For quite some time now I’ve been adding RSS feeds for sites of interest into Google’s RSS reader and finding it an effective way of monitoring a large number of websites.
Instead of having to visit lots of sites which may not have anything new, RSS pulls new posts into one spot making far better use of time and enabling effective scanning of those articles of most interest.
Having seen Flipboard for Ipad I began looking to see what sort of things might be available to present RSS feeds in a more dynamic magazine type format and discovered Feedly. The readability difference between Google Reader and Feedly is quite dramatic and seems far better for browsing lots of different content, however since it is a browser addon that repackages the underlying GoogleReader subscriptions, subscription feeds can still be read and analysed with Google tools when desired, this lets you see statistics of feeds that you really are using and tune your subscriptions for best results.
Using RSS feeds has been a great way to improve my coverage of an increasing number of information sites, and Feedly seems like an even better way to browse these feeds. If you find yourself visiting a large number of sites on a regular basis have a look at RSS, and if you like your applications web based perhaps Google Reader and Feedly might be useful.
While the iPad seems like a great addition to our technology options, we’ve run into a show stopper of an issue.
As a read only device things are fine, however our systems rely on updating information using a WYSIWYG editor written in JavaScript and so far we have been unable to get the editor to work. It seems that the cut down versions of the browsers on the iPad are to blame. What a pity.
Here are some links to editors we haven’t been able to work with from our iPad.
Job descriptions can sometimes be a very blurry area, resulting in staff being confused about responsibilities and some important functions being overlooked.
As part of the work ETX did to achieve ISO accreditation we identified and named each task performed in the office, from turning on the lights to looking after the financial reporting and everything in between. Each task became a database entry that was allocated to one or more members of staff, the list of tasks became the staff member’s job description. This made it simple to highlight any task that nobody was responsible for and do something about it.
Part of this process involved building a wiki page to describe how to perform each task in whatever detail those involved required. With links and pictures and snippets of code the wiki has saved countless hours by providing a way to constantly improve processes. While very simple tasks might have only one or two lines, there are others involved in End of Month and End of Year routines that have considerably more.
The beauty of this style is the ease with which descriptions can be updated when found lacking. There is no formal requirement to update things it is simply part of how we work.
Having recently been off work for few months and needing someone to step in and take over my role the task descriptions again proved invaluable.
If you need a simple way to document your processes and procedures think about using a wiki. The one we use is MediaWiki.
If you activate global roaming your mobile phone will work overseas just as it does in Australia, but you will pay hefty fees to both receive and make calls. Data charges can be especially expensive.
I would recommend doing two things before you go away.
(1) Download the PennyTel APP to your phone and open a PennyTel account. Use PennyTel whenever you are in a WiFi zone (every MacDonalds) to make calls to landlines (8 cents per call for as long as you want to speak) or mobiles (8 cents a minute).
(2) Purchase an Ekit sim card (Global Premium Service for $50) and put it in your mobile phone. Ekit will give you a phone number that everyone can use to phone you whilst you are away. Use the phone as you would at home – the rates though steep compared to your plan at home are much less than they would have been had you travelled with your normal sim card. Calls out are a little quirky (you make the call, it hangs up and then it calls you back) but you quickly get used to it. [[1]] Ekit sim cards have the further advantage of being “Pay as you go”. You can top them up along the way – you will be horrified how much your mobile phone chews through overseas – just console yourself that with Ekit you have control over how much and that it will be far less than what your normal sim card will have cost you – the nasty surprise when you get home!!
As a guide only
Calls out Optus 40 cent flagfall and $4 a minute Ekit $1.50 a minute
Calls received Optus $1.50 a minute Ekit 89 cents a minute
SMS in Optus free Ekit free
SMS out Optus 80 cents Ekit 79 cents
Voicemail Optus Yes Ekit Yes
Data (for internet use, emails etc) Optus $20 a megebyte Ekit $2.50 a megabyte most places.
How often do you hear that someone’s business email has not been working for a few days?
Does that seem normal and just part of life to you?
Email has always been a priority for ETX, having run our own mail servers for ages we know well the level of effort in maintaining a constantly available mail service, not to mention the never ending battle to filter junk mail.
