Entries Tagged “Technology”:

If you can see this, you’re viewing my website on its new server, courtesy of SliceHost!

I’m enrolled in a six-month entrepreneurship project course in the Graduate School of Business here at Stanford. My team is using PBwiki to manage our team’s collaboration. PBwiki is a website that lets you create your own wikis for the public or for private use. PBwiki’s tagline is “Make a PBwiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich,” and we’ve found that pretty accurate.

My team has been extremely happy with our experience at PBwiki. It was really easy to set up a wiki and start using it. There was almost no learning curve, even for the non-technical members of our team. It really has been a breeze, and I think the non-engineers on my team particularly appreciate that.

On the downside, I’m generally paranoid about vendor lock-in, and we’re getting pretty locked into PBwiki as we expand our content. I’d like the option of moving to another wiki platform at some point. There is a way to backup your data, but it would be pretty difficult to import that into another wiki.

Also, our project’s title uses “CamelCase”, and PBwiki automatically turns every CamelCase word into a hyperlink. There is a workaround, but it’s a little frustrating.

Anyway, I’ve been really happy with PBwiki myself, so I encourage all of you to try PBwiki for group collaboration. If you’re building a long-term collection of data, though, you might want to host your own wiki so that you can avoid the vendor lock-in problem.

Disclaimer: PBwiki offered us additional storage space in exchange for a blog post about their service.

I’ve published a data file for Jewish holidays from now through the year 5770 (July 2010). If you’re using an iCal-compatible calendar application, like Google Calendar or Mozilla Sunbird, you can subscribe to this and automatically add the holidays to your datebook. This particular calendar is useful for people who want a few of the important holidays, without all of the minor holidays and extra dates present on most Jewish Calendar iCal files. All holidays begin at sundown on the date before the date specified here. I found the holiday dates on a great website called Judaism 101.

I’ve published an iCal-compatible data file for the Stanford Academic Calendar for 2006-07. I took the information from the Stanford Registrar’s Office calendar, and published it so that you can use it in Apple iCal, Google Calendar, or any other calendar app which can handle iCal files. Warning: This calendar does not include all dates and deadlines in the academic calendar. Don’t rely on it to tell you when to submit your Ph.D. dissertation! Check the Stanford Registrar’s academic calendar site for more dates.

I’ve started using Google Calendar to manage my activities, and I’m very happy with it so far. It’s exactly what I was looking for: full iCal support, very clean and simple interface, and very easy to use. I don’t have a public calendar for my own schedule, but I’ll post an update if I create one.

I’ve seen some people express interest in inexpensive tools to help with database administration and development. Here are a few suggestions of tools I’ve used to manage various databases. All of these products are compatible with multiple platforms including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

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I password-protected the discussion threads attached to the article about Chris McKinstry’s death, a few days after I published them. I’m suddenly getting a lot of criticism about that. (75 comments in three hours!)

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At 6:00 PM EST, the Off-Topic discussion forum at Joel on Software will permanently close. This may be why.

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I’ve become a recent fan of Reddit, an online “social bookmarking” service that was a project of the Y Combinator Summer Founders Program during the summer of 2005. Anyone can post a link to Reddit, of a website or article they find interesting. Other Reddit members can read the article, and vote it up or down. Based on a super-secret magical formula, “hot” sites with a lot of recent points end up on the Reddit front page. The hot ranking mode works really well here, ensuring that the front page is usually full of fresh and interesting content.

The Reddit community is not a balanced representation of the whole Internet. It has an overabundance of hackers, specifically programmers, and more specifically people working with Lisp and other scripting languages like Ruby and Python. There are other social bookmarking sites with more well-rounded content, including Digg and del.icio.us. But Reddit’s niche makes it interesting to me.

Reddit recently added a comment feature, where users can write their own commentary on links posted to the site. This is a very useful feature, but its implementation is problematic. For example, here’s a link to the commentary about an article titled “Best Buy Sux.” There are three ways to view comments: the default view of hot (combination of most recent and popular displayed first); new (most recent shown first); and top (most popular shown first). This is unlike every other message board on the web, which all display messages chronologically. If you want to read through an entire thread, you can do so from top to bottom. But with this display, there’s no way to do that; you’d have to switch to new and then read from bottom-to-top.

More importantly, users appear to be moderating commentary based on whether they agree with it or not. As a result, important and articulate messages end up at the bottom if too many users disagree with them. For example, on the Best Buy Sux commentary: a user named jedberg posted a comment defending Best Buy’s actions in this situation. (Disclaimer: I met jedberg in person earlier this year, and he seemed pretty cool.) While it may not be the most articulate comment on record, he makes a decent argument, and it’s the precursor to a whole bunch of discussion later in the thread. But because people disagreed with him, or disagreed with the way he stated his opinion, his comment ends up at the very bottom. I couldn’t understand half the thread until I scrolled down, found his comment, and then scrolled back up.

I have two suggestions which I think will make the comments easier to understand. I recommend that Reddit add a traditional mode to view comments, where the oldest comments are listed first. I also think Reddit should change the default so that comments are viewed traditionally unless the user overrides it. If a lot of users do like the hot mode, the Reddit software could allow each user to set their own default view, like a user preference or through a cookie. But the hot mode doesn’t work well for commentary. New users shouldn’t be deliberately confused just because Reddit has a cool ranking algorithm.

I received an inquiry from another WordPress blogger regarding a WordPress support inquiry I had opened in August. He wrote:

I was searching for answers to a very pesky “Cannot establish connection to database!” WordPress error, and read your thread about database persistent connections. I was wondering if you could give me a hand optimizing the database for WP, I am not a programmer by any extent of the imagination, and know nothing of servers, just got one by chance. (Edited slightly by Ryan.)

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