Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

I’ve spent the better part of the last 6 years dealing with state government systems that manage information about citizens receiving government services. As creative as state government can be in some areas, presenting new and interesting visual metaphors for the management of citizen and case (i.e. collections of citizens) information is certainly not a forte. This problem is not solely the fault of state governments. Rather, it’s the product of state government business leaders’ lack of knowledge of the available options, educational obligation complacency on part of government’s IT partners, and the real or perceived difficulty of being visually creative in an environment where accessibility compliance is not an option.

One of the most common misunderstandings or missteps in following a particular software process is to follow that process in a blind, one-size-fits all fashion. This is especially true if you are mandated organizationally to use a particular software process. Just as the founding fathers could not have foreseen the challenges of the modern world when authoring the Constitution, there is no way that the creators of a generic software process could understand the nuances of every particular project where their process would be used.

I finally got around to adding videos to the site that I’ve been accumulating over the last couple of years. I’ve blogged about investigating Flash video a number of times before. After putting a number of videos on YouTube and being disappointed with the quality of the end product after their compression and resizing process was completed, I decided to go it on my own.

The decision to make this move provided the necessary impetus to do the final research and prototyping necessary to make this a reality. From my experience, I’ve come up with the three things that you’ll need to host Flash Videos, aside from the source video itself, of course.

In the first of my beginning-of-the-month speed blogs, I’d like to start with the topic that I’ve been putting off longest, building applications on top of Amazon’s Web services. For those of you that think of Amazon.com as just a book store, or an e-commerce platform, or [add your assumption here], think again. In the last year or so, Amazon has released a number of services that have not only established them as a first-class platform, but have pushed the envelope considerably on the idea of virtualization.

In the final installment of this March 1st trilogy, I’ll hit something really topical, the precipitous fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) two days ago on February 26th. For those of you just diligently minding your stakes in the market, you probably got wind that all the major indexes tanked pretty badly on the 26th. The Dow, however, tanked in a rather unnatural fashion that was quite different from the others.

One of my original intents of registering the beckshome.com domain name was to publish photos of my new baby son or daughter. That was two years and two daughters ago and, until this weekend, photos were nowhere to be found on my blog. I host my blog on the Windows platform and had no desire/time to do any of the following: (a) buy a separate package for image management; (b) cobble together an ASP.NET solution to manage my photos; (c) switch blogging software to a tool like Community Server that has integrated photo management. Furthermore, I already manage my photos on Flickr and I’m more than happy with the service, user experience, and the cost-benefit. What I really needed was a way to integrate my existing Flickr photos into my current .NET-based blog (DasBlog). The pursuit of this goal is what this blog entry is all about.

The innovation engine at Yahoo is heating up, looking to get Yahoo back in the race with the “Big Boys”, rivals Google and Microsoft. In an environment categorized by copycat service offerings and one-upmanship, Yahoo’s offerings are refreshingly unique. I cover three of the most recent services that I’ve been playing around with and that I think will prove entertaining to my readers as well – Pipes, OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, and TagMaps.