Author Archives: bhartsock

Fall Tech Talks at Rackspace starting next week!

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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. Developer at Rackspace

Our first talk is quickly approaching next week! The Rackspace Experience Design team, a group of awesome designers and usability experts, will be presenting on Informed Design. More specifically, using generative and evaluative research to create FANATICAL user experiences. UX research comes in many flavors: usability testing, user interviews, field studies, A/B testing, analytics, etc. The Rackspace Experience Design Team will share examples of how to use a mix of research techniques to inform design decisions

Here are some of the details:

  • When: Tuesday October 4th, 6pm
  • Where: Rackspace, 755 University City Blvd, Blacksburg (Look for flyers to lead you to the right room)
  • Food will be provided
  • Bring a friend or two, this is a public talk open to anyone.

Hope to see you all there.

A note from my summer intern

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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.

I feel like I Win this class.

Thanks for everything I learned there!

- John C

This intern spent the summer working on an HTML/JSPs/CSS/Struts/Ajax/Javascript web app, the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel. In a couple months, he was able to make significant improvements to our CSS and image sprites, not to mention other enhancements and bug fixes. Rackspace gets a ton of great code out of our interns, while the interns get to work on real products, get paid, and then get easy A’s.

Pretty sweet deal.

Operating System Checks in Bash

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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. Pretty trivial but useful nonetheless.

OS=`uname`
 
if [ "$OS" = "Darwin" ]; then
  echo "Running on Mac"
else
  echo "Running on Linux"
fi

Also, uname -n will return the computer name if you want to check that as well.

Review: Grid-It’s Cocoon

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Gadgets are awesome. But if you are like me and have too many, you quickly run into gadget hell. My backpack is filled with tangled wires, dongles, ear pieces, and chargers. Finding the exact device I need can be challenging.

Then a few weeks ago I saw Grid-It’s Cocoon on Lifehacker and quickly purchased one. I just finished filling it out and really like i so far. It is a quick and easy way to organize all your gadgets and cables. If you have $10-$20 to spare and want to organize your gadgets, I recommend checking it out.