When Flash is Abused

This may take a while….

Another great feature of retrospect - messages that mean nothing. 

Suggestion - This may kinda work most of the time.

Google Apps iCal integration official

Google Calendar, available through google as a free service or through Google Apps, now officially makes use of the CalDav standard for group calendaring. Google’s Post

You can now use Apple iCal with your Google Calendar, so you can work even when you’re offline, sync almost instantly, respond to invitations from others and see the free/busy data of your friends and coworkers.

They even made a little helper app that will get you up and running quickly. Setup Tool

Bubble Timer

The BubbleTimer app is small, straight forward, web application of a paper system. 

The Paper System: Emergent Task Timer

The Web App: BubbleTimer

What does it do? You fill in little bubbles for what you did in 15 minute slots, and it adds it up. Why? Well, this is not a forever system, it is more for reviewing the times when you feel your Time is not being well spent. I like it because it is not an all inclusive anal system. If you dont fill in some bubbles? So what. Don’t want to make a category for bathroom breaks or sleep? Fine. This type of loose requirements for functionality is the quality of a universal tool, like a wrench or hammer, rather than the do-it-this-way to do it right™ “systems” we see in most web applications.

When things get serious

?

Who comes up with these errors?  

Suggestions:  

1. Women and children first
2. You have no idea what just happened
3. You will be inconvenienced for….well a while
4. Help me I run Windows

Maybe Gmail & IMAP will get along better now

Gmail Blog on advanced IMAP controls

Big news, everyone turn this on right away so that your sentbox stops going crazy when you have a bunch of mail you want to keep synchronized.

Scout for dev

Just installed Scout (scoutapp.com) on our dev server using their free-level version, and I’m pretty impressed. Definitely a great option for Rails server monitoring. I had an issue with install, but the guys in the Scout Campfire set me straight.

As we start dealing with additional apps and servers, scout might be a worthy investment. The other nice thing is the fact that it works with both mongrel_cluster and Phusion, so if we head toward Phusion down the line, things will keep on kicking.

dynamically_tags

Open-Sourcing our Portal: dynamically_tags

For several months now, our internal company portal has had the ability to scrape natural text (in the form of incoming support requests or consultant-entered data) for the names of contacts or assets owned by our client.  This functionality allows us get information about referenced people and items on-the-fly, without having to manually link these objects.

I decided to take this functionality and extract it from the Portal into an open-source Rails plugin, called dynamically_tags.

We use it this like this:

class Ticket < ActiveRecord::Base
	dynamically_tags [:body, :support_body],
		:scope => :client,
		:includes => {
				:hardwares => [:name],
				:softwares =>; [:name],
				:vendors => [:name],
				:contacts => ['firstname lastname']
		}
end

I wrote up a blog post on my personal blog about this plugin, including a git-link. More information here!

Technology Agnostic

Too often the fanboys of the nets go on and on about things that are not even out yet. And when the fabled technology is eventually released there are endless excuses for the inevitable bugs.

Technology Agnostic is a term that I love. The adherents to this idea know that technology is in constant flux, the companies that promulgate their wares are not to be trusted, and that what you like doesn’t count. 

Point Consultants changes paths when technology changes. This means when we are wrong we fix it, rather than go into denial, ignore the problem, or blame something unrelated. All this technology we work with are just tools to get the job done, we have no stake in them individually, and when the chips are down we are not married to anyone but our client.

3D Medical Videos

As per Gizmodo’s post today about the 3D videos for science, check this link and watch the movie.  This drug is crazy and I think that I played it in a meeting at the old office. 

http://www.epeiusbiotech.com/rexin_g.asp