I was sure I would never become a consultant. The stress is high. You sell your time. You don’t get time off. You don’t get sick leave. Just try to get health insurance. Retirement? Ha. In spite of all that I am a consultant and I like it. Late summer 2008 the powers that be…
Tag: Programming
How New Carpet and Rattlesnake turned me into a Consultant or What the Hell Happened?
I was sure I would never become a consultant. The stress is high. You sell your time. You don’t get time off. You don’t get sick leave. Just try to get health insurance. Retirement? Ha. In spite of all that I am a consultant and I like it. Late summer 2008 the powers that be…
Social Search, User Discovery
As a follow on to my social profiles post I’m adding more images to help examine the way in which users find each other on a given social network. Billions of dollars have been made solving the search for content problem, but for the most part finding people is still a fairly tedious task. Most…
43 Social Profiles
One challenge any community site faces is how to let users express themselves. It is hard to express the sum total of any individual on a web page, but in the virtual world that interface is the one chance a user has to connect with another human being. The challenge for designers is making the…
River – Amazon Wishlist Gem
One more post on Amazon Wishlist code. As another follow up to my post on Amazon Wishlist RSS, Ruby and Signing/Authenticating your Requests and the site I built to run the code My Amazon Feeds (post here) I’ve created a gem to contain all the code. Get it by running sudo gem install river </pre>…
Amazon Wishlist RSS
As a follow up to the post I did a bit back explaining how to write ruby code to talk to Amazon.com I have also built a site that makes it simple to get your Amazon.com Wishlist RSS. This should make your life a bit easier if you want to integrate your rss feed into…
jQuery.ajax – Get in Firefox, Post in Internet Explorer
The docs for jQuery.ajax indicate that by default the request is made using ‘GET’. I would still recommend setting the type to ‘GET’. We just deployed a site and found that for some reason some versions of Internet Explorer were doing a POST instead of a GET. This is problematic with a Ruby on Rails…
Authorize.net – User authentication failed due to invalid authentication values
So you’ve worked hard to integrate your website with authorize.net and now you’re ready to turn it on and make the big bucks. You run your first real transaction and get: User authentication failed due to invalid authentication values. code=”E00007″ or This account has not been given the permission(s) required for this request. or E00007…
It’s Your Head Not Your Butt That Matters
I’ve been writing code all day, again. Luckily I enjoy writing software. There are moments when I and the computer don’t get along. On those days I consider becoming a garbage man or maybe a bulldozer driver. Just keep me off the bull dozer on the days I don’t agree with my code. Anyway I’ve…
Teachers Without Borders
During the day and lately most of the night I work as a Fellow for Teachers Without Borders at Utah State University. (funded by Cisco). What I actually do bores most people and causes my wife to roll her eyes and tune out anytime someone asks what I do. It’s a long story and involves…