Cross Dominant

#“The web tools we can’t live without in LouderVoice” It took it quite a long time to put together a "web toolkit" that works well for our business. To save you some of the same hassle, here are the some of important things our site/applications/OpsTeam use: Amazon AWS including EC2, S3, EBS and EIP - It's not about hosting cost, it's about enterprise features like snapshots  Rightscale - For some AWS management Ubuntu Linux - Our server OS and also used on some development machines Django - Our apps and API are all built using this framework Python - The language Django is written in Wordpress - All blogs and the business information site (plus approx 30 plugins) NGINX - Front-end web-server and load balancer Apache - Using mod_wsgi for apps and mod_php for Wordpress MySQL - Our DB server JQuery - For building a big chunk of our Widget Solr - Search Engine functionality Putty - To access our EC2 instances AuthSMTP - For sending email from EC2 DNSMadeEasy - 100% uptime DNS provider Akismet - For anti-spam Memcache - For API performance Komodo - Great cross-platform code editor that can edit files using SFTP on your EC2 servers Eclipse - For building our Android application  Jungledisk - Extra backup to S3 Dropbox - File sharing Gravity Forms - For Forms PayPal - For getting paid :-) Zoho CRM - Customer Contact Management Chrome - For non-Firefox browsing Internet Explorer 7/8 - For test only Yuuguu - For conference call desktop sharing to potential customers/partners Pidgin - IM Google Apps - For all our e-mail, calendar, GTalk and Goog Docs Google Docs - Docs and Spreadsheets great, Sites Wiki poor Remember The Milk - All of our To-Dos Inkscape - Vector images on site Gimp - Bitmap images on site Filezilla - FTP/SFTP Git - hateful source control Unfuddle - Problem tickets, Git source control, Dev Notes Firefox - To run  Elasticfox Firebug YSlow Poster S3Fox ColorZilla MeasureIt Live HTTP Headers Screengrab Web Developer Toolbar More as I think of them since I'm sure I've forgotten something important. »

#“How do you get your Irish web business news?” Just had a conversation with our VP of Sales (to be announced soon :-)) about how people in Ireland working in web-related businesses get their industry business news. So not the latest web-app announcement or gadget but the business side of things. Who is selling what where. Who is doing new marketing campaigns. Who is doing deals with who. But specific to Ireland. »

#“Huge mistake by Google with Earth on Android” Today Google released Google Earth on Android and it sounds impressive. But they have made a huge error of judgement in the release. It only runs on one phone, the Google Nexus One.  I have just tried it on a G1 with OpenEclair (a community version of Android 2.1 which runs on the Nexus One). It installs but refuses to run. The only app of 30+ that I have tried which has failed to do so. »

#“P-O-I-N-T N-U-M-B-E-R O-N-E” via dilbert.com How many man years of my life will I never get back, sitting watching someone read the text off their slides to me in a conference room? Just had a fab thought. Maybe when someone like that is giving a presentation, the victim should be in control of the clicker? Average meeting time would plummet as you lash through a 60-slide deck in 5 minutes flat. »

#“AndroidSPIN | Google Earth Debuts On Android” The bonus features of the Android application is integration of Google Maps layers, such as Places, Wikipedia, Businesses, Panoramic, Roads, Borders and Labels, and Terrain (no buzz yet for you buzz crazy people) via androidspin.com Looks like Google is starting to pull a Nokia on it by not supporting "older" v1.6 phones like, for example, the not-yet-released Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. Yeah yeah it's presumably due to HTML5 being needed. »

#“Moonlight - Needed for Digital Media Awards Web-site” Rich Internet Applications Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems. With Moonlight you can access videos, applications and content created for Silverlight on Linux. With Moonlight you can: Watch the Olympics on Linux with our 3.0 preview View Silverlight content on Linux Watch videos delivered with Smoothstreaming Run Silverlight applications on Linux »

#“MPs urge government to stop NHS funding, and MHRA licensing, of homeopathy” This was a challenging inquiry which provoked strong reactions. We were seeking to determine whether the Governments policies on homeopathy are evidence based on current evidence. They are not. It sets an unfortunate precedent for the Department of Health to consider that the existence of a community which believes that homeopathy works is evidence enough to continue spending public money on it. »

#“The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” via youtube.com Via Ciara from WeddingDates.ie . Just bloody fantastic. I'm happy to pimp any product that makes me laugh this hard. »

#“Oscar and me messing with phone video and Kino video editor” via youtube.com Both of us a bit shocked that two minutes using a Nokia E51 and the simple Kino video editor in Ubuntu gave us this very cool output. Morten and the boys in A-Ha better watch out. »

#“BMW 5-Series. Old or new for my Da?” My Da's 12 year old BMW will fail its NCT unless he has 5 grand of work done on it so he has finally decided to get a new one. The new 520d and 525d are catching his eye. The advantage of the 525d is that it is available in March. The big disadvantage is a massive price uplift over the 520d. But he can't really wait until July for the 520d to be released. »