Dec 21
wstearnsUncategorized google, site, vacation
Vacation:
I have finished setting my Out of Office message on the work email, vacation is officially here! Now I have some time to cleanup my blog site a bit and work on some projects around the house.
Google Wave and Voice Invites:
As I was going through my account on Google, I noticed that I have 3 Google Voice invites and 11 Google Wave invites. I have already handed out quite a few invites for Wave before, but I haven’t noticed any Voice invites until recently. The Wave invites will go out to the first 11 people that send me a direct message on Twitter or Facebook. The Voice invites will go out to 3 people chosen on Christmas day. If you are interested in being included in the voice invites send me a direct message on Twitter or Facebook.
Site Updates:
I have moved my live shack feed to the NE4RD page of my blog. This is not on all the time, but I try to have something up there when I’m operating on the ham radio equipment. I have also updated my About page to include an updated look at my resume.
Dec 04
wstearnsUncategorized glenn beck
Here’s what happens when Glenn Beck mentions a URL that isn’t ready to handle a DoS sized load.
Screenshot of GB /. Effect
Jan 15
wstearnsUncategorized marketing, twitter
I’ve been on Twitter for some time now and have continued to watch the traffic grow. The value for me was to stay informed a bit better on developers in the Django and Ruby on Rails communities. Using IRC on freenode worked for a while, but it seemed to be too cluttered with people learning the environments rather than people interested in adding to the environments. Don’t get me wrong, IRC is an invaluable source for troubleshooting your applications and that type of traffic doesn’t belong in Twitter.
Recently I’ve seen more and more marketing people getting involved in twitter as if this is something where they can spam, and I do mean spam in a derogatory sense, non-sense in the hopes of getting reach through following everyone and trying to get everyone to follow them. Is the real value in watching or publishing only to your follower’s list?
I believe the power of twitter is not watching your followers list getting spammed with “@noonespecial I really like to chat with you, DM me sometime for hugs and kisses.” Maybe I’m a bit too cynical with this, but come on. You’re there to find people interested in your services or providing a service to others. In this economy, I realize that spam and reach may be your only way to feel like you have some sort of false value. I do sympathize, but is it worth the cost of turning Twitter into a spam haven?
Now onto what I find to be the most powerful usage of Twitter, or at least one of the tools that makes Twitter an invaluable tool. Search API. For those of you that have a Twitter client on your desktop like TweetDeck, I would highly recommend adding a window for search. The most recent version allows you to combine search terms with OR and AND for those that want to aggregate multiple topics. You can use this to find useful information and people that are possibly interested in your services or company. I use it now to track programming and local area stuff. I’ve almost gone to ignoring what’s in my follower’s list since it’s been a bit too chatty.
In summary, I think if you’re on Twitter to make money or bring value to your business then consider every tweet before you hit the send button. Does this tweet add value to my brand? Should this be a Direct Message? Do I sound like a 13 year-old? Am I only tweeting because I watched some savvy presentation at a(n) (un)conference of (un)employed marketing people? Twitter can be a useful tool if your not a tool while using it.
Jan 14
wstearnsUncategorized opensolaris
I have installed all the packages that were in the repository that support my needs. I have update Python to 2.5.2, which is completely necessary. I’m now installing all the Perl modules that support my existing repository of scripts. I have also installed FreeTDS for communicating with SQL Server 2005. Basically the server needs to be able to execute a stored procedure on the database, it doesn’t really need any other functionality.
Screenshot of my VM as modules from CPAN are being compiled.
Jan 12
wstearnsUncategorized opensolaris
I’m getting my VM for OpenSolaris all setup so that I can test to make sure I can migrate my Ubuntu servers at the office with little to no problems. They are planning to replace them anyways with some Windows servers and a lesser product, but in the meantime creativity is still allowed.
