Dan Olsen’s Weblog

When the iPhone came out I figured for sure I would get an iPhone when I could afford to one. Well, I have also been looking at Android phones and I have been quite impressed. After looking at my options I think I am now leaning towards getting an Android phone. I like how open it is to development compared to the iPhone. The Android phone also allows background processes which is a nice feature the iPhone doesn’t provide.

I have an iPod touch and I really like it. However, if I am going to go to a smart phone I think the Android phone is the one. My main sources about the Android phones are Sam Curren and Jory Dunn. Both have provided me with great insights about the phones.

Now I just need be able to afford the data plan on Verizon.

I know it has been a while since I have written anything on my blog and I always promise myself that I will get better. Well, here is one sorry attempt at getting better.

When I started work for the State of Utah my first project was called the Employee Gateway. It was a web application that was a central point for finding all HR information an employee might need. Well, a few months ago the HR people came back to DTS and said that the governor would like a section added to the Employee Gateway for the new energy initiative they were kicking off. Part of that project was to allow for a virtual suggestion box where employees could enter suggestions about energy conservation ideas and then vote those suggestions up and down.

Well, one of the requirements for the virtual suggestion box was that they wanted to show data from the suggestion box in the actual web site. After looking at options that were already out there they determined that to get a suggestion box with an API it would cost quite a bit a month. After thinking about the idea I realized that I could create an application like that pretty easily. That’s when SuggestIt was born.

SuggestIt has been live for almost a month now and has been evolving. I am still looking for suggestions on how to improve the application so please go and beat on it for a while. Currently the service is free but I have covered myself by including a line that in the future I may be implementing a pricing structure. As most developers know, there are costs to hosting a site. Currently my income for the site is off Google Ads which does not come close to covering costs that I will accrue over time.

SuggestIt is written in Python (one of my favorite languages thanks to Phil Windley). It is hosted on Google Appengine and so far the cost of running the site is free. However as traffic increases (I hope) I will exceed the free quotas. Hence the reason I am planning on working out some sort of pricing for the service. Any suggestions on pricing structures would be greatly appreciated. Any publicity would be greatly appreciated as well.

So for most of my Ajax and javascript programming I have been using YUI. I liked it better then Prototype, Scriptaculous and MooTools. I have known about jQuery for quite some time but I have never actually tried it or even looked at it. Last night I posted a tweet on Twitter about how I like the YUI library. Well, Sam Curren was kind enough to tweet his feelings about YUI. I quote:

On JS Libraries: Code I write with jQuery is beautiful, and code I write with YUI appears to have been beaten with the ugly stick.

So, with those comments in mind, I stayed up later then normal looking at jQuery. As a matter of fact, I just added the jQuery file to a project I am working on and I am going to start using it. Sometimes it takes the truth from others to help you see the better choice.

However, the part I like most about YUI is their grids, resets and font files. It saves me a lot of formatting time and cross browser problems.

I am a Steelers fan and was happy to see them win the Super Bowl. This video was just awesome!

You can go here and see Google’s new favicon and how they came up with it. If you ask me it looks horrible. It reminds me of early web sites that over did it with color.

Image via Wikipedia

Previously I wrote about how I read more sports news on Yahoo! Sports instead of ESPN.com since the look of Yahoo! Sports was more appealing to me. Well, I am sitting here waiting for the polls to start showing up for college football. They claimed on the TV that the AP poll would be coming out. I checked Yahoo! Sports and didn’t see much of anything. I then went over to ESPN.com and to my amazement they have updated the look and feel of their site.

I really like the new look of ESPN.com. I just might head back to ESPN.com as my main sports site. One thing I still thing Yahoo! is much better at is their Fantasy sports games.

I also have to say, I was happy to see Florida win the game tonight. I am a big Urban Meyer fan even though he coached the Utah Utes I still think the guy has class and is a great coach.

Now that leads to the question, should the University of Utah had a shot at the #1 spot in college football?

