I got more interested in exploring Pinterest when I talked to several people at a New Year’s Party that were becoming “addicted” to the platform.  I asked “What are you doing on Pinterest?”
The responses followed a few general themes:

Pinterest Uses:

1. Creating a wishlist of stuff that you want and sharing it. Great for your upcoming birthday or other gift-worthy event.
2. Finding Ideas. Ideas of all varieties: recipes, vacation spots, things to do, etc..
3. Photo Sharing. This one seemed odd but, some people like the presentation of the photos so it may “work” but, I would think it’s less than ideal.

So it appears that Pinterest is what you make it. I took the dive and created my first board around products that I love for multi-sport activities (triathon, running, swimming, cycling, etc..).  Boards are Pinterest-speak for a collection of stuff.  It’s stupidly easy to add “pins” once you have the browser button in place. Just click “pin it” and select a photo on the page you want to pin.

I first wanted to add a pin for Vibrams which have become my favorite running shoes.  Using my browser I found the the product on Vibram’s website and clicked “Pin it” ,  added a quick description and I was done!  I added a few more products and my board was now taking shape.  I even re-pinned a few products I found on Pinterest which also show up on my board.  It’s that easy to quickly build up a board.

It will be interesting the see how Pinterest evolves. It’s general purpose functionality is great but, I wonder if there are more powerful focused uses for the technology.

The challenge with using any new technology is there is a learning curve and new techniques to learn. If you get in deep with a technology you will soon find the limitations and maybe even “bugs”. You need to understand how it is built enough to know if there are acceptable workarounds and what directions will simply be dead ends. In searching for more information about Cassandra I came across a new book “Cassandra High Performance Cookbook” by Edward Capriolo and was asked to review it. Here is that review:

If you are getting into Cassandra and have gone through the basics the “Cassandra High Performance Cookbook” is a good next read. The book is formatted to provide an index of quick techniques called recipes. A recipe include the problem or technique at hand, a how to do it, and how it works. Some topics include code or script samples that can be very helpful.

I found it easy to jump around the topics that were of interest to me. You generally don’t need much prior context for most of the recipes. Some of the topics are fairly basic like “Connecting to Cassandra with CLI” but, there are move advanced topics that were of more interest to me. I gained some quick insights about unit testing with embedded Cassandra and well as learned many tips on performance tuning and data modeling. There are over 150 “recipes” as they are called which cover everything from setup, client development, administration, multiple data center deployments to the internal workings of Cassandra.

If you are getting into Cassandra I would recommend giving the “Cassandra High Performance Cookbook” a read after you have gone through the Apache docs.  Let me know what you think.

I have a new laptop that is wicked fast that I am very happy with except for one major problem. It would connect to some wireless networks and not others. Unfortunately one of the networks it wouldn’t connect to was my home network, frustrating! But, wait there is more. Not only would it not connect to my home network it had the bizarre side effect of taking my entire network down! That’s right, every PC, laptop, media player, set top box, phone got kicked off the internet and wouldn’t get back on. I could still connect to the router and all it’s status thinks everything is fine but, no internet. I needed to reboot my router to fix the problem.

I have had this problem a few weeks now and even resorted to calling customer support for both my laptop and router. As expected they did not offer any useful advice. So as you can probably assume from the title of this post I got it working.

I had searched Google before looking for anything that might be applicable but, I searched again and stumbled across a forum post that mentioned power options on a laptop can effect network communications. Not likely I thought but, I gave it a shot. It appears changing my power setting from Balanced to High Performance does the trick.

Problem solved, or at least a work around.

That’s the thing about technology there is always one more crazy thing you wouldn’t think of trying that can solve your problem. Now I have a laptop that is capable of playing nice with networks or not.

Given my new super-power, I promise to use my network taking-down capabilities only for good… most likely.

Social Media Exchange

What’s Empire Avenue About?

