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: ...

My wife and I have had many discussions of late about how best to raise kids in an increasingly connected world. What I would like to share with you is how much change we’ve seen since we became parents nearly 20 years ago and some of the things we’ve done in order to make it all work. A Little Background All of my children grew up around computers and have had my hand-me-down machines in their rooms since a very early age. Since my oldest is now 19 and off in college, that means that a lot of their exposure pre-dated Internet access. Initially having a computer in their room meant getting them educational software and games that helped with reading, geography and math. One of their favorites was the old Oregon Trail game ; as a history teacher my wife loved those types of titles. Giving my kids extensive access to computers at an early age meant providing them with an advantage that I knew would help them later in life. Connectivity Comes Along In the late 90s I retrofitted our house ...

I was happily working along this afternoon when suddenly I received a Skype pop-up text message. I rarely use Skype for text messaging, sticking with Adium for that. It's usually some Skype SPAM asking me to come to some lonely woman's web page to see pictures of her. This time the message looked pretty ominous: Obviously this is just a SPAM attempt to get someone to jump over to a web site. Kind of tough for my Mac running Leopard to get a Registry hack installed. At the bottom of the message was a link to go to the offending site: http://www.registryscan.cc/?q=scan Out of curiosity I decided to jump over and take a look at the page. I'm running a Mac and it was pretty clear this was targeting Windows machines. What I got was this: Just trying to navigate away from the site presented me with this little pop-up: What do I love about all of this? Let's see: The animation leading up to the above screen shot looks like a Windows progress dialog The Windows XP style dialogs...

I was buying a couple of items at my local Costco yesterday and saw the Logitech Harmony 620 sitting in a display for $99. I had been wanting a decent all-in-one remote that would help me integrate my primary entertainment set up down in my basement. The equipment is a bit dated but works very well, the only problem being the plethora of remotes that I need in order to make it all work properly. What looked interesting about this particular device was that it had a USB connector on it and would allow me to program it with my PC. This beat the old process I had to go through on a previous all-in-one remote that required a series of numeric entries into the keypad that felt like a game of Twister for my fingers. The packaging on the 620 indicated that it supported a Mac so I made the impulse decision to buy it. Turns out I could have saved myself $10 by buying it from Amazon/Target but I didn't feel like driving back and returning it over $10. Once I managed to extract the device f...