As a quick followup to my previous post (http://michaelkimsal.com/blog/six-week-test-followup-custom-business-cards/) I wanted to drop a quick update here.  Six weeks isn’t too long if it’s your only activity.  Trying to fit in a six week project in the midst of other projects and deadlines is hard, but you already knew that!.  I’m 4.5 weeks in, and [...]

Posted in Book, Business, Development, Software, Web No Comments »

I’ve been working with a couple local people on developing a short term plan for them to get in to or move around in the web development job space, and I was wondering if there’s a need for something perhaps sightly more formal in the Raleigh area.  Here’s my initial sketch…
Weekly classes (probably Saturday morning) [...]

Posted in Business, Development, Job, Society, Software, Web 4 Comments »

I’m planning to move to using Opera as my main webmail client.  I do a lot in gmail, and to a lesser extent in yahoo mail and other webmail clients.  Firefox, as nice as it is, tends to hang quite a lot (not just with gmail – basically, all the time – 3.5 has not [...]

Posted in Personal, Software, Tools, Web 4 Comments »

I’m putting out a call for fulltime web freelancers to possible be interviewed for an upcoming book project.  PHP, Java, .Net, Front End Engineers, JavaScript, Graphic Designers – if you do web development or design for a living as an independent, we’d like to talk to you.  Visit http://webdevpub.com/interview to fill out a quick background [...]

Posted in Book, Software, Web, Writing No Comments »

I stumbled on an article recently about the government’s plan to change its cookie policy.  There wasn’t a whole lot in the article other than that the new federal CIO Vivek Kundra has proposed that federal websites be allowed to use persistent cookies to track visitors.
It’s *about time*.  Give me, the tech savvy end user, [...]

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I’m taking my own advice and plunging ahead with a small, focused six-weeker. I’m not sure this counts or not because A) I’ve had the idea for several months and B) I did a bit of work on it several weeks ago. With that said, perhaps I should only give myself five weeks [...]

Posted in Business, Ideas, Web 2 Comments »

The August issues of GroovyMag and JSMag are both out.  They’ve been out since earlier this month, but I didn’t publicize them here yet. 
GroovyMag’s content this month includes Part I of building a Grails Portal, Part II of  Logging in Grails, a deeper look at Groovy Typing, the Clojure Plugin, Grails with RMI, [...]

Posted in Business, Grails, Groovy, Javascript, Web No Comments »

I’ve been speaking with a number of local entrepreneurs over the past few weeks, and they all have a few things in common.  All are sharp, smart, have good taste (hey, they’re talking to me, right?), have some killer ideas, and seem to be stuck.  Taking definitive action on the ideas seems to be the [...]

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My brother wrote a Magento module recently – the Facebook Connect Module.  It’s pretty straightforward, and allows you to make it easier for shoppers to enter in their information in to your Magento store.  When checking out, they can connect their Facebook info, using the Facebook Connect process, and their information will be imported in [...]

Posted in Ecommerce, PHP, Software, Web 3 Comments »

Just saw on TechCrunch tonight that Justin.TV has taken a first step towards DVR functionality in their player. Good to see it, and I just felt like posting that I did call this out as a need last fall   It’s not quite what I was hoping for just yet, but it sounds like [...]

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