Project Management

Just an informative page as I continue my run through the Gauntlet known as project management.

Cables, Wires, and Bears. Oh No!

No this post really doesn't have anything to do with Bears. But I figured if I didn't throw that in the title, people would not get the reference. So replace Bears with bestbuy. I've mentioned in previous posts about the home theater I'm trying to set up for myself and the Wife. Let me tell you, its no cheap or easy task!

I went to BB about a week ago and got thoroughly ripped off on the insane markup they have on cables. After realizing my newbiness, I went ahead and did what I should of done in the first place... consult the net.

Here is a good review from audioholics on receivers and their multitude of connections.

Also as a side note to myself (which is supposed to be the entire intention of this blog after all). Here's a brief snippet from audioholics describing what I'll do with the speaker cables once they arrive.

Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL

This video was highly recommended by a user on a Bioinformatic mailing list I follow. I'm far from being a database Guru. So these are the kind of things that may help!

Ad and url Blocking

Lets face it, there have been a time here or there where you were force fed web content and just wished you had some kind of blocking solution. For ads, a lot of people use the firefox plugin, AdBlock. While AdBlock is good for the everyday user what about a solution that doesn't require a browser plug-in or allows the user control to the point where they can block not only ads but urls also? Recently one of the mailing lists I subscribe to covered such a solution. The suggested solution was to setup a machine that would run DansGuardian, an Open Source web content filter, which would in turn serve the requested pages to the users on the network. This seems like the ideal solution for my use, but its something that will have to be looked into in the future.

Reading Code

Recently I've started to have to go through some of the code of developers that no longer work for our company. I discovered after reading Joel's article on reading code one of the better approaches is to attempt code reading as a group. Also in my search I discovered that Scott Hanselman does a series called "The Weekly Source Code" where he takes a snippet of code and does a brief review on it. These are two resources I'd definitely recommend if you want to improve yourself as a developer.

Colossal Cave

A couple nights ago, I encountered the Colossal Cave, the first text-based adventure game. Anyways after a painful hour of trying to get through the game I remembered that google is my friend and found a couple of guides:

• Colossal Cave Walkthrough


• Adventure Walckthrough

Editors! Editors!

There are a ton of editors out there. Quite a number that I would like to learn for programming/historic purposes. I'd say I'm a novice at best with vim. I've barely touched emacs. But I'd definitely want to get more of a firm grasp on both to understand what all the Linux editor wars are all about.

Finally there's TextMate. I bought this a couple years back with the MacHeist bundle but have not made the most out of it. I've got the online manual at my disposal but no time. Time seems to be the one resource that is constantly elusive.

Building Web Applications

Someone from the local Ruby Group posted this link to a resource for building web applications. One of the many projects I have in the queue.

Home Theater

Well I have all the components for my home theater. The following are audioholics reviews of each individual piece:

• The Yamaha RX-V463 A/V Receiver


• The Klipsch Quintet III Speaker System


• The hc1500 digital projector