After talking to one of my friends about purchasing a new computer for his software project, it became quite apparent that developers are in the dark on what to shop for in a new machine. The assumption is to buy the best machine that they can seem to afford. In reality this is throwing money down the rabbit hole. A good development machine only needs three things: processing power, RAM and a decent hard drive. Now to completely blow your mind, the basic Dell Vostro laptop can be more power than most developers will ever need. You don’t need to spend hundreds on upgrades to get it there either.
This is an off topic post for this blog but I feel it fits under the name “Resourceful Idiot”. Well it seems that Activision cannot get anything right and with the latest CoD4 patch actually caused more connection problems than fixed. If you are like many who cannot go through more then 1 or 2 games before getting the “Connection Interrupt” screen, do not worry your not alone. This issue has been acknowledged by the community and developers and is being looked into. As for a fix, the only thing that has seemed to help me is to sign out and sign back into your Live account. I encourage anyone who is having this issue to post their solutions in a comment. Now back to your regularly scheduled postings.
Graduating from college is such a refreshing moment. It is the first day of the rest of your life and most want to start it off with a bang. Well what could be better than leaving academia for that dream job that kept you going on those all night study sessions. Unfortunately, leaving academia was the easy part and finding that dream job will prove to be the fight of your life. I know this from first hand experience.
Over at Socialized Software, they have posted an interesting article arguing that open source developers are better marketers than other developers. They use sites like Twitter and Automattic (Wordpress) as these types of companies. I agree that both of these companies are driven by excellent marketing strategy. However, I have a disenting opinion when it comes to having a profit maximizing business. At the end of the day, it is all good and well to have a site the community enjoys because it does not cost anything. The problem becomes when you want to expand your brand, the company needs some capital in order to execute the expansion. Where do they get this money from? Well the typical strategy is to turn it into a Free / Pro structure and hope people feel obligated to upgrade their account. By doing this however, the company is no longer considered “open source” because they offer a pay product. Usually these transitions come with a little slight of hand and most users still consider them an open source product when in fact they technically are not. Read More
Being developers we do not have the benefit of taking basic marketing and finance courses. This quickly becomes a problem when developers want to start their own business. Developing the software is one thing, making financial gain and increasing your user base are the two problems everyone encounters during the course of their startup. It also is 90% of the reason why startups fail within their initial year. So what can we do about it to prevent this?
Keeping with the trend of web services, I figured I would take the time to give a brief overview of the two major service types. The one I will obviously cover first is the called REST. This is an acronym for Representational State Transfer, but that does not really tell you much about it. REST is the newcomer when compared to its popular counterpart, SOAP. The idea behind REST is quite simple, its base principle is that everything is a resource. This is similar in principle to object-oriented principles which treats everything as an independent object. Since every resource is independent from each other, the programmer must set up relations between these resources in order to provide access links to related data.
Once the structure is setup with the required resources we need a way to modify these resources. REST provides a very simple interface for manipulation, it uses the existing HTTP protocol that has been around for over a decade. Now if you are familiar with HTTP protocol you are thinking, “So all you do is use GET and POST commands?” Well, yes you do use these but other requests are required. GET and POST are the most common of the two because these are the only ones primarily used by web browsers. However there are actually nine different request types in the HTTP protocol. A few of these are GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE.
One thing I seem to come across when talking about new startup ideas for companies is the implementation of some sort of web service. I have personal experience building these type of services so I figured I would take a brief moment and talk about the technology behind them.
The first thing that you must understand is that a web service on the surface looks like nothing more than your average web site. I am sure most the sites you visit have a web service hidden in the background and you have no indication that it is even there. This is the beauty of the system, the service is only visible to those who really look for it. Transparency of this type of system is a thing of beauty, but this does not mean security is not important.
Twitter is one of those Web 2.0 sites that I am still trying to get my head around. The idea is overly simple. A user signs up and posts small “tweets” of >140 characters. It is very unique concept, but what is the point of it all? Some say it is to stay ‘connected’ to people while others have posted about its stalker potential. After using Twitter for only a few days, I must say that I am somewhere in the middle. I can see some potential benefits from running a Twitter page, but also some major disadvantages.
I just returned from the Imagine Cup National Finals for the Software Design competition. I met some great people and also some valuable lessons. Microsoft did a overall decent job of running the event however there are a number of things I would like to have seen done differently. Oh and just for the record my project, Footprint, did not place in the Top 3 at the event. However I will try to be as non-bias as possible.
- Free Time - Microsoft gave us a very aggressive schedule of 8am - 10pm activities every single day. This did not allow many participants ample time to prepare and also have more than 5 hours of sleep.
- Judging Criteria - We were given a published listing of the judging elements on the competition, but were never given a break down of either the winners or losers. This is quite hypocritical when every workshop on presenting/marketing products is about finding out what you did wrong so you can improve for next time. Apparently they do not practice what they preach.
- Itinerary - A week prior to the event we were notified that there would be elements not included or hinted at in any documentation. This caused a panic among teams and a scrabble to prepare for the new elements of the event.
- Showcase - We were told to prepare a showcase of our product for the public. However this was not factored into our final scores so if your booth was ineffective or sloppy, your score was not hurt as a result. If something like this isn’t going to count, and requires days of prep work then just leave it out! In addition, a showcase should be to potential investors or a broad range of customers, marketing green technologies to inner-city high school students does nothing but make Microsoft look good with a PR stunt.
Now just to finalize this post. Yes, I did not place in the top 3 but that does not mean I am out on a vendetta against the Imagine Cup or Microsoft. It is a great concept, but seems to have some large holes. These holes allow me to realize why events thrown by other companies get more participants and more news coverage. I encourage every student to sign up for an Imagine Cup event as it is a great experience and you meet some amazing people. I hope Microsoft can solve these problems so people can walk away learning something from their mistakes instead of just wondering why teams won in the order that they did. [Rant]I also firmly believe that having 2 similar projects in the Top 3 would look badly upon the competition so it was decided behind closed doors to select one of them.[/Rant]
Upon installing macports on my OSX machine I found that I come across the following error:
port: command not found
Well upon doing a quick search of I found my answer.
nano ~/.bash_profile
#paste the following:
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:/opt/local/share/man
export INFOPATH=$INFOPATH:/opt/local/share/info
Ctrl+O
Enter
Ctrl+X
Now just reload terminal and everything should work like a charm. I newb proofed this article for the sake of those users who have not used the nano editor.
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