If you are an active participant in any of the usual social media channels you’ve probably seen Empire Avenue mentioned.    Empire Avenue is billed as a “Social Media Exchange”.  Basically a stock market where you can invest in other people, brands, companies, etc… that are big players or not so big players in social media.

You start by setting up an account and pick your ticker symbol.  If you sign up soon there are still plenty of great symbols available  (I have WHIS for my personal accounts and CROWD for my startup CrowdMesh).   You can then earn virtual currency, called “Eaves”, by linking your accounts and participating in social media (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc..), or on EA’s Communities.

With your eaves you can invest in other stocks, buy boats, planes, houses, etc… Those investments can appreciate and pay dividends or the opposite of course.  That’s what makes it a market!  The market aspect of EA is fairly intriguing as the value placed on stocks is driven by the market (people buying and selling your stock).  They do have some anti-gaming features in place so one person can’t overly inflate another persons stock.  My thought is as the site matures your EA stock value may be a better indicator of your social clout than Klout currently provides.  But, it remains to be seen if they can garner enough users to make that viable.

The one thing I was a little disappointed in were the communities.  There wasn’t much participation or interesting conversations.  Mostly annoying “buy me” pitches.  I think that’s an area they need to reevaluate as I don’t think people are looking for more general forums to participate in.

Overall, I like the concept and think it has good potential.   Beware, it can be a little addicting to be able to buy stock in people you know and follow.

Crunch-Time Participant

If you’ve been in a web or software development group you’ve probably experienced what is commonly referred to as crunch-time.  Crunch-time is when the deadline is quickly approaching for a project and everyone has to put in extra hours at night or weekends to get the project completed.

I’ve worked on numerous projects where the seems to happen and also numerous others where it wasn’t required.  So why is there a need for crunch time? It is simply poor time estimation , over ambitious goals, lack of resources, inflexible deadlines? Those are certainly factors.

Deadlines

Often development deadlines are set to coincide with marketing initiatives like  trade shows or media spends.  Changing these deadlines is often not feasible (e.g. We can’t push SXSWi back a week to meet a goal), expensive (changing when a promotion is going to run), or undesirable (missed opportunities).

Ambitious Goals

If you hear the executive-speak about a project that includes the terms: Aggressive, Ambitious, High-Risk or Accelerated the project is a good candidate for crunch time.  The reasons projects become high-risk are varied but, common examples include: large feature sets, bleeding edge technology choices, un-finalized requirements and fluffy goals.

Lack of Resources

Another common factor in crunch-time projects is lack of resources. This is especially common in our current tech climate where rock star development resources are scarce.  True it can  be difficult to find the right devs but, often the realization that additional  resources are needed come to late in the process.  Then the common adage is that late in the game new devs can not make an impact so it’s up to the current development staff to make up the difference with additional work hours.

Task Estimation

Most developers even leads are simply not great at determining level of effort on large projects.  Smaller projects and sprints are easier to estimate and dev groups can increase their estimating skills over time.  Trying to do this for large projects that will take many months is a different story.   It’s hard for many reasons including:  many unknowns in the system, many components and interactions, many developer skill levels, etc…   What is usually produced is a best guess estimate  effort required and then a buffer multiplier is used to produce the man hours required.

The Positive Side

One thing I can say positive about the crunch-times I’ve been involved with is that they can be tremendous team-building exercises.  There is something about working late into the night, focusing on getting the last few bugs outs, drinking a beer and general comrade help to build strong dev groups.  I have many close friends to this day that I’ve gone through crunch-times and death-marches with.  Although, I wouldn’t necessarily want to go through those events again they obviously have some merit.

What to do?

So can anything be done to reduce or eliminate crunch-time?  Certainly organizations should strive to improve their development processes and planning and that’s a good step.  Moving to scrum or other agile processes can certainly help also.  But, in the end I think there will usually be crunch-times for most large projects because there simply isn’t an economic force to reduce it especially in organizations that use few outside contractors.  It’s also become the status quo and is often expected to happen.

