Flickr decision to use Yahoo’s maps instead of the far superior maps from Google or Live Local, shows that they were obviously forced to use them by Yahoo. What do you think – should Yahoo force Flickr to make decisions based on political reasons rather than technical reasons?

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I posted this video from my vSocial account in a previous post, but I wanted to see for myself how good the quality is on the DivX site. Watch this video and then compare it to the one on this post.

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Since finding this site, it’s really got me thinking about culture in the workplace and how most companies need to make some huge changes. (it’s even made me change my voicemail greeting to a much happier sounding tone!)

Here’s a bunch of recent posts that are worth reading:

• Ask the CHO: Dealing with uncertainty at work
• Top 5 business maxims that need to go – Part II
• A devious trick to handle chronic complainers

And since I’ve developed this interest in this topic, the following links were also interesting – all related to work-place culture, productivity, happiness, and other good-karma stuff.

• Democracy in the workplace
• 10 Ways to Improve Your Technical Skills
• How to handle a boss who takes credit for your work

Tags: productivity, happiness, culture, positive-sharing, business, work

One of the interesting articles that popped up was how to prepare for an interview by prepping yourself with 50 common questions. The famous one that I’ve encountered often wasn’t there: “What’s your biggest weakness” but someone asked about it in the comments and got a harsh response.

The reply to the comment was that if anyone has asked you that question before, then they do not know what they are doing and probably shouldn’t be interviewing. He gave some examples of the typical, cliched answers and I must admit to the fact that I’ve used them all myself!

I’ve also asked the question to candidates while I was interviewing for engineers at the last company I worked at. But I worded it differently and my reason for the question was slightly more valid. I really wanted to find out what technical area the candidates thought they were weak in and how they planned to develop that. The typical answer was that SQL server was the weak spot, but that’s because the developers tended to configure it more often than the engineers.

But I guess it is a bit pointless so I’ll be sure never to ask that again!

Tags: interview, work, questions, answers, productivity

Now that I’m back in Wellington after the four days in Auckland for TechEd, I’ve been catching up on my reading. Fortunately, FeedDemon is great to work with so I’ve got everything all up to date now.

Funny little bug keeps cropping up though. I’ve got FeedDemon set to open links in an external browser (as opposed to it’s built-in browser) and every now and again, the links will open internally instead. If I click the back button to get back to the feed, then click the link again, it will open correctly. Not sure if anyone else has seen this on the forums – I haven’t had time to check.

Lots and lots of good stuff popping up in my subscribed feeds, so I bookmarked a whole bunch of them with del.icio.us – you should see a large post appear shortly with all the links.

Tags: delicious, teched, wellington, auckland, feeddemon, bug, feeds

I just wrote a quick post about Stage 6 on the beta @ amanzi site going in to more detail about this, but it’s basically a YouTube competitor but with WAY better quality videos. The downside is that you have to manually install a plugin but it’s definitely worth doing as the quality is amazing!

Here’s the Where the Hell is Matt video that everyone loves.

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Day three of TechEd has just finished with brings the event to an end. We were all a little bit weary after the brilliant TechFest last night but we still managed to get in a couple of good sessions.

The Active Directory session from Brian Puhl was quite interesting as he went through the details of the Read Only Domain Controller (RODC) and some of the Server Core stuff too. Server Core is a method of installing Longhorn Server so that it has no gui at all – just the command prompt. So I find it odd that Microsoft’s new PowerShell scripting won’t be able to run on Server Core as it doesn’t support the dot net framework.

The Exchange sessions today were good too and we got a live demo of the new clustering and high availability options in Exchange 2007. This will be interesting to follow as there are a couple of third-party companies like XOSoft and Neverfail that will compete directly with this new technology.

Unfortunately I didn’t win one of the XBox 360’s , so I guess I’ll be buying a PS3 when it comes out – as long as the NZ prices are too ridiculous.

Tags: teched, techfest, teched-nz, active-directory, rodc, server-core, powershell, dot-net, exchange, exchange-2007, xbox

Lukas Zawilski has recently started up the New Zealand Citrix User Group and is looking for interested people to sign up. The site has recently been updated with the Drupal CMS software. You can register with the site here: http://www.cug.co.nz/?q=node/9 or just browse through the site here: http://www.cug.co.nz

Tags: citrix, cug, drupal

We went to TechFest last night, the big geek-fest that Microsoft puts on for all the attendees to TechEd. The event was held at the St James theatre and featured a couple of comedians and a few bands. The highlight was local band, The Feelers – they were awesome live.

Here’s a video from last night, I’ll be posting more photos and videos soon.

Tags: teched, teched-nz, techfest, the-feelers, comedians, microsoft

The second day at TechEd was pretty good. The best sessions I attended were the Exchange 2007 ones. Charlie Chung gave a flawless demo of Exchange 2007 and its integration with PowerShell.

The worst demo of the day came from Softricity whose session I was really looking forward to. Their presentation was all marketing based and none of their demos worked and they couldn’t fix them! Sometimes you can forgive a presenter whose demo fails, but they had three, unrelated failures so we didn’t get to see any of the product.

Also, I found a video of the (annoying) Jaquie Brown interviewing us the meet-and-greet function that was after the first day of TechEd. Its’ quite funny to watch as you can see that nobody wanted to talk to her. Here’s the link – http://www.techedlive.co.nz/Video.aspx?v=4, fast forward to the 4 minute mark to see us.

Here’s a photo from the TechEd Live site showing Nathan from Microsoft demloshing a hard drive!

Tags: microsoft, teched, tech-ed, teched+nz, exchange, exchange+2007, softricity