mindware

Freshbooks’s button

At 1:28 AM entering worked hours in the time tracking section of Freshbooks i get a sumbit button that says Hallelujah! after submission!

Nifty, beautiful and human all the way!

Better magic mouse = Better touch tool

Better touch tool will let you do this with your magic mouse:

and is working very well although its a small and beta app.

Do grab it and have FUN :)

My configuration above is the IT for me.

Wordpress ad-minister tip

How to use and track flash ads on your blog Ad-minister is a popular ad management plugin for wordpress. It scans your theme for calls to its position method and presents you in the backend a visual way to manage content for those positions. However it looks like ad-minister has been designed for usage with static images as ads sort of discarding flash based advertising. But as we know wether we like it or not flash based ads are still around and kickin’. Hence it would be cool if support for this type of ads is enabled in the plugin. As it stands using the create content tab in the ad-minister interface you can put the flash embed code and it will show up in your page. But what if you want to track clicks and impressions of that specific ad? Ad-minister uses a simple redirection mechanism for tracking clicks on the ads it manages. The lading url of the ad is filtered trough a special tracker address (depending on the id of the content) and counted as a click. After the count you’ll be redirected immediately to the destination. In order to use this cool facility in flash we need a couple of simple actions: 1. Use the following code on the button that handles the click on the ad: on(release) { getURL(tracker + url); } 2. In the create content tab paste or write the embed code for the flash ad 3. Edit the file address by adding: ?tracker=%tracker%&url=http://www.yourlandi.ng/page/here to the swf extension: For example:

Expose tip

Did you know that after you command tab for the cool switch you can press the up arrow after you selected the desired app icon and get an expose of that app’s windows :) Nifty trick for keyboarding fans.

Magic Mouse - Spaces or Expose with three finger tap

For this you will need your old or someone’s old usb migty mouse.

The whole magic in Apple’s magic mouse is the multi touch.

Well, for some reason at the moment Apple wont give us more than two finger swipe. The rest is exclusively used for the scroll functionality. All the magic touch should replace all the other 3 the old mighty mouse had but because of the driver, most people think, multi touch gestures are a bit limited at this moment.

About everyone using a classic mighty mouse will notice instantly the missing squeeze action and the third button because about everyone used these for expose and spaces.

People found that with the use of multiclutch you can assign the swipe left / right actions to the function keys that call expose and spaces respectively. But the down side is that you loose some of the magic which is back/forward in supported apps using the swipe action.

Some smart people like to use the mouse exclusively for some actions. So does Clement Beffa for opening pages in new tabs in Firefox. For that he coded and hacked and then coded again with a misterious osx private tapping api and helped everyone have their beloved apple feel when they have three fingers on the thing and interpret it as middle click.

So he created Middleclick an uber small thingie that will sit in the menubar.

This open and bam your magic mouse can use the middle button spell.

But the problem is that the magic mouse doesnt have a middle button and hence you cannot assign it anywhere. There is only mouse button 2.

The solution is to use your old usb mighty mouse. Plug it in. Disconnect from the bluetooth magic mouse.

Go to System Preferences and assign mouse button 3 to either spaces or expose its up to you.

Then reconnect to magic mouse, unplug the mighty mouse.

Tap with three fingers. Voila!

The trick is that you will need some personal training since the three finger detection is not as cool as the one Apple will provide in their next driver :D

TIP: while spaces/expose is on use the cool touch scroll to select what you want and then three finger tap again to exit spaces/expose with the focus on your selection.

Again from the dashboard

Isnt there any cool mac tumblr client?

bash copy to a folder found from file’s name

PATHA=~/Desktop/50-100
PATHB=~/sites/staticmatic/site

for i in $PATHB/*.html
do

#i is the etire path to a file in $PATHB
name=`basename $i`;

#this is the filename without extension
fileint=${name%.*};

#you can copy
#cp $i $PATHA/$fileint/index.html;

#or whatever
touch $PATHA/$fileint/colours.txt;

done;

Job love story

This could be About Adobe romania and mirages.

Three years ago i was dropping my entrepreneurial initiative and as a starving potential employee i was starting a very hard job search.

At the time i have been at the end of a 4 year effort to build a web development company out of one family, me and my wife. During that time we had a long list of events, some extraordinary some really crappy, a long list of clients, some huge brands some friends who wanted a website. All in all at the end of the day it was so hard we have decided to drop it.

So we did and we each started to look for a regular job.

Of course, coming from the land of being your own master that was a complicated task. We wanted the same degree of freedom, a job that posed challenges and helped us not feel low as reconverted employees, and a job that provided for us: a hefty steady paycheck.

