David Alison's Blog

I have now been working from home for the better part of a year. Being self-employed has its advantages; not only do I get to choose the technology I will use ( Goodbye Windows, Hello Macintosh ), I also get to determine where I want my office to be. While others struggle with the daily drive to the office my biggest concern during my daily commute is turning an ankle while walking down the stairs to my home office. Of course you don't have to be self employed to work from home. A surprising number of my friends and neighbors that work for other companies work from home as well and have to deal with many of the same issues I do. I've worked from home many times in the past as an employee and have also managed people that worked from home so I have learned a few things that may help you out if you are considering it. 1) Personal hygiene is NOT optional It's so easy to simply stumble down stairs (or into the room you work from) and not worry about getting dressed for wor

I've been doing development work for quite a while and up until my recent switch to Mac I had been doing that work using Microsoft technologies; on the database side I was using Microsoft SQL Server. When I started playing around with Ruby on Rails I also needed to switch out the underlying database I was using, settling in on the wildly popular MySQL . Though there is a huge amount of information available online for MySQL I still like purchasing technical books and I cast about for a decent entry level book on the topic. What I found was Ben Forta's MySQL Crash Course . If you are trying to learn MySQL, especially if you are new to SQL in general, this book is a must buy, especially given the price. The presentation is consistent throughout and Ben frames most commands with Input, Output and Analysis. He demonstrates what a particular command looks like in Input, displays the results of the command in Output and then discusses the nuances of the command in Analysis. His wri

I'll be the first to admit that I didn't "get" Twitter . When I first heard about it and saw that "tweets" were 140 character micro-blog posts that contained such mindless drivel as "Heading out to work" or "Getting a haircut" I dismissed it as pointless. A couple of months ago my good friend Jeff told me that I should give Twitter a go. Jeff's a bright guy so I ask him "Why on earth would I want to do that?". His response was "You don't blog frequently enough for me". Well, this was indeed true. As I've been working more and more on my startup I didn't have as much time to devote to blogging. I had lots of things I wanted to share but didn't want to take the time to put together a full blog post for it. So in July of '08 I grabbed a Twitter account and started tweeting away. I only had a couple of "followers" (people that would see my tweets in their Twitter home page) for the first

Yesterday's Washington Post Security Fix disclosed that on November 21st of this year Apple put out a technical note where they recommend the widespread use of anti-virus software for Macs, including specific recommendations for Mac AV utilities. I've never believed the "Macs cannot get a virus" mantra that some people spread. The reality is that any computer where the user has the ability to write to the hard drive or install applications is subject to a program doing evil deeds without their knowledge. I've been a Mac user for 10 months now—a relative neophyte—but have learned a couple of things that have carried over from my Windows days. The single most important one is to be very careful about which software I allow to get installed on my Mac. When I install something that comes from the web I get a little confirmation dialog: In addition when I try to run full installation programs I will often get prompted to enter the administrative password for my Mac: