http://www.wynia.org/wordpress J Wynia - Web Consultant, Writer and Geek Sun, 11 May 2008 22:33:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Photo: Steve Jurvetson A while back, there was a TV commercial (for a product/service I can't recall)1 that showed a group of businessmen having a meeting in a shower. They were there because the executive that called the meeting wanted to leverage the fact that his best ideas came to him ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/05/11/setting-up-shop-in-the-shower/ About a month ago, I set a goal for myself to go to the gym every day for a month. The idea was largely predicated on a principle that I've seen in many other areas of life. Basically, if you do something often enough for it to become a habit ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/05/01/on-the-30-day-gym-experiment/ After some recent restructuring of my business (I'm now 100% owner of Pragmapool) and ongoing problems with the server that this and my other sites sit on, I'm migrating all of my sites over to Mosso. I'll probably go into why I chose them and why I'm willing to recommend ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/04/23/setting-up-google-mail-for-your-own-domain/ This weekend, I was doing a bunch of digging into how to use some of the open source ORM (Object Relational Mapping) packages out there. That process of technical research follows a pretty predictable pattern: do a few Google searches open the best results into a bunch of tabs read the info come up with ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/04/14/nevermind-i-figured-it-out/ Photo: Dan ZenI make a swing past a bunch of sites like Freshmeat, C Sharp Source, CodeProject, Codeplex and Sourceforge every week or 2, looking for new and updated C# (and PHP, etc) projects and libraries that are up to interesting stuff. One article on CodeProject today caught my eye. The ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/04/11/generating-applications-or-solving-problems/ There are a lot of common patterns in data that appear over and over again. When we can recognize patterns in our reality and match them to these known and documented patterns, we can much better understand what's actually going on and Anyone who has sat through an intro to economics ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/04/11/mapping-reality-to-common-graphs/ Ten years ago, I left college and sat down, completing a slowdown that began 4 or so years earlier. When I left high school, I transitioned from doing chores every day and working on the farm to going to college. I stayed relatively active, riding my bike to class year ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/04/10/toward-30-days-straight-at-the-gym/ A few weeks ago, I saw a notice that there was a security flaw in Wordpress that needed patching. Unfortunately, I've been dealing with lots of stuff that trumps site maintenance and I didn't get to it until last week. Apparently that was too late because as I sat down to ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/04/08/this-site-de-listed-on-google-due-to-wordpress-flaw/ Every Sunday morning, give or take a few, for the past couple of years, I have breakfast with my good friend Aaron (who I met 20 years ago in junior high). It's always an interesting conversation that covers lots of topics. This morning, I came away with more ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/04/06/notes-from-breakfast-2008-04-06/ About a year ago, I articulated my upgrade cycle for laptops. Then, last summer, most of that criteria was met and I rushed to order a new one. However, when Dell reported delays of up to 2 months to ship that particular laptop, I reconsidered my impulsiveness and cancelled. I've since ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/04/04/requirements-for-a-new-laptop/ Ever since someone gave me an overview of RESTful web development in the same week that someone else gave me an overview of the Atompub protocol, I've been hooked on the idea. I've tinkered around with starting implementations of both a client and a server on my own ever ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/03/31/using-atompub-to-export-from-wordpress/ Photo: Duchamp I'm about as big of an advocate of the use of Creative Commons licenses for my creative work as you'll find. Nearly everything I make online is licensed under either the most permissive of the Creative Commons licenses (for things like articles, photos, documents, etc.) or one of ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/03/31/creative-commons-commercial-use-and-gray-areas/ Photo by: Bob Jagendorf Back at the beginning of 2007, I had an idea to highlight some of the amazing photographs that are added to The Commons every day. In my zeal for the idea, I jumped right to trying to do a "Best of 2006" book, but didn't start until ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/03/26/photos-from-the-commons/ A while back, Dave Slusher started mentioning a conference he was working on. What actually caught my attention was the approach they're taking. Conferences (even the ones about participatory culture) tend to set themselves up with experts up on a platform conveying their expertise to crowds of various sizes. ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/03/23/createsouth-conference-in-april/ This morning, I awoke to a white blur outside my bedroom window. As I put on my glasses, the white came into focus and I could see that snow was clinging to every surface in sight. The heavy, wet snow of an early spring storm was ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/03/22/the-peaceful-spring-snow/ photo credit: Liel Bomberg I often push people who work as employees to view themselves as actually being self-employed. When you take a job, your little business just sold some of your time to a company for an agreed-upon amount of money per year. It's a business arrangement, so treating ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/03/19/eye-catching-resumes/ photo credit: tibbygirl I was in the grocery store earlier today after a trip through Crystal. Along the road every restaurant that I passed seemed to have suddenly added corned beef and cabbage to their menus or managed to dig out the big ol' bottle of green food coloring and ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/03/16/beyond-corned-beef-cabbage-and-green-food-coloring-food-for-st-patricks-day/ This morning, I ran out of my pomade, digging the last of it out of the jar. I headed to the closet to grab another, thus ensuring that my nasty cowlick in the back stays put tomorrow. Unfortunately, while the shelf proudly displayed my stash of extra shaving ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/03/14/amazoncom-and-customer-centric-service/ A while back, I sent an email to Dave Slusher about making money in "new media".  He asked if he could publish it and a few emails went back and forth, including some extra bits that he wanted to include in his posting about the conversation. I sent a quick ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/03/10/sharing-writing-and-openness/ Somewhere, at this very moment, in an IT department or team of programmers, someone is planning a scheduled task. That task should run in "off" hours, when no one is around. The immediate suggestion that pops up is MIDNIGHT. There is no debate, no questioning of it and the task ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/02/18/the-midnight-problem/ Photo: Kevin Dooley If you were to go through my Visual Studio "Projects" directory or my personal development web server, you'll find about 2/3 of the directories are named SomethingPOC or SomethingExperiment. The former has become my convention over the last year or so and stands for ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/02/17/the-power-of-the-proof-of-concept/ For a while now, I've had a project on the back burner for a different set of tools for RSS reading, writing and publishing. I'd like a single toolchain that lets me keep everything together in one place. I've got piles of notes, a few proof of concept projects and ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/02/14/using-htmltidy-to-clean-up-html-with-c/ A few weeks ago, I was staring at my browser which was presenting me the now ubiquitous receipt page after buying something online. That page was, as is so common, recommending that I "print this page for your records". The thing is that I usually don't really want ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/02/13/keeping-track-of-everything-you-print/ Photo: Iman Moradi Every few weeks I seem to see clusters of discussions about "young people" and technology. Typically, it starts off as I notice someone doing a news story or just spouting off in a restaurant about how amazing it is that "kids today" are growing up with ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/02/09/beyond-wikipedia-researching-and-exploring-online/ Photo: Tim Lloyd I've worked on several applications where we used .NET DataSets as the container for passing records between web services and other components. They work pretty well to keep things nice and loosely coupled when you're building lots of separate components that may or may not all ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/01/31/c-datasets-and-the-magic-of-readxml/ When I mentioned over the holidays that the croutons on our Christmas salad were actually homemade (in response to a question on the brand), I was met with more surprise than I expected. Unfortunately, that response is something I've heard from lots of other people who actually make their own ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/01/24/make-it-yourself-croutons/ This weekend, Dave Slusher expressed frustration in trying to explain why most of the arguments related to money in podcasting seem to miss the point. I wrote what was originally going to be a 140 character Twitter post (no, I will not use the tw**t word) that ended up being ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/01/22/my-rant-on-making-money-in-podcasting/ Every once in a while, someone asks me about the numbers behind doing contract/wholesale consulting. They usually aren't asking about specific figures, but are curious about how the numbers fit together. Because there's so much information out there about how to figure out pricing on retail consulting, I figured I'd ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/01/22/running-the-numbers-on-wholesale-consulting/ As I mentioned a few days ago, I got a Zune for the holidays from the consulting firm I'm subcontracting through. I've had it for a few weeks now and it's a decent enough device. But, there's this strange behavior that leads me to the conclusion that the ghost of ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/01/18/the-ghost-of-johnny-cash-haunts-my-zune/ Photo: Jackie As I was growing up, I always had access to a big sandbox. When I was really young, it was a literal sandbox, usually something on the order of 8 or 10 feet on a side. My siblings and I would build large cities, populated with ... http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/01/12/the-power-of-the-sandbox/