Monday, February 28, 2005

A Mac in a Lexus

Richard from the Gadget Lounge and The Gadget Show found this great item on a guy who installed a new Mini Mac in his Lexus.

Besides being very cool, it raises some interesting other uses of the Mini Mac, which is probably the vision Apple had for it in the first place. For example, my wife has always wanted a computer in the kitchen mounted in the benchtop, maybe now we can do this. LG has their top of the line fridges that have TV's built in, a handy kind of person (not me) could build one themselves.

Many a geek out there probably could of done this before but the Mini Mac provides such a nice pre-packaged box for us all.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/28/2005 09:03:00 am   |

Saturday, February 26, 2005

Security flaw in PayMaxx software/service

Here is a very interesting (read scary) press release from Think Computer., if you have an outsourced payroll vendor it is a must read!

I wonder what Kim Cameron and others in the identity management domain would think?


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/26/2005 10:05:00 am   |

The future of recruiting software in 2005

The Employment Marketplace has an article from Bob Nelson (yes he is a vendor) on where he sees ATS and other recruiting solutions moving in the next 12 months. An interesting read after the last post.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/26/2005 09:49:00 am   |

Resumes

Gretchen stirred up a storm on her blog last year with a post on one page resumes for technical candidates. Over the course of the next two days she had lots and lots of comments.

What is really interesting was the HR-XML got a mention in the comments. Why is this cool? Because it was an techie who mentioned it because he wanted to put his resume into an XML format, used Google, found the standard. The next he did something I wished I had done, it was an aha moment, he looked for an easy to use solution to build his resume in XML. Back to Google and he found Microsoft has some tools already built for this.

Now the resulting solutions are a bit technical, however it go me thinking. In order to full endorse the HR-XML standard for resumes there really needs to be an easy method for candidates to create and store their resumes in XML format. I posted about this a while back on the benefits and usages when coupled with search engines. But forgot this critical point. A quick search in Google found several links for pieces of software and components that could help out. Now I am off the try some of these out.

On a side note my Google search also returned several recent articles that point to an increase in acceptance of HR-XML.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/26/2005 09:45:00 am   |

Friday, February 25, 2005

Want to know what is a Blog?

Darren Rowse published at the beginning of the month a great item on defining a blog. Darren's site is a fantastic resource for all types of bloggers from the first time blogger to the blogger who wants to earn a living from blogging.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/25/2005 08:22:00 am   |

Thanks John for the traffic!

A couple of days ago John Sumser placed my blog in a list of the top 20 or so new HR/recruiting related blogs!

Thanks for the mention, I am most humbled to see my blog there with so many others that I read daily.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/25/2005 06:33:00 am   |

I annoyed Mitch, sorry

I think I upset Mitch Denny today (or was that yesterday?). Anyway I think I have finally fixed the comments on my blog. For the last few weeks I have been trying to get Haloscan comments to operate but the Blogger template was just not doing as I wanted it to. With the move to Melbourne and changing jobs things just got out of hand and I dropped the ball.

Anyway after Mitch's comments I thought I must fix this, funny how things are not important until they are public :-)


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/25/2005 06:28:00 am   |

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Personalised RSS

Great item from Enterprise RSS about the possible changes we could see in RSS. Essentially there could be multiple private RSS feeds based on the needs to a single individual or group of individuals.

This starts to move personalisation into RSS, if we all remember personalisation was "the thing" on the web in the late 90's when retailers began using cookies to track what we did and the started to personalise the experience for us around this data. The biggest and the best at this is Amazon. Personalisation is also one of the important points when creating workforce portals.

Now if we overlay personalised RSS with the portal we certainly start get some interesting results. Policy changes can be distributed to people who need them, management reports delivered on demand etc etc.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/23/2005 07:31:00 am   |

mLearning and Smart Phones

Another gem from PubSub. Selena has recently begun a blog on her learnings about elearning, with several very good posts.

Her post on mLearning and smart phones. This follows on from my post on Macromedia and eLearning. Selena talks about her teaching of bakers in NZ, a perfect environment for some form of mlearning.

As Selena points out many of the technologies needed to achieve mLearning are available today, but they need integration into a seamless framework that will be easy for both the learner and the teacher to participate. The same goes for ePortfoilios and there usage within a learning framework. The work by people such as Brian Lamb and his friends using MT is a great start.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/23/2005 07:18:00 am   |

Monday, February 21, 2005

Creative commons based learning objects

Found this interesting pieace around learning objects that are released under creative commons. Very cool!


