June 16, 2006

Long time since an update - been hectic fun busy. Currently getting ready for railsday2006.

I needed to edit an audio track on my new Mac Intel and after trawling through Audacity, Amadeus and more - all of them are PPC only, slow to update and not great. Tried GarageBand which I love, but it's not great for zooming in and editing microsecond cues.

Step forward Sound Studio 3 from Freeverse - a fantastic editing app for just getting down and dirty with audio files, seperates left and right channels, and is great for podcast editing. The other really big attraction is the automator addins - if you need to pre/post-pend audio signon/signoff for podcasts or clean up a library of audio (eg, interviews) for example, then the monbots are for you - great icons too. :)

The price point is a bit high at $79.95, I think it has a $30-50 price point, but either way if you need a usable audio editing tool with a friendly interface then sound studio is for you....

disclaimer: I have not been paid to give this review - just software I've picked up.

technorati tags » audio editing soundstudio freeverse

May 20, 2006

In a past job, I worked for a startup e-commerce firm. The architecture was management not customer driven (it was a battle to even get permission to interact with customers and solicit feedback). The structure came from ideas, concepts but not planning: the end result was meaningless and frustrating.

I remember having a conversation with the not-much-older-than-I Managing Director. I had been researching some potential vendor and raised the name with my boss. Yes, he said - "This company are our biggest competitor". I neglected to mention we hadn't sold our product to a proper external client at that time and this competitor was powering some of the country's biggest blue chip names, and instead focused on the company I believed was the bigger and most dangerous competitor: Amazon.

So I responded - "have you considered Amazon?" he dismissed the idea - "don't be silly, amazon just sells dvds and books - it's a web store not an ecommerce platform!" It was about this time that I realized he was a moron.

The thing is - Amazon is the biggest threat to e-commerce developers. It's also their saving grace - they just don't know it yet.

Continue reading "Working big: ACM interviews Werner Vogels of Amazon" »

technorati tags » amazon acm wernervogels ecommerce

May 17, 2006

When you get switched on people running conferences about this new space we've carved out for ourselves, you end up with a useful conference. Euan Semple has kicked off the forum today with the reasons why we're here and how to get the most out of social media. The thing is - we're not sitting here and being told stuff we may already know - we're pushing through panels, breakouts and table discussions: learn by the experience of your peers.

An interesting comment from Raymond Jordan - VP Comms. Johnson & Johnson in this brief as to why he's here (paraphrased):

"It's easier for us to quantify our social media output: we have zero active internal blogs. We have zero active external blogs, and two wikis. Maybe."

Going to be keeping an eye on Jordan - I think he'll have some interesting tips as to why traditional enterprise is slow and hard to pick this up...

technorati tags » blogsandsocialmediaforum euansemple loiclemeur

May 15, 2006

please welcome: vlo.gs!

technorati tags » vlog vblog videoblog aggregrator technorati

May 11, 2006

Often times when you are generating html code and injecting it into a page, you can't always see what code has been generated by your backend machinations. The following snippet of code will enable you to have a button on the page which, when clicked, will reveal the code of the element you're debugging. Requires the prototype library.

technorati tags » ajax rails javascript html