Ben Christen

Newsvine and How Big Companies Can Innovate

Yup, pretty much sums it up. Great post.

What a great command name. And, tonight is the first time I’ve used it in a place where things could actually go wrong if I mistyped something. — Majorly wrong. p4 obliterate is the command in Perforce to completely remove a source tree — it removes all traces of its existence. It would certainly be a problem if I ran the command a directory level too high. Whooo! Feel the rush! York peppermint patties have got nothing on this!

Sweet, I just got my first spam comment. Someone was trying to sell their company’s product as an alternative to another product I recommended. I feel like my blog is all grown up! (well, at least able to get into bars now, not all grown up) I don’t have nearly enough readers to make commenting on my blog worth too much time and effort - although it may have been done via script. Regardless, I’m amused.

After the events and frustrations of the day and comparing that with the ideal . . .
Creating Passionate Users
. . . here’s a list of what I need as a developer (as of this moment):

1. Basics/Mandatory

• The basic tools required to get the job done.
• One machine, Licenses for the software I have to use and a clear direction of what I have to do

2. Above and Beyond

• Someone to learn from (someone more senior and more of a rockstar to guide and mentor me)
• Training (books, conferences, classes - invest in me as an employee)
• The uber-tools to do the job - a tablet pc! a lappy (laptop)! a dual-core sun workstation! always the latest versions of any software I could ever want!
• Encouragement to go above and beyond - and Reward! (encourage me to do extra, refactor existing code, build a lucene based search engine to spider all our disparate intranets)
• Reward and Recognition - rank me properly (and others properly too) - and tell everyone else in the company that I kick ass (assuming I actually do kick ass)
• Respect - listen to and support me - allow me to be the expert!

It’s not about bonuses or salary (although they’re certainly nice), but instead it’s about fueling my passion for what I do and enabling that passion to be effectively channeled into business objectives.

Awesome! It’s like having a GPS Nav system on my phone! Fantastic use of Java on a mobile device.

http://google.com/glm

This is a great mobile application that I look forward to using quite a bit in the future.

Also, my other google mobile fav: Google SMS

I’m moving from roller@jroller onto a personal install of WordPress.

Here are some of my reasons for the move:

1. I have my site fully hosted now (on dreamhost) and it’s a better branded presence (I am my own most important brand/product after all)
2. jroller is great, and I LOVE roller weblogger (it was my first blogging platform, and will continue to be anytime I have multiple users and the ability to run java) — but, I don’t have java on my shared hosting and WordPress seems to be the PHP equivalent to Roller.
3. I thought about Movable Type (MT) and tried the sample install, it was cool, but so was WordPress.
   1. MT provided multiple blogs and multiple users from one admin interface, which was tempting, but not tempting enough
4. WordPress allows for static pages
   1. seems like a simple feature, but it allows me to have a poor man’s CMS and edit these static pages when I’m away from my FTP access

Links:
Ben’s Tech Blog - http://benjaminchristen.com/
Roller Weblogger - http://rollerweblogger.org/
MT - http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/
WordPress - http://wordpress.org/
Dreamhost - http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?benchristen
shameless referal link, I know - but that’s one of the great benefits of dreamhost

My content mandate -

If I give you my content, I expect in return:  access to my
content via RSS/Atom/XML/API/webDAV/etc — something/anything in
addition to the simple html view of my content.

By “you” I mean any website, webservice or web-enabled repository.

Luckily for me, most of the sites that I give content to already
subscribe to my mandate!  w00t! 
(del.icio.us/flickr/upcoming.org/blogs (roller)/etc.)

Hooray for the internet!

I've been reading Joel On Software for a while now, and loving it.  However, I enjoyed this post
more than usual and I just can't quell the urge to blog about it. 
It's just a great essay getting to the point of passion and the
importance of design and quality in software development.  Plus,
it gave me flashbacks to CS323 (that's right, I feel cooler by
association, I'm not ashamed of it) and some of the most difficult
programming I'll ever do — web application development is so simple in
comparison.

Also, this is a great quote:

I tagged this article as “awesome” on my del.icio.us — enough said. 

So, my latest addiction (don't worry flickr, there's room for multiple addictions in my online life) is Kingdom of Loathing.

It's a very simple html implementation of an adventure game (An
Adventurer is You!).  All the images are stick figures and the
basic gameplay is click here, then click here, then click here –
proving that the most important thing about a game is the Content and
Story.  Also, it's free!   It 's also  a great
example of Creating Passionate Users (look at me, I'm giving free advertising and I've donated to the game (and I'll probably donate again).

So, if you have some time to spare, I highly recommend playing.  Careful though, it is addictive (you've been warned).

Maybe it's because I've mostly used VSS in the past, but SVN is just so
easy and awesome.  It was a breeze to setup and also get svnserve
running, and now by using TortoiseSVN everything is just a right-click
away from a commit, add, delete, etc.  I've just yet to find
anything that makes me unhappy about Subversion.  It rocks! 
I guess my next step is to have it running locally and version ALL my
files.  Awesome.