In the management positions I’ve held I always tried to avoid crunch-time whenever possible and that is probably a good rule to go by.  Use them only when absolutely necessary!  If you have too many death marches you are bound to loose your star developers and any team building you’ve accomplished.

What’s your experience?

No Comment

No Comment!

If you have been using WordPress or really any blogging platform one thing you’ll quickly run into is comment spam.  Comment spam are those generally meaningless general comments you see on every blog post.

Why would anyone spend the time to post spam comments? Well it’s not people so much as automated bots.  These bots are usually run by SEO groups that are attempting to obtain backlinks for their clients.  Backlinks are simply hyperlinks from one site to another.

This may sound a bit odd but, backlinks are one of the key signals that Google, Bing and others use to determine relevant content for search.  The more backlinks to a site the better.  There are some exceptions to this as bloggers commonly use the rel=”nofollow” attribute on hyperlinks to inform the search engines to ignore the links for ranking purposes.  But, not all the SEO’s have caught on yet.

In every blog comment by these comment spam bots you will notice a couple things.

1. A generic comment that can be applied to multiple posts
2. A hyperlink to the site trying to boost their SEO value

Here are the basic categories of comment spam and examples of what they look like:

Simple
I truly like your site

That’s not just the best asnewr. It’s the bestest answer!

Complementary
I as well as my friends have been examining the good information found on your site then all of the sudden came up with a terrible feeling I never thanked you for those strategies. These boys happened to be so thrilled to see them and have in effect clearly been taking pleasure in these things. Thank you for indeed being simply thoughtful and also for selecting this form of incredibly good tips most people are really needing to discover. My very own honest apologies for not expressing appreciation to you sooner.

Off Topic
Today, I went to the beach front with my kids. I found a sea shell and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She placed the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab inside and it pinched her ear. She never wants to go back! LoL I know this is completely off topic but I had to tell someone!

Helpful
I really love your site but, I thought you should know that the images aren’t loading in my browser.  I don’t know why but, thought you should fix it as you have very good knowledge.

As you can see these comments could be used on just about any post although they probably need grammar and spell check .  These comments will be littered with hyper-links to sites hawking success secrets, supplements, get rich quick schemes, cheap software and the like.

One thing you can do if you have a blog is to moderate comments and simply reject comments that are spammy like those I mention.  If your blog is getting sufficiently popular this may become a hassle. There are also many plugins for popular blogging platforms to force a user to login or enter a CAPTCHA code to place a comment.  Those plugins can be slightly annoying for visitors but, will eliminate most of the comment spam and can be a good option.

So now I go to publish this post and await to comment spam I am sure will come.  When will the SEO’s learn that all these blog comment back-links have little value in SEO.  Stop spamming everyone!

Thumbs Down

So I’ve been doing a lot of interviewing this year.  Not so much on the receiving end but, on the end where I need to ask probing questions to see if you really know what your talking about or you’re just BS-ing.  Believe me there is a lot of BS-ing going on.

I’m amazed at the times people think that if they say a wrong answer with authority it makes it true.  Not so much.  There is also nothing wrong with saying “I don’t know”.  Unless of course it’s to every question.

So without further a-do here are the top 5 funniest (sad) interview answers I’ve received.

1. Q: Some technical question
   A: I knew you were going to ask me that.  Ugh but, I still don’t know the answer. 

   Wow, your psychic abilities did not help you here.

2. Q: Can you explain what SQL injection is?
   A: SQL Injection is injecting some SQL in a variable so I can use it later. 

   I was dumbfounded as was no longer able to complete the interview.
   

3. Q: How many Starbucks are there in Austin?
   A: Well there are probably 100 roads… and there is a Starbucks on every other block… so 13. 

   What?  That is just wrong on so many levels.
   

4. Q: Why did you leave your last job?
   A: I’d rather not say.
   Q: Why is that?
   A: It was bad.
   
   Enough said. 