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/21/2005 07:02:00 pm   |

Mick & Cam will be happy

Doc Searl's has found that podcasting has gone mainstream, at least where car audio shops in the US are concerned.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/21/2005 08:27:00 am   |

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Claybourne

Having not heard this when it originally aired we listened today in the car and now the whole family is waiting for the next installment.

Another great podcast from TPN, highly recommended.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/20/2005 06:36:00 pm   |

SAP blogs

Over the last couple of days I have been trying to subscribe to some of the executive blogs from SAP.
, but can only seem to find an email subscription.

Very sad, I don't want them in my email I want them in my RSS reader.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/20/2005 10:00:00 am   |

Welcome to Claybourne (NZ's Area 51?)

TPN has the first radio drama as a podcast Claybourne is a sci-fi/ supernatural thriller/ soap opera radio dramw originally from NZ in the laste 90's.

Already pointed Doppler at it!


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/20/2005 09:44:00 am   |

Perceptions from the other side

Jeremy Wright has posted an enlighting item trying the answer the question, "are people fired for blogging" or "are they fired for poor judgment". Jeremy's post was in response to Anil's recent post on a non-blogger who got fired for blogging.

Anil puts lots of things into perspective.

It all boils down to one thing think about the consequences of your actions before you act. In the same was as employees need to think before they forward that "joke" email, or just visit a porn site once late at night from the office PC. They need to think twice about what they publish online.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/20/2005 09:13:00 am   |

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Hiring entrepreneurial people

Frank Arr has posted an interesting email from Tim Holborn with several interesting ideas.

Tim states that over the last couple of years he has been involved in the creation of many ideas, but not product. It seems he has also been looking for a role where his skills can be put to use, but has failed. Now to Tim's first idea and recruitment.

Essentially Tim is suggesting that current recruitment practices might not cover matching of ideas people and organisations. Now recruiters will say (please let me know if I am wrong) that they do take into account the softer side of things when trying to match candidates and roles. However I personally see several issues with this current process, which might explain Tim's lack of success. Firstly, Tim is right on the money when he talks about job ads, framework currently being used in a majority of ads (at least in Australia) focus on the typical profile attributes, education, experience etc. Not on the "entrepreneurial" attributes.

Secondly, this is further hindered by the tools that have been provided to job seekers and recruiters where we make it really easy to search on traditional attributes but provide fairly poor keyword/free text searching capabilities. This then limits the match capabilities from both sides of the fence.

Finally, the HR department of any medium to large organisation "forces" hiring manager's to develop traditional job descriptions. Where manager's must specify the education, experience they want. I have never seen an hiring process that would "allow" a manager to create a job description with 2 words in it "ideas person". Ok you might want a few more but I think you get the point.

If you read the rest of Tim's email there are some great ideas there, now all I need to do is find an engineer and we can commercialise "Computer expansion port for displays"!


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/19/2005 09:29:00 am   |

Friday, February 18, 2005

My feed stats

Over the last 2 weeks I have noticed an interesting trend (I think I can call it a trend but my traffic might not be big enough to count as a statistical trend), the most popular post in my feeds has been this one, where I said I had coffee with Splatt. Now I wonder could it be due to his new found fame over The Podcasting Network or The Bulletin?

Hmm, personally I don't really care as I get more traffic!


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/18/2005 06:50:00 pm   |

More on the Google blogger who got fired

Mark Jen, the non infamous ex-Googler who was fired late last month has just been interview by InformationWeek (via Steve Rubel). The interview brings up 5 very good lessons which should form the basis of a blogger's code of conduct.

I find this story interesting for several reasons. Firstly how quickly Mark managed to get himself fired. Secondly how secretive it seems Google is, although this is not surprising. Third (and this is a generalisation) did life experience have anything to do with this? Mark had only been in the workplace for 18 months, I remember how I was 18 months into the workplace I did some very stupid things (not to say I still don't but that is for another post). As the interview states if your employer does not have a policy then ask for one.

Maybe Google needs to provide more of a supportive framework for employees, especially given they also own Blogger. It could the interpreted that because they own Blogger that they have embraced blogging as a corporate culture. Maybe Google's induction process needs to state this clearly for all concerned. One thought that comes to mind is does Google (maybe all employers) have an obligation to their employees to make sure that they all understand where their corporate culture fits with relation to blogs? I kind of think Google does due to their ownership of Blogger. Not being an IR/ER specialist I could be completely off base on this but I do feel it is a question that needs to be asked.