With the arrival of GoogleApps a couple of years ago the rationale for running our own mail server was severely challenged. Why should we dedicate, time and resources to an internal IT service that was less effective than a free alternative? Really we could find no reason not to adopt GoogleApps and have since enjoyed a higher than ever availability level, a fantastic search capability, the most effective spam filtering, easy user management and no need to install desktop software ever since.
Every time I hear someone lamenting their lack of email availability I just wonder, why?
Needing to work from home for a little while provides a perfect opportunity to work on some overdue projects. One of these is to explore turning our accounting paperwork and receipts into online documents.
Having received some glowing reports about a little desktop scanner from Fujitsu a Snapscan S1500 was purchased from Amazon via Shipito.com, which saved a few dollars over buying locally.
With 5 years of documents needing to be retained to respond to Australian Tax Office queries there are numerous archive boxes of paper files that could be scanned. However, while the SnapScan comes with some effective software to produce searchable pdf files and retrieve them, these are desktop tools which don’t fit neatly with our web based systems style.
After creating a small sample of scanned documents as pdf files it was time to set about configuring a version of Swish-e to provide document indexing and retrieval from a LAN based webserver. This turned out to be relatively straightforward as this software has been used to index applicant resumes in the past and having configuration files to copy from certainly helped.
After 4 or 5 days of labourious effort receipts and invoices are now online, with everything for a single financial year in it’s own directory and quickly accessible from a web form. With more and more accounts arriving via email it should be a relatively simple matter to file new documents.
The SnapScan package comes with a full copy of Adobe Acrobat which supports the addition of notes to pdf files, unfortunately files with these additions break the current thumbnail process. Luckily there’s another product that, initially at least, seems to allow adding comments to the pdf document, which should be good for payment references.
The results of this project have proved useful in only a few days, providing much simpler access to information than was previously available.
My last post here was nearly two months ago, but I’ve got a really good excuse. You see I had a bit of a tumble from a ladder while doing some work around home and have just spent six weeks in hospital.
So that I could stay in touch with the world, I had our tech support people get one of those USB mobile connections from 3 with a 12GB data allowance. Knowing how much easier it is to sort out connection problems when you have another machine nearby to look up the answers, I made sure that the card was installed and working on the Ubuntu laptop before it was given to me in rehab.
Initially things worked really well, I could use Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn and a bunch of other web sites that have become part of my day to day information feed. Surprisingly there was even a version of Tweetdeck available. So for general web access the wireless card worked fine, although I did often need to manually copy a version of /etc/resolv.conf that wasn’t created on connection.
As I began to feel better I wanted to try and do some work, this meant setting up a VPN connection. I tried a few things there before realising that the wireless card was using a private IP address 10.x.x.x and it was about six hops through Hutchison’s private network before reaching a public IP device. Since I really wanted VPN access I sent an email to the support address and two days later received a response advising that I must call the support centre for assistance. After three calls to support to try and reach someone useful I established that all connections are private IPs, there are no options to obtain a public IP address with any 3 wireless card. This isn’t the case with Virgin / Optus cards which others in the office have used and do have public IP addresses that allow use of VPN, remote support connections and VoIP.
Not wanting to throw away a couple of hundred dollars worth of service that I’d paid for and just move to a different carrier, I began to explore alternative ways of establishing a VPN connection and set up an SSH tunnel between the laptop and our gateway server. This isn’t going to be for everybody as it requires administrator access to the server. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH_VPN
With the SSH tunnel in place and a few extra routes defined, VPN was working and I was able to access the ETX Intranet services. A bit more routing to have VoIP services run through the tunnel and Xlite and Pennytel were working.
In the end I was able to get all of the services I wanted to work, but it was a lot of effort that would not have been needed if the 3 network was able to provide a public IP address. If you want to use a wireless GSM internet connection for work find out what sort of IP address the provider allocates, sourcing from somewhere other than 3 will make life a lot simpler.
It’s hard to throw out old PCs that still work but aren’t really up to what you want to do today, and there’s no point putting them in the cupboard because in a few years they will still end up in the dumpmaster.