5. Q: Follow up question about his last boss
   A: He was an idiot.
   Q: So I would be you’re new idiot boss?
   A: Only if you don’t hire me.
   
   I’m not sure that’s where he wanted to go.  He was not hired.

That’s it for now I’m sure I’ll get more than enough for another blog post.  What are some of the worst responses you have received?

IRS Tax Form

It’s tax season again.  You know the signs:  People talking IRS, TurboTax, Deductions, IRAs, Tax Credits and the dreaded Tax Payment.  Tax season always reminds me of a little tax utility I wrote.

About 3 years ago I had a problem getting my trades from my Broker into TurboTax.  I had all my trades in a nice little spreadsheet ready to import when alas I saw that the only import format TurboTax supported was TXF.  TXF? What is a TXF I thought.  I looked it up and discovered it was a fairly simple text format.  I also saw many conversion programs available that would take a CSV or Excel file and convert them to TXF for the low price of $40.  $40 to convert one text file to another?

I was frustrated that something as basic as a common file import was not available in TurboTax and that 3rd parties where charging as much as I paid for the tax program to do this simple conversion.  One of my skills being a software architect I got to work and wrote the converter in an hour or so and got my taxes going.  I then decided to put this conversion utility on my website so that anyone can use it for FREE.

So around this time of year I get a ton of traffic to that TXF conversion utility as Intuit still hasn’t gotten around to adding it to TurboTax so there is still a big need to fill.  I even use it myself  and I always enjoy the intermittent thanks I get from satisfied users.

Just my little way of giving back while the Tax-man taketh away…

Well, you’re last tweet may have been good but, that’s not what’s happening here.  This is the work of  “Twitter Bots”.  A Twitter Bot (or robot) is an automated program that scours Twitter looking for accounts to follow.

Why would anyone do that?

The main reason is that some marketers view Twitter a strictly a numbers game.  The more followers the more people they can blast their “message” to.  Twitter has imposed limits so people can’t follow 1000’s of accounts without people following them back.  Essentially everyone can follow 2000 people but, after that you need to get more people to follow you before you can follow more people (e.g. the game).  Some people call the state where you can’t follow more people as Twitter Jail.

To break it down here’s how the bots generally work:

1. Follow as many people as you can (up to the Twitter limitation)
2. Wait some time (maybe a few days or a week)
3. Un-follow every account that hasn’t followed back
4. Repeat

Here are some quick indicators that someone following you may be running a bot:

1. Little or no tweets.
2. Same tweets over and over (aka. Twitter Vomit)
3. Obscure or no bio
4. No profile picture (e.g. The twitter egg)
5. Account is following  100’s or 1000’s of accounts but, has few followers (note:  their few followers are probably bots also)
6. Over 2000 followers and around equal numbers of following / followers.  Note: There are exceptions to this.
7. You were followed by lots of people around the same time in volume that is unusual for your account.  Paid bots are often at work for multiple accounts.

So what to do?

Don’t play the game.  Don’t follow people unless you are really interested in what they are saying.  There are so many really interesting people on twitter to follow, just look for more with the many twitter tools available.

State Route 12 - Wolfgang Staudt

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  I’ve had this setup for a couple years now and figure it’s about time I start to use it!  I’ve had some other blogs in the past but, haven’t kept up with them.  Hopefully this one is different.

If you have met me in real life (as opposed to online life) you’ll know that I am a big user of twitter.  The 140 characters is usually sufficient for me but, I have some things that I would like to share that just don’t fit in that space.

A little about me: For my day job I do some enterprise software architecture but, I’m also involved with a startup doing some interesting things in the social media arena.  I’m into cycling but, I’m nowhere near the peak form I was in a few years back.   Most of my time is spent with my wife and 3 kids who are awesome and keep me grounded and motivated.

I’ll be writing more about my experiences on the entrepreneurial front as well as sharing technology insights and random other things I find interesting.  So stick around and see what happens.