I was listening to Jeremy C Wright (I remembered the C Jeremy) being interviewed on G'Day World (yes I listen to them way too much) and Jeremy said that he feels that all bloggers need to take some of the responsibility on what they posted and remember that a smart comment posted one day could come back to haunt you. Jeremy has also had a chance to reflect on his situation in the last few weeks and provides some interesting insight during the interview.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/18/2005 08:12:00 am   |

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Macromedia & eLearning

The power of Pubsub and Technorati should never be underestimated. Steve Rubel was talking at length about this recently in his interview on G'Day World.

My find of the day is Tom King's
blog from MacroMedia on eLearning. Tom seems to be a corporate blogger from MacroMedia focusing on eLearning and the application of their tools and technologies.

Something that I personally found very cool was his recent post on Nokia licensing Flash for their phones! This takes the possibility of mLearning to a new level! The possibilities are endless! The apprentice who is working on a slightly more complex activity could access the company eLearning system and receive just in time training on site, or someone who is dealing with a obscure chemical in a plant might not have at the forefront of their mind the correct procedures for handling, so access a quick flash tutorial right then. I could go on all night.

Great site Tom, you are now on my subscriptions.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/17/2005 09:34:00 pm   |

Trillian Pro & Rendezvous

This looks very interesting. Great tool for conferences and other ad-hoc meeting places.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/17/2005 08:28:00 pm   |

Skype & customer service

Just found this post on CNet about the lack(?) of customer service from Skype.

Having not used Skype a huge amount I cannot comment. However now we are in Melbourne and the rest of the family and friends are in Sydney I have been working to get them all set up and was considering a SkypeOut account. But this makes we think about it a little further.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/17/2005 08:23:00 pm   |

Podcasting the answer?

Just catching up on my feeds and found this item from Des Paroz on podcasting and the mainstream radio in Australia.

I already subscribe to the Triple J podcasts (they now have 3), and so far it has had some fantastic snippets of content. Following the launch of The Podcast Networkk from Mick and Cam and their interview in The Bulletin things seem to be picking up in the mainstream arena for podcasting.

I am currently looking into purchasing a cassette to MP3 deck for our home PC (or I might just go low if) so that Jayne can convert her uni tapes and take them on the road with her. It is this sort of activity that really needs to power of "timeshifting" that podcasting provides.

Organisations can start to use podcasting as a method to connect with their customers, for example annual general meetings, investor briefings, quarterly results etc.

I feel these thoughts are still "half baked" so I will need to get back to them later.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/17/2005 08:40:00 am   |

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Newsgator online vs Jager BlogMatrix OPML

I have been trying to find a new RSS tool so that I can receive feeds (work based) while in the office. Being in a large company our laptops are locked down to stop everyone installing anything they want, therefore I am looking to web based tools. I have been trying to get NewsGator Online up and running, which has not been the most successful of exercises.

I have an OPML file of feeds (about 50) that I read that are work based and thought it would be good to import them so I did not need to manually re-subscribe. The OPML file is from BlogMatrix Jager however Newsgator Online will not accept it it keeps claiming that it is not an OPML file.

I have tried removing the category sections in the file that Jager uses, still no luck. So I decided to compare the Jager file with a OPML file created by NewGator Online. Not surprising they are different.

Hmmm

I created a small test file where I changed the tags in the Jager file to match those in the NewsGator. These were url to be xmlUrl and rssUrl to be htmlUrl and the file imported. Someone does not seem to be playing by the rules. Checking out Dave Winer's OPML Specs I found that there does not seem to be a specification for the different attributes within the file which I suspected was the case. But I am now way out of my depth and and a few minutes searching on Google did not turn up the anwsers. I am now up to a find and replace of the Jager file so that it will import into NewGator Online.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/16/2005 08:01:00 am   |

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Laws of identity and workplace tools

Kim Cameron has recently published his 7th law of identity management they are:-
  1. The Law of Control
  2. The Law of Minimal Disclosure
  3. The Law of Fewest Parties
  4. The Law of Directed Identity
  5. The Law of Pluralism
  6. The Law of Human Integration
  7. The Law of Contexts
Kim provides a good summary page if you want to get started on understanding the laws in more detail.

Now reflecting on the 7 laws and where they place us for identity management for workplace technologies.

HRIS systems should be the master source/trigger of an identity for an employee, logically they are the first system to hold information about an new employee, from the recruitment process. From hear we need to build a framework to enable the rest of the organisation and the employee to understand and use this "professional identity". By the very nature of things the HRIS should now hand off the control of the identity to an LDAP environment. However the HRIS still retains control of the people data associated with that employee, not the LDAP environment.