Recently we’ve had a lot of success installing Ubuntu on a few older PCs and giving them to people who only need a web machine. In doing this the systems have worked so well that I decided my tired old laptop that takes 10 minutes to boot up would be more use with Ubuntu on it. It took about an hour to install the system and download a bunch of updates and I now have a machine that starts in 30 seconds again.
Then I realised that I no longer have a PVR to record the MotoGP because the AverMedia PCMCIA card doesn’t work. A bit of googling showed that it was going to be difficult to get that card to go, it would be simpler to just buy another card that was supported under Ubuntu. So off I go and get a new tv card and over the next few days come to realise that “supported under Ubuntu” meant that I could download some driver source code that I could compile only if I had the full linux source code, or some things could be commented out and the driver coaxed into action.
When I got my system talking to the TV card I then had to configure it to one of the many tv viewers available. This step took a few more days until I eventually realised that the new tv card being a DVB-T device would only work with digital channels, analog signals were ignored. The Foxtel channel I particularly wanted to tune in is an analog channel and I would need to obtain a supported Hybrid TV card and start over. Maybe I should get a Foxtel IQ box that just works.
I’m not so sure I want a PVR anymore as I’ve also been seeing Ustream showing a number of things that have been really good and getting better very quickly. Maybe I’ll just subscribe to an online site for MotoGP and see where things go.
The office space we have now is huge and we’ve got some other small businesses in to share with us. In fact the office feels almost like a start up incubator with people doing lots of different things.
Displaying everyone’s company logo in the reception area seemed too hard to make it look good.
Here’s what we did.
An old PC that was waiting to be binned got reborn with a Ubuntu Desktop install and a copy of OpenOffice. With not too much fiddling around we managed to get the box to go automatically from power up into our slideshow with no keyboard or mouse needed. The system was then subjected to some severe power disruption testing (we pulled the plug a few times) and survived without issues.
The display was going to be a second hand LCD TV from Ebay, however we were lucky enough to source a brand new plasma TV for a nice price. The end result has been a very effective and flexible signage solution for a price everyone is pleased with.
The impact of our new corporate signage has been even better than we had hoped for with suitably positive comment from passersby.
There is still plenty of office space available if you would like to join us.
The above tweet by Thomas Shaw was the impetus for this post.
Often candidates want to present their information in different formats for various reasons, perhaps to highlight their skills with a product like Flash, or so that consultants can’t corrupt the original content (pdf) or sometimes for no reason at all (docx)
While we can work with varying formats, the tried and true Word (.doc) format is the one we really prefer, and here’s why.
The majority of candidate resumes received are in response to advertisements on Seek and other job boards. When you apply for an ETX Seek ad you start interacting with the ETX database straightaway, our software will try and match you with any previous registration by using your phone number, your email address as well as your name – mostly that works and duplicate versions of your details are avoided.
Uploading your cover letter and resume in the application screen, firstly tries to figure out if you are already registered with ETX, then merges the cover letter onto the resume (we can do that with Word but not with something we can’t edit). The whole content of the document is then scanned for “buzz” words that help to identify different skills and experiences (not something we can do with image formats). That’s far from the end though, once uploaded the resume is indexed to support full text searching by our consultants, similar to the larger Internet search engines.
Consultants and clients, to whom your details are legitimately available, are able to review your resume online, to improve the speed of live delivery your details may be presented in plain text – again this is something we can do with Word but not with graphic formats.
Within ETX there is only one version of your details, if you ever want to see what we present to a client you can log in and access your complete details. Upload a revised version of your resume anytime at all – give it a try. The only thing you wont see are the consultant’s summarising comments provided to the client in relation to the candidates shortlisted which would compromise the confidentiality of other candidates.
If you recruit, ETX software is available as a service.
For quite some time now I’ve been adding RSS feeds for sites of interest into Google’s RSS reader and finding it an effective way of monitoring a large number of websites.
It’s hard to throw out old PCs that still work but aren’t really up to what you want to do today, and there’s no point putting them in the cupboard because in a few years they will still end up in the dumpmaster.
