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January 6, 2006

Storing passwords on somebody's Web site

It's one thing to put your to-do list or bookmarks or pictures or knowledge base or project coordination on somebody else's Web site.

But as I registered with Aganta to try out their password-management system, and was about to enter my first password, I had an almost physical reaction (go write a blog entry instead).

Was thinking about just putting everything in, but I think I'll start out with less-critical passwords until I get over my anxiety.

Posted by pete at 12:04 PM

SnakesAndRubies: Python vs Ruby web frameworks bake-off

DePaul University hosted an extensive Django vs Rails discussion, and has made the video, audio and presentations available. It's 3 hours, but well worth it. Pretty extensive overview of each framework followed by over an hour of Q&A with some great questions. Some very good food for thought and discussion.

Update: Interesting comment and discussion during the post-presentation panel from David Heinemeier Hansson (starting about 2:31). He prefers not to start a company in Silicon Valley because of the big-startup, big-funding mentality, so Rails enables (by design) a start-up to be small and fast and not have to spend a lot of time coordinating a big project.

Posted by pete at 10:37 AM

January 5, 2006

Switching communities

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm in process of moving to a new job.

On top of the normal year-end cleaning I was doing (something GTD highly recommends), I was also wrapping things up at UEN and getting ready for my new job. That ended up being a much more significant undertaking than I'd anticipated. This job change is a lot more than just a different employer (and what normally comes with that). I'm leaving a community I've been part of for more than a decade, and building new ties to a community much closer to home.

I've been part of the service provider industry since only the geekiest of geeks knew what an ISP was (1994 to be specific). Over the last 12 years, I've developed many relationships within that community, which is mostly located (in the US) on the east coast and some other larger cities, but very few in Utah (I've probably attended more service provider community conferences than everyone else in Utah combined).

During the last two weeks, I've slowly unraveled myself from the service provider community and started exploring the Utah IT community. The experience reminded me of my switch from Windows (after about 12 years as a Windows power-user) to Mac OS X. There was definitely something very real about unsubscribing from the NANOG (the core community of service providers in the US) mailing list after 10 years.

A few weeks ago I went to my first Utah Geek Dinner. This was before I had gotten an offer from Linux Networx, and I was mostly interested in seeing what was going on with the Utah technology community. While listening to Phil talk about the vibrant tech community he had left behind in San Francisco, and how he (and others) wanted to develop the same community in Utah, I developed an intense interest in getting involved with the Utah tech community and helping to develop the community Phil described.

I'm looking forward to the next Geek Dinner (tentatively planned for January 17 at Thanksgiving point, hopefully the details will be posted soon) and meeting more of the Utah tech community (I think I only got to talk to about 10 people at the last Geek Dinner, this time I'll have to be more efficient). Also decided to go to the next Ruby user's group meeting. It's been a long time since I've gone to a Utah user's group meeting, and I'm excited about it.

Update: I just found a blog entry where Phil Burns talks in detail about the vision he shared at the Geek Dinner (starts with the fifth paragraph, about half-way down).

Posted by pete at 10:43 PM | Comments (1)

January 4, 2006

New year, new job, new direction

This Friday will be my last day at UEN. I've worked at UEN for five years, which makes this the longest (by a few months) I've worked for an organization. It's a great place to work, and I've been part of an incredible team that has done some amazing things. Though I am sad to leave the team I've loved working with the last five years, I feel a great sense of satisfaction about what we've accomplished in the last five years.

My new job is at Linux Networx, a company that develops Linux-based supercomputing clusters for HPC applications. Linux Networx is headquartered in Riverton, about 15 minutes from my house (I'm pretty happy about that, I'll save 1.5 hours in commute time every day).

I will be moving into an enterprise IT group, managing a small (for now) team supporting the IT needs of a growing company. It's a move back to my roots, after more than 10 years in the service provider industry. There are some significant differences which are challenges I'm excited about. Enterprise IT has changed a lot during the last decade; fortunately, it looks like a lot of the lessons I've learned in the service provider industry will be helpful.

Beginning next week, I'll be writing regularly about my transition to a new job, a new team, a new (for me) company, a new industry, and a subtly/majorly different career.

Posted by pete at 8:07 PM | Comments (1)

January 3, 2006

Playing Pandora while (still) waiting for last.fm

I've only made it 1/6 of the way to the minimum 300 songs last.fm requires to make personal recommendations. I can still use the "Similar Bands" station feature (which I'm finding is much more enjoyable than I thought--doesn't require as much effort as surfing iTMS, so I can do it while working on something else), but I'm still anxious to see what recommendations they make based on my listening habits.

Doesn't help that I sold my iPod (4G click) a few weeks ago, so my iTunes listening has dropped significantly. Also last.fm has been down for several days (though iScrobbler did just fine queuing my iTunes activity).

In the mean-time, I've been playing around with Pandora. It has some nice feature differences from last.fm:

Probably the biggest differentator is that Pandora developed from the Music Genome Project, which in theory should make Pandora a lot better at recommending music based on your current favorites. Would be interesting to do a comparison of last.fm vs Pandora recommendations. My experience listening to each for 2 days is that Pandora recommendations are much better. Maybe once I make it through the minimum requirements last.fm will make better recommendations.

Hopefully Apple will take notice and pick one of these companies up to fill the gap in iTMS recommendations.

Posted by pete at 1:35 PM

January 2, 2006

RSS readers: Shrook vs Google Reader

I've tried a variety of RSS readers over the last couple of years, including on Palm, my Treo phone, Windows and most recently Mac.

None of them every really stuck. Well, there was one I really liked on Windows, but I've been on a Mac for a year now and can't remember much about my Windows setup.

A couple months ago Mike told me about Shrook. After a few minutes, I knew I'd found the right RSS reader. I'm sure it's a personal thing, but it seemed to fit my expectations of a good RSS reader (I really like it's scratch pad and the way it tracks and displays read/unread and the ability to sync Shrook on multiple computers, amongst other things).

So a couple of days ago, my Shrook trial version expired. I decided I would give Google Reader a spin before I pay my Shrook license fee. So I save out Shrook subscriptions as OPML, upload the file to Google and away we go.

After using Google Reader for 3 days now, I can say definitively that Shrook blows it away, and that I don't understand how Google Reader works. It looks cool and everything, but I can't figure out how it maintains the list of articles (mostly, how it misses so many).

I'll be buying a license for Shrook.

You should try it out, maybe it'll be your perfect RSS reader, too.

Posted by pete at 10:46 PM

How well do you know Web 2.0

Test your Web 2.0 industry awareness here.

I only got 6/10, but that's above passing grade. Considering I didn't know much at all about Web 2.0 a month ago, I feel pretty good about that score.

Posted by pete at 10:41 PM

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