elannert's blog
UPDATE: the training vouchers have all been allocated. What remains is certification exam vouchers.
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on a recent bridges project we tried using a flash based object to cycle through images in a block for a site.
The url for the i.c.stars wiki was changed this weekend from http://pmo.icstars.org/wiki to http://wiki.icstars.org
Cycles 14-16 will remember the challenge of presenting the currently assigned courses and cbo's for the DePaul application. No other page in the entire system went through more rewrites.
Context:
The application is designed to facilitate the matching process between courses (which have students), and cbo's (which need volunteers). The assignments table creates a many-to-many relationship between courses and cbo's, where a single course has several cbo's that will work with it, and a single cbo can work with many courses over time. The implementation was done using node referenced cck fields. You can see the datamodel here:
http://www.gliffy.com/pubdoc/1408817/M.jpg
Problem:
We had the chance to attend an interesting Executives Club meeting yesterday on Social Networking.
A few points I'm hoping to get the alumni group to chew on/inform:
1) facebook social graph - the idea that what you say, anywhere you say it, can automatically feed back to your facebook page. does this mean we should have a facebook widget on the vault so that your posts here automatically get posted on your facebook page?
2) second life ("in world") - it was apparent that virtual meetings in second life have an advantage over webex and actual physical meetings in that you can present REALLY LARGE maps/diagrams of information that attendees can zoom all around to read. anyone have any candidates for how we might use that concept for virtual information sessions, e.g. timelines, project overviews?
3) second life II - we need someone to do research within second life to find out if it would be a good recruiting ground, and how to advertise in there most effectively.
The google spreadsheet below can be helpful when deciding between multiple job opportunities. How to use it:
1) review/modify the list of needs - you should have no more than 8, but you can change the one's that are there if others (like location) are important but not critical. This was created with someone who had to work downtown, so location is not a factor because its a MUST HAVE, so any option that wasn't downtown would not be evaluated.
2) prioritize the needs - rank each of the 8 needs 1 through 8, no ties allowed. 8 is the highest importance, 1 is the lowest.
3) evaluate how well each option meets each need - score 1 through 3 - 3 meets the need perfectly, 2, somewhat, 1, not so much
4) review the scores - anything over 70% is a good option in the first 5 years of your career. After that point, you should be at 80-85%, and after 10 years, you should only be looking at options that are 85-95%.
Here's the link:
Since 2001, I've been seeking to solve a core information problem that frightens me is still not solved by *anyone*: a single contact database from which all applications could connect. This single database would need to authenticate people and allow them to update their own contact information, but would not require people to have online accounts (eg. i get a business card and enter them into the system and we can start interacting with their contact record). If at some point they did create an account on our site, the system should match that account to the contact information we already have on file, but have the ability to keep some information we have private. The database itself would need to be open enough where we could extract contact information (emails) for use in other applications.
The road to this point has been long and disappointing:
2000-2001 - site server (discontinued)