Jason Chaffetz represents the Utah 3rd District which is the district I am in. Stephen Colbert recently had him on the show.

I have found that issue tracking software and Subversion repositories can be more of an obstacle then a help if not used properly. Since I started working for the State of Utah one of my responsibilities was to update Subversion and come up with some standards for our group. Another task I was assigned was getting bug tracking in place. I figured that it was not that big of a task. However, now I realize that software without a plan is a recipe for disaster.

I was surprised to find that people who have been in software their whole career don’t understand these tools. Now I am paying the price of not adequately training these developers. I am in the process of writing up some documentation and coming up with processes that involve the tools we have.

The one lesson I learned is to never assume people will understand the tools without adequate direction. Also, never assume anything.

I just read a tweet from Phil Windley about Zemanta so I thought I would see what it could do. So, I used it in Windows Live Writer to see how it did.

Zemanta looks at your post and tries to pick the right links for words or groups of words. It also tries to find images that correspond to your blog post. Pretty neat tool.

I decided to see how much comment spam my blog had. To my surprise it is almost 13,000 spam comments that have been caught. I was expecting to see a number around 500 or so.

I have decided to start using Twitter more frequently. I have never fully understood what that point of it was. I have found that you have to use it to figure out how you can benefit from it. I have already benefited from it by finding information based on other people tweets.

I am interested to hear how people are using Twitter. Please leave a comment and let me know.

As you can see, I changed my theme. I finally created my own like I’ve wanted to do all along. Please send you comments to let me know what you think.

I watched McCain’s and Obama’s speeches last night after Obama clinched the Presidency. I thought both men gave great speeches and I think the people of the United States have a great chance to take President-Elect Obama’s promise and run with it. Obama promised to listen to the people. The thing I like most about what Obama has done already for this country is that he has shown that the people really do have a say.

Although I am weary of Obama’s plan for this country I think we can start out with some positive momentum going into the next four years. If Obama can really get Washington’s act together we can start getting some work done. I was a supporter of Bush but over the last four years I got sick of his stubbornness. The constant battle between parties and standing on party lines instead of working hard to work for the people was getting old. Now we have a democratic president and democratic Senate and House if they can’t get something done the problems in this country are only going to get worse.

I believe we need to start looking past parties because it is getting in the way and not allowing the country to progress.

Lastly, I was disappointed in many of those in attendance at the McCain speech. When McCain mentioned Obama’s name people would boo. It is one thing to not agree with a candidate but I believe in respecting the office of the president. Obama is going to be our next president and he deserves this countries respect. Just remember, there is a difference between respect and agreeing with the President’s decisions. Too many people have forgotten this.

My congratulations go out to Barack Obama for his well deserved win and wish him the best in taking on the hardest job in the world.

I have enjoyed watching all the political skits on Saturday Night Live this election season. It is currently one of the few things about this election season that I am not getting tired of.

I have to say, my favorite was the McCain QVC TV spot.

I am subscribed to emails for both the McCain and Obama campaigns because I want to hear what both campaigns have to say. I have noticed something interesting. When I get an email from the McCain campaign it comes up and just asks if I want to load images. However, when I get an email from the Obama campaign, Thunderbird flags the emails as a scam. Is the Obama campaign a scam?

My personal opinion? I am scared about the change Obama wants to bring. Do I think this country needs change? Yes. Do I think Obama has the right kind of change? No. His ideas seam a little socialist to me. However, I am not too excited about John McCain. I am currently leaning towards a vote for Bob Barr.

One concern I have about this country is that too many people vote for their party instead of the best candidate. I encourage people to become informed voters! I really got interested in learning about candidates working with Phil Windley and seeing him really analyze the issues.

I downloaded Google Chrome as soon as I could. I’m always interested in trying out new Google products. They have always done a good job in my opinion. I use GMail, Google Apps, Google Reader, Picasa, etc. I’m a big Google fan.

I have liked Google Chrome so much that it is my default browser. Does it have everything I would like? No, not quite but it is showing promise.

One of the things I was surprised about was the fact that the browser wasn’t hooked into Google Bookmarks. I love the Google Toolbar and the Bookmark feature. I figured that this may be an addition later until I read on a user forum about the idea of integrating Google Bookmarks into the browser. Google is probably trying to avoid integrating their other products into the browser to avoid those anti-trust guys.

I am sure that there will be some sort of Google Toolbar for Google Chrome but it will be a plugin that you have to download. At the moment Chrome doesn’t support plugins but from the press release we know that those will be coming. I would love FireBug to be ported to Google Chrome. To develop my code I still use Firefox so I have FireBug support. The developer tools that are integrated into the browser are good but not as good as FireBug. However, they are much better then IE’s developer tools.

If you haven’t tried Google Chrome yet, I would recommend it. I love it!

Below is a video from CNN about Utah’s new 4-day work week.

Today was the first day of the “Working 4 Utah” initiative. This means that Utah State employees no work 4-10 hour days instead of 5-8 hour days. Ever since the announcement of the initiative the papers here in Utah have been writing stories about it. I have gone online and read some of the comments by people about state employees.

For some reason people think that 4-10s means less work then 5-8s even though it is still a 40 hour work week. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to become a state employee because of of the stereotypes put on public employees. I was greatly surprised when I found people that work in the Department of Technology work just as hard if not harder then the people I worked with at Omniture.

Because of my findings amongst my fellow State employees I started thinking about my employment at Omniture. Some weeks I would put in 60-70 hours and sometimes even more. Even though we were at work longer at Omniture we didn’t get as much done as one might think hearing those numbers. The problem at Omniture was that if you didn’t stay late you were looked down upon even though you had a very successful day without staying late. I found that people at Omniture spend a lot of time watching TV, playing foosball, playing pool, etc.

Now at the state there isn’t much to do during breaks and lunch so people are focused on work. Looking back at my Omniture days I would say that we could have gotten the same amount of work done in a 40 hour week as we did in a 60 hour week. If people worked instead of played during the day they could be home more. I think in technology, people gauge your work by home many hours you put in at the office instead of how much work was done. I would go without a pool table or foosball table if that meant I would be focused on my work instead of knowing that I was expected to stay late even if I didn’t get anything done.

Another thing I noticed at Omniture was that after they brought dinner in for us, very little work got done. Now, I will admit that there are some people at Omniture that work long hours and get stuff done during every hour. However, those people are very few. It’s great to have a fun work place but not to the point that people expect me to sacrifice my family.

This week I have taken on new responsibilities at work. They have divided the development group in three groups. Internal Projects, New Projects and Support. I am the lead over the Support group which means I make sure the bugs get fixed in all our supported web apps as well as making enhancements to those web apps. I am also now in charge of web site projects. I have felt like I have been drinking out of a fire hose these first couple of days.

This is the kind of stuff I have wanted to do as I started my career in software development. Now that I have the chance I am excited and uncertain all at the same time. The hardest thing right now is just figuring all the things that need to get done. Once I get myself organized I am sure things will run a little smoother.

Just the first couple of days has helped me realize how important it is to be organized and how important it is to communicate clearly. I am in the process of figuring out the best way to organize all the work and how to follow up with developers and then bring it all together to help make solid, educated decisions.

If anyone has any good advice I would love to hear it. I want myself and my group to be successful.

So I am currently on the bus on my way into work. It is about 45 minutes on an express bus and then a shuttle bus that takes me up to the capitol building. When I first accepted the job with the State of Utah I was not excited about riding the bus. I knew I would have to since gas prices were too high to be able to drive to work every day.

Well, after almost 4 months of riding the bus, I have to say I love public transportation. UTA (Utah Transit Authority) now has Internet on all express busses and on Front Runner (the new commuter train that runs from Ogden to Salt Lake). The speed is a little slow but it allows me to get stuff done on the bus.

I must say. I am now a big fan of public transportation.