TechToolBlog

Getting Your Education

Tim — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:06:26 +0000

My friends at Educator.com recently rolled out their new website. Sufficient to say, they did a great job on the new site design & the content looks very promising. It’s very interesting to see how their business model will work out, $20 a month or $200 a year subscription.

With all of the education budget crisis we are seeing in this country, could a system like this help fill the void? Educator isn’t offering “core” classes, rather advanced Math & Science, in which good teachers are tough to come by & students are of a different nature. Just a thought…

Some of their courses

Daily Find #122

Tim — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:38:27 +0000

Pear:Log – ELMAH for PHP if you will

In case you don’t know it yet, Seapine is releasing TestTrack RM (Requirements Management) very soon, in fact the beta site was opened last week & you can now go sign up for it.

CodeIgniter Conference

ASP.NET AJAX testing with Visual Studio 2008 Web Test

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Balsamiq Awesomeness

Tim — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:49:02 +0000

We are building a little something here at work and I needed to throw together a quick UI design before things got heated. In the past I’ve come across Visio designed application or a mix of visio & photoshop. I found some decent visio stencil sets for web applications but I just wasn’t satisfied with the end result and didn’t want to jump into Photoshop to make things prettier. I wanted a something simple, that understood I was building a web application, & a low learning curve. That’s what I found with Balsamiq Mockups. I highly recommend you give it a try.

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Daily Find #121

Tim — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:28:36 +0000

I’m back…

DOMPDF resurrected – PHP PDF library

Twitter API for CodeIgniter

Prism 1.0 Beta Launched

Modal Popup for Search

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Daily Find #120

Tim — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:55:21 +0000

LinkedIn Architecture

ASP.NET 4.0 & VS 10 – Talk given at Mix 09 about these two

HTML Color OneBox – Google a hex color value and it’ll show you what it looks like

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Daily Find #119

Tim — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:37:07 +0000

I am alive! Hoping to return to a daily find next week. Stay tuned.

http://www.datejs.com/ – Gives you RTM type of date handling

Masked Input Plugin – Jquery plugin to mask data input, very nice.

Asp.Net Control Panel Control – Great idea

.NET Developer Survey Results

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Daily Find #118

Tim — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:35:43 +0000

Charles – Http watcher similar to Fiddler

AMY Editor – online source code editor based off of textmate, very cool

Mozilla Bespin – Online code editor

Microsoft offers $250K for Conficker virus creator – Was it you? Email me if so

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Daily Find #117

Tim — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:57:30 +0000

In honor of Steve Jobs stepping down, I’ll call this the Mac OS X Server edition.

Optimizing an Xserve for Web Hosting – Been there done that.

Macos-x-server.com – wiki full of info not found many other places.

Apple Server Discussion Group – If you must ask a question

Mac OS X Manual Pages – Boy do I wish I would have found this resource earlier

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Daily Find #116

Tim — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:03:23 +0000

The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets – psr.exe could come in real handy

Update fix for Windows 7 for media center

99.99% availability with asp.net & sql server

Google’s new sitemap generator

Google Quick Search for the Mac

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2008 Goals in Review

Tim — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:51:58 +0000

Thought I would jot down my 2008 tech goals in reviews. I’ll be putting my 2009 list shortly.

Learn MVC – Accomplished. I started down the asp.net mvc route but after a short bit realized I didn’t want to learn beta technology that would be a moving target on top of learning mvc. I then went down the ruby on rails route but again I was learning 2 things at once and ended up settling on CodeIgniter MVC framework for PHP. I really enjoyed learning CI and mvc and made doing PHP much more bearable and actually enjoyable again! I can’t imagine writing PHP without a mvc framework and hopefully it will make learning asp.net mvc or ruby on rails that much easier since I now understand the mvc concept pretty well.

Get Microsoft Certified – Accomplished. Passed the MCTS 70-536 exam test. Learned/memorized some new things but frankly I think I’ve already forgotten alot of it. It was worth it though.

Actively Post to this Blog – Accomplished. I’m going to say “mission accomplished”. The daily find never was daily and really was never meant to be. It’s just a name and besides I do have real work to do besides finding the best web stuff for my readers, the 2 of you

Learn LINQ – Accomplished. Big fan of linq and grudge when I’m working on an older application that uses plain sql strings.

Learn Ruby – Fail. Really epic fail. Just never got to it. This is one of my top goals for 2009.

Learn Silverlight – Fail. This I don’t feel that bad about. I’ve never been keen on Flash development and silverlight falls under this category for me. I’m not a great designer so my UI will never be sweet and I don’t see myself using this professionally so, eh… off my list.

Zero Inbox – Fail. Instead I now depend on search, either in Gmail or outlook 2007 (which is actually not bad). It’s been working good for me. Off my list.

Discover New Tools – Accomplished. This is the the techtoolblog after all :). Biggest win tool for the year = BitNami/mRemote.

5 out of 8 is one heck of a batting average in baseball and I’ll take it.

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