So we started. My wife got her job before i did. From this point of view it made things easier (!) since i did have the time to really weigh each job i was interviewing for.

I was targeting for a management position because i had this view about my self:

• my designer talent was not great
• my developer skills were not amazing
• even so i pursued a lot of projects to completion
• so what else can i be but a great project manager

Fishing around for jobs i have built a solid and serious CV that had a really good response rate. At the time i had four major opportunities and out of them i had to choose one:

1. a temporary web developer job at oracle romania
2. a team leader job at the local subsidiary of Hostway
3. a job at InterAKT now Adobe Romania
4. a project manager job at Netbridge

These 4 ruled out for me any other jobs on the market at the time. Here is what i did and how well that was:

1. At oracle the interview sucked. Big time. The HR person (it was a she) kept me there for 3 hrs just to point out i was overqualified, which i told her i knew in the first place and that being a temporary job was ok with me, because i wanted the “Oracle experience” and they wanted someone who can do the job for 6 months. I am not saying she did wrong, i am saying that it was so easy to determine i was overqualified form my CV that i don’t get it why she interviewed me anyway if she already had her mind set up :)

2. At the Hostway subsidiary, the interviews were fantastic. I met a bunch of nice people. It was a good chemistry between me and them. We had like four meetings, i was introduced to my potential colleagues, my potential team to which i was the perfect leader for, and my potential boss which was a great person. All this beautiful situation crumbled when they came up with the salary offer and also how the growth promotion plan was working. It was a disaster. They said it was not their plan, that it came from the mothership. I couldnt cope with it anyway. It didnt matter how you looked at it, it was all half way below the market. 50%. Way too much. And i was already starving.

3. InterAKT. See these are moments when life plays tricks on you. The experience with them was really neat. I had the interview with a very nice person who was the team leader of team leaders at the time in their internal organization. Great experience, great place, great people. There was no Adobe at the time. I got homework that was supposed to prove my dev skills, and two interviews. Things were looking nice but there came number 4.

4. Netbridge. Well this was the IT. While InterAKT was waiting for my last email with the wrapped up homework, and made me feel like they were looking for the dev i was not, i had met the CTO at Netbridge. He was looking for me. Really. The perfect job. The sallary i wanted and expected, the job i wanted and loved: technical project manager. Specs, ideas, planning, working with huge local projects and highly skilled teams. The man called me after one interview and said i was in.

What do you do after a number 4 like that hits you? You call number 3 and tell them you’re sorry but you cant continue. The people at InterAKT were so nice that they even insisted on me reconsidering. I didnt.

I got the job at Netbridge. It was swell. It lasted 2 months.

You know sometimes the CEO leaves takes everyone with him including me and the CTO that hired you and crafted your dream job dedicates his time and effort to his other business.

What happened next is the subject of another post. But in months InterAKT was Adobe Romania. No regrets but after the failure of my dream job to stay real so that i can really enjoy it, and coming years later to this article i can think maybe i was wrong going for no. 4 and missed a lot of fun with no. 3.

No. 4 was a mirage. No. 3 blossomed later but what a flower. :)

Most business advice is bullshit

Well i bet you must of thought that at some time.

If you are like me and follow with pursuit new information from TechCrunch, 37Signals and the likes, you must have read already a dozen articles on how to do and how to not do startup business.

Even when the advice is proven and its actually a story more than an advice. its still bullshit. During the latter years i have been involved in 5 different enterprises who failed. There is no such thing as startup advice not being thought about, and in the end they all failed.

I am not saying everyone fails, and that those people writing those articles are all crap. No the information is real. The real world is false :)

There are so many variables involved that the most solid assets and advice any start up seeder can have are:

• talent
• determination
• patience
• financial security

That is the only real advice you can consider. Do you have ALL the above? No? Then the one(s) you dont will make you fail. Unless you are the exception from the rule of course.

The simple truth

Don’t confuse “monopoly” to mean only software; think “INFORMATION” Your view that Google is not the same as MS because may not be targeting monopolistic status as a “software” vendor per se misses one possibility: Google may be targeting monopolistic status on INFORMATION. And information is far more powerful, poltically and all other ways, than software market share.

Google wants the underpinnings of the “cloud” in their access control, not necessarily the software itself (hence, they are just fine and dandy letting the open source slaves do all the work for FREE all the while being praised for their “open-mindedness” and “generosity”).

Google is an INFORMATION company, not a software company. MS = software. Google = INFORMATION. Again, as long Google controls the cloud information repositories, or whatever form the cloud takes (I am no expert, forgive me), they will have achieved their domination that will be far more devastating to anything MS has ever done, or will do.

Posted by: lalogos Posted on: 07/08/09

from zdnet