I should have mentioned this earlier. We launched raveal. The site is pretty damn cool for creating a professional resume and portfolio. The free plan is powerful enough to give you a ton of features. Check it out:
Raveal compared to LinkedIn reminds me of google local compared to mapquest for some reason. Something about the UI, LinkedIn is so busy and ugly.
No, seriously, this is really cool:
It allows you to send and receive large files through your browser. It bypasses email’s limitations of 10 MB attachments. It’s better than email because you can still have a discussion and it’s tracked in one place. Most attachments have previews automatically created for you. I was sending photos back and forth with friends I haven’t seen in awhile. Freakin awesome!
Screw you myspace. Kiss off facebook. I’m doing it my own way.
Wow, that last month or so is such an up hill battle. We have finally launched Flowzit, our first product. Check it out:
If you haven’t received an invite code for the Family & Friends account, shoot me an email.
For the past 9 months and change, I have been working on a new application and company to support it. We are getting ready to go live soon.
You can follow our twitter feed: twitter.com/flowz.
The application is called flowzit and it exists simply because so many people in the creative world have no way to convey their productions to people inside and outside their company. It is the first in a suite of applications aimed directly at solving tiny to small to medium sized business needs.
It has been a real challenge. It is the first after hours project I’ve worked on that actually has funding. So the first four months or so I was working at home and it *was* my job. Working out of a home office could be an entire discussion in itself. I won’t touch it now other than to say that I was dying to get out of the house by the end of it. Luckily, in March, we found office space in a sweet building at half the going market rate. Yowza!
I’m now working on polishing the app and putting the websites together. Soon, baby soon.
The company: flowz.com and the product: flowzit.com
Check them out, now or later. Either way, you’ll hear about us in the news someday.
I’m now full time on a Mac and am currently exploring Solaris for use in a production cluster. Mainly because of ZFS, which is the most fabulous new thing to happen to IT in 8 years. I’m installing it as a VMWare guest OS on my Mac. Over the past two months or so, I have tried to install Solaris 10 at least 10 times with no success. It always locks up hard right around 50% at something like “preparing install.”
It is the most frustrating thing in the world right now. Well, really, a close second behind Michigan roads.
So Green Day is running around masquerading as this band called Foxboro Hot Tubs. Good for them. Blink 182 did it, why can’t they? (Interesting… Foxboro… Box Car… whatever)
As a pleasant surprise, you can download their CD off their website and it is even in DRM-Free MP3 format. It’s encoded at 320k bit rate no less! I applaud their decision and figured I would put my money where my mouth is and reward them with my support.
That’s where the nightmare begins. Apparently, they partnered with this service called Neurotic Media. Clicking on “buy cd” takes you to a second website, foxborohottubsdownload.com, which I assume is pointed at NM’s servers. The checkout process feels like something from 1998 and asks for information not required for checkout like my date of birth. Well, what the heck, I love Green Day, like the songs I’ve heard so far, let’s do it.
There is a fatal flaw in the Macbook Pros. Delete, PageUp, PageDown, Home, and End are two-key, key-strokes. How can you just leave off these keys?
Am I the last person on the planet that still uses them?
The worst part of this mistake is that not a single cursed application on OS X uses the same keystrokes to perform those functions. For example:
In Safari, to page down, you use Option+DownArrow. To go the end of the document, you use Cmd+DownArrow.
In XCode, there IS NO shortcut for page down. WTF?
John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame, who I have mucho respect for, linked to an article about how the Java support in the lastest version of Mac OS X is terrible. He then makes a very irresponsible statement:
“I fail to see why anyone (other than Java developers themselves) would care.”
The problem with this statement is that you should care. Why? Well, because you are a Mac user. It will take a bit to explain. Humor me.
There are many upon many businesses out there that support the Mac platform ONLY because their Java applications will run on a Mac. But this isn’t the complete reason. Hear me out.
Now, these businesses aren’t Google, Microsoft, or IBM. You probably haven’t heard the names of these businesses, let alone the names of the software they provide. They certainly aren’t household names, and your mom and dad aren’t using their applications. But they do represent a significant base of development energy. These are the guys that make it possible for the little guys and the medium guys to do business.
Nothing in this world makes less sense then how Apple decided to make Home, End, Page-Up, and Page-Down work.
I’m not sure where, when, and why this started. But on every other modern day operating system, these keys work like this:
- Home -> move the cursor to the beginning of the line - End -> move the cursor to the end of the line - Pg-Up -> move the cursor up the length of the viewport - Pg-Dn -> move the cursor down the length of the viewport
Now I don’t know why I am even repeating these descriptions. As much as the sky is blue and earth is below our feet, everyone knows what these buttons do.
Unless you are on a Mac. <Read on…>
For the longest time, I have offered my friends phatness.com email addresses. Everyone wanted one. No one kept one. The problem is that the webmail applications offered by hosting providers have never been able to compete with any of the free webmail providers out there. Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc. The closest we ever got was Horde. While it is light years ahead of what was out there, it just didn’t come close to the established providers.
Now, we have our answer. Round Cube is a webmail system that even in its pre-release, blows the doors off of everyone else. I’ve been using it now for a month and find it heavenly. There are a few bugs and missing features but I still use it. That’s how good it is.
