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Project Trident is a new scientific tool kit by Microsoft that aims to revolutionize the way academia deals with the increasing onslaught of experiment data. In the past, as well as today, a scientist would design an experiment, collect the data, analyze the data using some sort of programming, and review the results. The big hang up in all of this was the programming involved to bring the experiment to life: a programmer was brought in to make one-off programs for a specific experiment. Any changes to the experiment would require the programmer to make revisions. If another scientist wanted to perform the experiment elsewhere, there would be another programmer involved to write the experiment code. This became an ever-increasing problem of inefficiencies and wasted time. Microsoft to the rescue. Read more »
Being new to professional blogging, I’ve faced my first share of decision-making. And while I’m sure there are many more decisions to be made, this series is dedicated to exploring the myriad of decisions that I either have already made or am thinking of making. How many parts will this series contain? I have no idea, but I promise to document as many decisions and the details behind them.
For the first part of the TNR blogging series, I would like to address the age-old question of quality vs. quantity. More specifically, do readers of (insert your blog’s name here) want to see a lot of stories throughout the day, or do they want less stories that go more in-depth (and are perhaps longer than than an average tech-blog post)? This is the first question I had to face when starting TechNest Report, and one I am constantly thinking about. In my experience, four major factors have an influence on answering this question.
Your audience
Your market, your readership, your fanboys and girls – whatever you want to call the people who visit your site and read the blog posts – that should be the first thing that determines whether you should focus on quality or quantity. Do your readers want fewer posts that are more detailed or do they want a greater amount of posts that are shorter and to the point. In the case of TechNest Report, I didn’t have a clue: it was a brand new website that nobody knew about. How was I supposed to know what people wanted to see? Sometimes, you just have to trust your gut feeling on this, but at the same time – be smart. Before launching TNR, I noticed that the majority of technology-related blogs in the blogosphere focused on the quantity factor – they had many posts throughout the day that tended to be short in nature, often not exceeding two paragraphs. Seeing an opportunity in this, I decided that it was a great idea to do the complete opposite – to write in depth posts that go into greater detail and explain as much as possible. This proved to be a little problematic, because of Read more »
Audiobooks are awesome, especially when they reside on your MP3 player of choice. Forget audiobooks on cassettes – those times are long gone; embrace the day in which everything is digital. At least that is the mantra of many online audiobook retailers. But what if you still have some audiobooks on tapes laying around the house? Well, luckily for you – today’s mainstream technology is able to help you out and digitize those cassettes – bring them to your computer, that is. Actually, a very important tool I used to accomplish just this task is a plain-vanilla 3.5mm male-male cord – which I made my pick of the week on Saturday’s TNR podcast. So what’s the tip, then? Well, I ran into a bit of a predicament after bringing my cassettes over to iTunes: the audiobook files disappeared.
Let me take a step back and explain what transpired from the beginning: I recorded the cassette (both sides) and then joined the two (sides A and B) in GarageBand. I then exported the two sides as a single MP3 file and sent it to iTunes. From iTunes, I navigated to the Get Info pane and then to the Options tab, where I marked the file – as it properly should be marked – as Audiobook (under Media Kind). And then… poof! The file disappeared from iTunes entirely! It wasn’t to be found – either by performing a search or by organizing the files by Most recently added. It was gone. Read more »
After a long and drawn-out battle by many a tech enthusiast and digital rights management opponent, the utopia that is DRM-free music has finally arrived. Proponents of a DRM-free music world finally sighed a breath of relief when Apple announced early in January that the entire iTunes music catalog will be void of the restricting and inconvenient technology. But what about DRM-free video? It looks like that’s an entirely different bowl of spaghetti: consumers aren’t interested in downloading video as much as they are in consuming it via streaming. Here’s the lowdown. Read more »
Does this ever happen to you: you find an interesting article on the web but have no time to read it at this moment in time? What do you do? Do you just leave the window open, hoping that your browser doesn’t crash and if it does, it will remember the tabs you left open? Do you the web page to that overflowing bookmarks folder called “stuff to read”? Or do you just take the environmentally-unfriendly route and send the article to print? All of those solutions work, but they can be equated to using a stick with dry leaves to start a fire: antiquated and inefficient, to say the least. With today’s technology having come as far as it has, there must be a better solution. Meet Instapaper. Read more »
As some of you may know from my previous posts, I have been an outspoken complainer about the lack of wireless over-the-air (OTA) calendar synchronization options for the iPhone. Simply put, unless you have access to a Microsoft Exchange server (medium to large corporations do) or pay for MobileMe (with which you can’t share calendars with friends and family), there is no easy, intuitive, or otherwise streamlined method to synchronize a web-based calendar such as Google Calendar with the iPhone. Luckily for us iPhone users, this has finally changed thanks to one company: NuevaSync. Hit the Read More link to find, well, more!
Cloud computing is awesome? Don’t think so? Here’s some information that might change your mind: computing is steadily becoming – if not has already become – dependent on internet-based services (cloud computing for all you buzz-work lovers). So, unless you’re a “hater” of cloud computing or John C. Dvorak, who seems to have trouble coming to terms with today’s “cloud reality”, there are certain things that require attention as data moves to the cloud: besides well-known issues with cloud-computing (such as the needs for security, redundancy, and off-line access, to name a few) the issue of authentication is becoming the most important, yet is not getting the coverage it deserves. So let me break it down: ever forget which user name and password combination you used for a web service? So have I. I have come to the conclusions that, as users make the migration to the cloud, they are led into one of the following bad habits: Read more »
Project Trident is a new scientific tool kit by Microsoft that aims to revolutionize the way academia deals with the increasing onslaught of experiment data. In the past, as well as today, a scientist would design an experiment, collect the data, analyze the data using some sort of programming, and review the results. The big hang up in all of this was the programming involved to bring the experiment to life: a programmer was brought in to make one-off programs for a specific experiment. Any changes to the experiment would require the programmer to make revisions. If another scientist wanted to perform the experiment elsewhere, there would be another programmer involved to write the experiment code. This became an ever-increasing problem of inefficiencies and wasted time. Microsoft to the rescue. Read more »
Does this ever happen to you: you find an interesting article on the web but have no time to read it at this moment in time? What do you do? Do you just leave the window open, hoping that your browser doesn’t crash and if it does, it will remember the tabs you left open? Do you the web page to that overflowing bookmarks folder called “stuff to read”? Or do you just take the environmentally-unfriendly route and send the article to print? All of those solutions work, but they can be equated to using a stick with dry leaves to start a fire: antiquated and inefficient, to say the least. With today’s technology having come as far as it has, there must be a better solution. Meet Instapaper. 
