Book Review: Winners Never Cheat

Before picking up this book, I had never heard of Jon Huntsman (or his son Governor Jon Jr.). Unbeknownst to me, many well known plastic products are produced by his company. However, his book doesn’t really focus on his business conquests. Instead, it focuses on one man’s value system and how he applies those values in the business world. This book isn’t necessarily anything new. Most of the guidance is common knowledge, the author even says so himself. »

Startup Weekend coming to Blacksburg!

Very excited to hear that Startup Weekend is coming to Blacksburg. Being so close to Virginia Tech has encouraged many young technology companies, like Webmail.us to start here. Hopefully Startup Weekend can encourage many more! »

Tech Talk: Building Killer Web Apps

Our final tech talk for 2011 is quickly approaching. Dave King, a software engineer at Rackspace, will be speaking on Building Killer WebApps. He has been working most recently on building Rackspace’s next generation control panel as well as improving the existing cloud control panel. In this talk, he will be sharing some of his experiences as well as best practices in the industry. Why is this an important topic? Web applications are omnipresent in how we interact with the world. »

Tech Talk: Large Scale Distributed Systems with Udi Dahan

We had a great turnout for our last tech talk on Informed Design. The next talk is fast approaching on November 15th. Udi Dahan will be onsite at Rackspace in Blacksburg, doing an informal Q&A; session with the audience. He will be answering questions on software architecture and design, so come prepared to ask a few of your own questions. Here is a little more information about Udi taken from his website: Udi Dahan is The Software Simplist, an internationally renowned expert on software architecture and design. »

Fall Tech Talks at Rackspace starting next week!

I am really excited about this fall. Rackspace Tech Talks are back with some awesome speakers and topics. Come out and join us for some great presentations and geeky conversation. Here are all the talks slated for this fall: October 4th, 6pm - Informed Design with Rackspace Experience Design Team November 15th, 6pm - Large Scale Distributed Systems with Udi Dahan December 6th, 6pm - Building Killer Web Apps with Dave King, Sr. »

A note from my summer intern

I received an email a couple days ago from one of my summer interns that recently returned to school. Hey everyone had first day of classes today thought you guys would find the syllabus to one of my classes hilarious. Goals: Learn HTML Learn JSPs Learn CSS Learn Struts Learn Ajax Learn Javascript and JMeter (don't actually know Anything about this one) Objective: To be able to work on and maintain a web-app running on Apache Tomcat First Project: Take a webapp that has only in-line styles and set up a CSS page that will make the site look the exact same. »

Operating System Checks in Bash

I have been using my Mac and Linux computers a lot more recently. Syncing configurations between the two machines is pretty easy with tools like JungleDisk or Dropbox. Today I just started syncing my .bashrc and .bash_profile between the two systems. There are some configurations that need to be different on a per machine basis however. I wrote this quick little bash script to illustrate an easy way to do this. »