 1;
const Select = 2;
const Hidden = 3;
const Checkbox = 4;
const RadioButton = 5;
const Submit = 6;
}
I can easily reference that with something like the following:
if ($myVar == FormFieldType::Text)
{
//do some stuff
}
or
$myVar = FormFieldType::Text;
If I create as many classes as needed for different types, it effectively makes the equivalent of an Enum 
The RX-7 Sold!
Posted by Dave on October 2, 2008 in General
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Yay I sold the stinking thing! I only got $3k for it, but that is better than selling it for 5 and the bloke doesn’t pick it up again. With that we can now pay the obstetrician and buy $1000 worth of silver since it’s about to go nuts.
Nerdy slip of the tongue for today
Posted by Dave on September 22, 2008 in Funny!, IT
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My boss, Paul, said to John and myself that he got a resume` in, and I was recounting the story to Belinda…
“Paul got a resume in today and John and I scrolled over to his desk to look at it.”
Maybe I need to get out more.
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