Why is this so? If the employee moves positions in the organisation this should be facilitated by an online self service solution in which the HRIS is the first system to know about the change and as such the information can now be transferred to LDAP. However this now begins to move out of the identity management area and into data management.

Personally the laws make sense to me and I will be interested to see how/if the laws impact the market and how long it takes for solutions to appear.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/15/2005 09:13:00 am   |

Monday, February 14, 2005

Recruitment suggestions from Gretchen

Gretchen has recently introduced a new concept/category/area/idea on the Technical Careers@Microsoft blog, The Suggestion Kitty's Bite of Advice.

Some great pieces of advice for all job seekers.

(I do have to wonder if the Kitty is a virtual replacement for Zoe?)


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/14/2005 09:44:00 pm   |

The podcast network is live

Mick and Cam have launched their newest venture, The Podcast Network! So far they have 3 shows online, GDay World, The Gadget Show and The Mobiles Show. Good luck to them.

I will be very interested to watch how this progresses as such a network of shows could be also used as a foundation for eLearning podcasts. I will have to find out from Mick what technologies they have running, if anything other than standard multiple RSS feeds.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/14/2005 08:41:00 am   |

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Busy times in our house

Just completed my second week in my new job and I am very busy, not just with all of the things associated with starting a job, but the job itself and moving everyone to Melbourne. In the interests of not getting fired in my third week like Mark Jen, I will not be blogging about the induction process, the benefits or anything else about the workplace. But I will give you a run down of the last few weeks.

Three weeks ago, we were packing up our house, having a garage sale and catching up with friends and family before I left. On the Friday at 4pm I called the removalists to confirm the arrival date of our goods, it was to be 3 - 4 days from pick up on the 7th Feb, overnight I was told. This provided us with a slight problem as we were not going to leave Sydney until the 8th and Melbourne is a 9-10 hour drive (with a child and a cat in the car). A new plan was now needed. Jayne, child and cat had to now fly down and I would drive separately.

Sunday 30th Jan was Jayne's birthday, it was also the day I flew to Melbourne to spend a week in our new house sleeping on an air bed as no furniture was in the house and start my new job. Starting a new job and basically sleeping on the floor is not recommended! While I was in Melbourne Jayne still had to work, finish packing oh and prepare for her sister's wedding the day before the furniture left for Melbourne. I flew back to Sydney on Saturday the 5th, spent 2 hours at home getting a run down on where the packing was up to, then all three of us went to the wedding rehearsal, then Jayne spent the night in town with the rest of the girls from the wedding party and I went home to finish packing, clean etc.

Sunday 6th Feb, wedding day. The morning was spent finishing all the packing as this was the last time we were in the house before the removalists arrived. About midday we (Ben & I) left to go to the wedding, on the way we picked up a family friend, went to the hotel were the girls were getting ready collected all of the bags from the bridesmaids and arrived at the church about 1 hour early. Ben was the usher and did a fantastic job at handing out the order of service. Both groom and bride made it to the church on time and were married. Then Ben home with my mother and we all went off to the reception. Jayne & I eventually got home at about 1am on Monday 7th, moving day!

6:30am moving day, the alarm goes off and we struggle out of bed, 7am removal guys arrive (6 hours after the we got home). The moving went without issue, my mother took Jayne, Ben and the cat to the airport at about 11:30am to fly down. Once everything was in the truck I then began the drive down, at about 2pm Monday. Jayne, Ben and the cat arrived in Melbourne without an issue.

I slept in a motel on the way and arrived in Melbourne about 2 hours after the truck, as with Melbourne it was raining! The truck left our house at about 4pm, we now had a house full of boxes and real work started. By about 6pm we were all exhausted and went out for pizza.

Wednesday, I went back to work in a very tired state, Ben off to school for his first day and Jayne was left to unpack :-).

Well it is now Sunday and the house is basically unpacked. Last night I got the ADSL back up and we have our network going and things can start to get back to normal.

One downside, given I work for a large company my laptop is locked down and as such I am yet to be able to get an RSS reader installed. This is a fairly large issue as how can I keep up with the feeds, one thought might be to use my phone, but I really do not want to pay for large amounts of data traffic. More investigation is needed. In the meantime I am going to take over the home PC as see what happens.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/13/2005 08:23:00 am   |

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Where's Michael?

Yes where am I? Actually into my third day on the job, hope to get back to regular posting sometime next week. See you all then.


I have moved from this site to my new home which can be found a www.specht.com.au

posted by mspecht @ 2/02/2005 08:10:00 am   |