Uncategorized Archives - Page 2 of 7

What I’m Looking for From Platform Conference 2014

I have the amazing opportunity to attend Michael Hyatt’s platform conference. I’ve followed Michael Hyatt for many years ago – I’ve read his books, blog posts, and religiously listened to his podcast. I’m a big fan. Although in a web application and website developer by trade, I love marketing. I’ve made learning marketing a priority over the last year and I’m excited to dive into a full two day conference dedicated to building an online platform and an online business. Here’s what I’m looking for from the conference. Copywriting I’m a horrible speller. I got a 10% on the state spelling exam in high school. However, I love the craft of communicating ideas and grabbing someone’s attention. How to effectively test multiple headlines?..

Configuring Polycom 321 IP Phones With a Plantronics CS510 Wireless Headset

98% of my work is software engineering and web development but sometimes I get pulled into troubleshooting random internal IT issues. One of these was building a small business phone system. Recently it was setting up a wireless headset for the Polycom 321 IP phones. Sounds easy, right? Nope. VOIP systems are not well documented and seem to suffering the same fate as router hardware. All the innovation in the VOIP is in the cloud, on the hardware side there is a lot of progress to be made. So, for all those who just need to get their wireless headset to work: Hardware CS510 – The wireless headset EHS APP-51 – The adaptor Plantronics adaptor for the Polycom phone…

Don’t Wait for Change. Attack Yourself.

Change is hard. Challenging the status quo is scary. Hurting “the existing business” is a real concern that has short term consequences. If you don’t attack your own business – whether you’re a consultant, small business, or large corporation – someone else will. Someone else who has the pressure of a smaller budget, the focus of not being distracted by less important projects, or the freedom from red-tape, will make a game changing move. You have to be flexible and bold enough to to replace your legacy business, to create a product or service that will change or possibly destroy your current business model. As the marketing classic The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing states, you have to attack yourself.

Don’t Sell Inputs. Sell Results.

Work is often valued on the number of hours you put in. It’s complex to price work on a per-project basis. It’s easy to set an hourly rate as opposed to pricing on a per-project basis. However, there is a hard limit to return when working on an hourly basis. I was recently challenged to change the way I value and price my work, this quick comment has triggered a significant paradigm shift over the last week: You have to move to be outcome driven. Stop concentrating on inputs. All that matters is the outcome. Most of the time it doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as the goals are met (hopefully surpassed!), timelines hit, and executed within budget constraints…

Cloud Based DID With a POTS Based Asterisk System

A while back I wrote about my experience setting up a business phone system with Asterisk, Polycom, and POTS. This system has been working fine over the last year, I’ve only had to dive in once or twice to fix a couple issues (which I’ll detail in a future post). However, recently someone using the phone system needed a Direct Inward Dial (DID) to their phone. I couldn’t find any concise walkthrough about how to set this up, so I’ve written down my processing in figuring this out. I knew Asterisk supported DID, and I found a guide that walked you through setting one up. If you using POTS for your calls and not a SIP trunk, DID gets tricky really fast…

Billings Pro Touch Server & Client Syncing Issues

Quick tip for anyone having issues with getting their iPhone’s Billings Pro app to sync with a local Billings Pro server: I recently grabbed a Asus RT-N16 and flashed it with DD-WRT. It was working great until I was fiddling with some of the wireless settings and accidentally reset the router. After reconfiguring the router, my iPhone with Billings Pro Touch would not sync with the local Billings Pro Server. For some reason it seemed that the network tab on the server admin GUI wasn’t picking up my lastest public IP and/or reporting it to the switchboard service correctly. To fix your reported public IP: log out of the switchboard, click advanced, manually set your public IP, and login to switchboard again…

MacRuby 0.12, RVM, and Gem Installation Problems

I recently jumped back into a MacRuby project that I haven’t touched in a while. I upgraded to the latest MacRuby 0.12, installed the necessary gems via macgem install, and was presented with this error:[code]Segmentation fault: 11[/code] Since I started this project my ruby setup had drastically changed: RVM, custom irbrc, and lots of other tools that I’ve found essential for productive rails development had been installed. I noticed that macgem list –local returned the list of gems needed for my rails project. Running env from the command line revealed that GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH were set explicitly in my bash env, a result of having RVM installed and a non-system ruby set as default…

Cocoa User Interface Buttons: Previous and Next

I created these years ago, but forgot to post them until now: back forward icons for a Cocoa / Objective-C application. PSD + TIFF files included. They were designed during the snow leopard (possibly the leopard) era, but they still look decent. Should be a good starting point for anyone looking to design a custom previous and next button set for their Mac application. Download Cocoa UI Previous and Next Images

Product Pricing in a Zero Marginal Cost Distribution Environment

Jarrod Drysdale on digital product pricing: Our strategies were very different. Sacha wrote a book and priced it relative to the cost of other books, which is the strategy just about everyone follows. Instead of that, I wrote a book and priced it based on the value it provides. Choosing a pricing strategy based on competition is a natural approach, but also a flawed one. Price competition implies scarcity—supply and demand market forces. There is no scarcity for ebooks because digital files are replicated practically for free…

Setting Up QuickBooks on Windows XP Professional for Multi-user Environment

Recently I was involved in a project moving a company’s files from a old 2003 windows exchange server to a mac mini server setup. The first setup was to move from Exchange’s email and calendaring to Google Apps. After that step was complete we moved the shared files drive over to thunderbolt RAID 5 storage attached to a mac mini server device. The transition was pretty smooth, however there was one problem which wasted a significant amount of time. The accountant’s in the organization use QuickBooks 2010 for all accounting purposes. Moving to a hosted solution was not an option, and they needed multi-user access to the file (2-3 people could be working on the same quickbooks file at any given moment)…

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