Jul
8
2010
We’re in beta testing and preview period for our new product at Humantelligence that we’ve dubbed TalentScan. Simply put, TalentScan makes it drop-dead easy for any business owner or group leader to analyze their people and find ways to improve efficiency as well as foster communication and understanding among their workforce. If you picture a cross between Mint.com and Google Analytics, but instead of looking at your bank accounts or your web stats, we’re looking at the motivators and behaviors of the people you work with.
Even more simply put, TalentScan gives you really interesting information about your employees that you probably didn’t know. It discusses their dominant workplace motivators, workplace behaviors, ideal workplace and life priorities. And that’s just for starters. Plus, it’s totally free to try it out and get quite a lot of useful information without even giving us your credit card info.
Planning to unveil all the details over the next few weeks as we march towards the public launch, but you can get a quick peek and register for notifications over at TalentScanApp.com and we might even squeeze you in to our beta test group!
no comments | posted in asides, software
Jun
30
2010
For those of you who are interested in a super-quick way to create an easy online portfolio, I recently launched a site called FolioHD to do exactly this. We’ve had about 100 people sign up so far and had over 2GB of images uploaded already. So, yeah. If you need a portfolio site, you should try this free online portfolio site and tell me what you think!
We timed it and it only takes 60 seconds to sign up, upload some pics and have your site live. Beat that with any other site and I’ll be surprised…
no comments | posted in asides, cool stuff, software
Jul
27
2009
Another great essay from Paul Graham of Y Combinator about the differences between “managers” and “makers” and how they schedule their day. I’ve personally found that most non-makers are completely oblivious to how much having even short meetings during the day can disrupt our work process. I can’t remember where I read it (maybe Joel Spolsky) but I recall a discussion about how if it takes 15 or 30 minutes for a developer to “get in the zone”, a couple 15 second distractions can ruin a whole day of productivity.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. [...]
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
[full essay here]
On a related note, why in the world does Paul Graham not have an RSS feed for his essays?? Dave Winer needs to make that happen.
no comments | posted in software, tech
Jun
5
2009
I have done nothing truly innovative in the first 155 days of 2009.
This is what I have come to recognize as the cause of my current state of discontent. I have been doing a lot of self-reflection lately, which of course only happens when I have too much time for self-reflection. My preference is to occupy myself with exciting (read: cutting edge, innovative) projects rather than silly introspection.
Now, it’s true that I have done several things this year with which I’m quite satisfied. I’ve started making some good friends here in LA as the two-year anniversary of my moving west has come and gone. We added the Atlanta Braves as yet another flagship Photocore client. I was involved in launching a free career assessment aimed at helping young people understand themselves and find their ideal job (more about that later). But none of these satisfy my basal thirst for innovation.
Continue reading
5 comments | tags: entrepreneurship, innovation, software | posted in feelings, software
Dec
16
2008
We’re using the ASP.NET C# version of PDFLib at work to generate loads of reports and cool pdf files. Everything was peachy on our development systems until we deployed to staging servers, then all of the sudden we started getting the following exception on the site:
The specified module could not be found.
(Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007E)
Not one of Microsoft’s more useful error messages, to be true and googling for that error returns so many diverse topics that they were completely useless.
So after a bit of troubleshooting, we came to the following solution tips. These should work for both C# and VB and any other .NET language. Tested on Windows 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Continue reading
3 comments | tags: .net, c#, pdf, tip | posted in software
Sep
8
2008
Need to find something on your way to somewhere? check out FindItOnMyWay.com. If you need a starbucks on the way home, or need a FedEx on the way to the office, it can help.
no comments | posted in asides, cool stuff, software
Jul
13
2008
edaah is a social dining recommendation tool. based on where you and your friends are eating, edaah will suggest a few places to try. if you spend more than five minutes thinking about where to eat today, edaah will come to the rescue. by keeping track of where you eat, we can make sure you don’t repeat too often and can help to find a place your group of friends can all enjoy for any occasion.
we just launched the beta site – check out my page and then sign up for yourself.
no comments | posted in asides, cool stuff, software
Feb
21
2008
Last week I just released with a couple friends the v1.0 of ChopShop Racing on Facebook. It’s better than all the other racing apps.
Why?
Because it has a visual race viewer – you watch cars progress throughout the race (no coin flips).
Because it is based on Physics – heavier, faster cars aren’t always great around the turns.
Because it has technical tracks – we build track data based on the severity of the turn, lengths of the segments, etc.
Because you can race people who aren’t your friends.
Because you don’t have to invite people to play the game!
I’ll let the rest of you fill in the blanks after you go play.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7900548411
no comments | tags: chopshop, facebook, game | posted in asides, cool stuff, software
Jan
5
2008
Need a C# native client API for Sphinx Search to use in your C# or VB ASP.NET projects? So did I, so I wrote one.
Yesterday, I found Sphinx Search and decided to try implementing it in place of the (horrid) MySql Fulltext searching for my Photocore project. After downloading the binaries and indexing a couple million rows of metadata, I was amazed at how well it performs. It indexed all my data in less than a minute (compared to the 30 minutes required by MySql Fulltext) and I haven’t come up with a search that takes longer than 0.005 seconds. I was hooked immediately. So I needed a .NET API because I didn’t want to patch my database server to use the Sphinx plugin.
Source download after the jump.
Continue reading
21 comments | tags: api, free, search, source, sphinx | posted in software
Jan
31
2007
Earlier today Microsoft released the source code to the AJAX 1.0 release System.Web.Extensions library. I was in the apparently unique position of needing to modify parts of the code for a special case application, so I downloaded the source right away ready to modify, compile and deploy.
I guess I was pretty naive to think that it would be that easy. The distribution doesn’t include some pretty important parts. A .csproj file for one. The entire Resources class for another.
So I had to work my way through the process of getting a compile-able version of the library ready to replace the official System.Web.Extensions binary in my project. The server code Reference License prevents me from simply providing the project to you, but here are the high points if you need to do the same.
Continue reading
8 comments | tags: .net, c#, source, tip | posted in software