Get ready to upgrade your Flash player – Saks.com has a new web video site.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Retirement
Sick of six sigma? Irritated by ISO? Outraged by outsourcing? Want to leave the office for the last time?
It sounds like you have the desire to retire.
Good for you. First, you need to know your number
Of course, lots of other planning tools to see how close you are to your number are available on the Web; the one I use is part of Quicken (there’s less typing since it uses your Quicken data).
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Polling your users
I really like the idea of energizing the communication channel from your customers towards you using the web, so I was really impressed by My Starbucks Idea. What surprised me though was that this wasn’t a simple blog, this was a SalesForce.com application. I wonder if we’ll see an increasing number of these in the future.
Let’s hope we see some of these suggestions implemented and some exciting changes in your local ‘Bucks. 
Friday, March 21, 2008
Whoops! They did it again.
Microsoft’s latest foray into things that might possibly have a small chance of not sucking is their new MOSS offering – Sharepoint as a service. Now I know what you’re thinking: has That Software Guy lost his mind? Actually using a low quality, buggy, insecure Microsoft service?
Relax. I’m just doing it because I needed a laugh. And sure enough, I got one.
The marketing ploy is, “use MOSS because you won’t have to provision your own capacity to run Sharepoint – we’ll do it for you.” But then when it comes to actually trialling the service, you get a pretty blue dialog that says,
* The number of available trial accounts has temporarily reached its limit.
ROTFL!! Boy, that’s sure a confidence builder.
OK, so why would someone who wasn’t clueless use a closed-source content management system? Why would you choose to be at the mercy of a single vendor with such a lousy delivery record? And has Microsoft finally solved problems that everyone else figured out decades ago, such as managing multiple simultaneous updates to a single resource? (The Sharepoint 2003 answer was “last one in wins with no notification of impending overwrite.” Nice!)
Making money off open source
Looks like the SitePen guys have the right idea – provide professional class support and bill for it. Good luck, fellas!
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Listening
Wasn’t it Yogi Berra who said you can learn a lot just by listening?
I really enjoyed this talk by Dawn Airey from ITV on how she benefitted from listening to her staff.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Playboy partners with eFashionSolutions
The temptation to make a silly joke is almost irresistible…but instead I’ll just congratulate the nice folks over at eFashionSolutions on their newest client. Good job, guys! I look forward to seeing the new site.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
The weirdest sanction yet
TJ Maxx is being ordered to hold a one-day “we got hacked” sale as part of their punishment for lax data security. Tip to shoppers: pay with cash.
Magento installation – not there yet
Last weekend I upgraded my system and installed Magento. Since my Linux system is still on FC4, I had to download Apache and PHP sources and rebuild them by hand – no yum for you, young man! This was an interesting experience, and was useful in its own right since it allowed me to start using PHP’s built-in SOAP calls in some other software I’m writing.
However, Magento was disappointing. It kind-of sort-of works sometimes, but mostly I get these incredibly irritating blank page errors.
Based on what I’m seeing on their forum, this might be related to PHP 5.2.5. We’ll see …
Update: It seems that by using the private (192.168) IP address instead of localhost and updating httpd.conf to explicitly set the include path, you can get around this problem.
