Finding coders for small IT projects

A review of RentACoder. These sites are not necessarily offshore.

The Healthcare IT Guy: How to dip your feet into offshore custom development of medical/clinical software

I’ve been using an auction-style service known as RentACoder. Their business model is simple: if you need software related work done you create an account, describe what you want done, and within 24 to 48 hours you will have a bunch of developers from all over the world bid on your project. You take your time to decide on what you want and RentACoder (RAC) will provide ratings, previous work history, etc. Once you’ve selected a “coder” RAC will escrow the project funds and tell the developer to initiate work; during the project you can keep contact directly with the developer and through the RAC website’s messaging system. Their website isn’t the friendliest in the world and the messaging system is a bit difficult but if you dispute anything they want you to document it through their system to ensure non-repudiation.

Interesting IT blog, I need to review the back issues. (I just realized last night that I would be better served reading back issues of the best blogs than reading current issues of so-so blogs. Duhhh.)

Cableyoyo

About Cableyoyo

Cableyoyo is a small, ultra-thin product with a big mission: to reduce cable clutter and bring order to your desktops or floors. Designed and produced by Bluelounge, Cableyoyo's minimalist casing relieves the eyesore of unmanaged cords, and protects them from damage due to twisting and tangling.

We all need one. Lovely web site too.

The iPod Updater is model specific -- how dumb is that?

i'd wondered why my hard drive had several vesions of iPod Updater on it. For all I know I've deleted some of them as rendundant. It turns out that that updateres are iPod specific.:

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh: "We've run into a common problem with iTunes refusing to transfer purchased music to an older-model iPod, and the answer is unintuitive to the uninitiated. The issue, it turns out, is that the iPod user must manually update the iPod's firmware to support Apple's latest digital content control system, and this is a confusing process.

The iPod owner runs Apple's Software Update, which finds a new iPod Updater utility and 'installs' it on the hard drive, so the iPod owner thinks the job is done and can't understand why the iPod won't accept purchased iTunes. In fact, though, you must search your disk for 'iPod Updater' and run that program while the iPod is connected to the computer, following its instructions.

To add to the confusion, the latest iPod Updaters display misleading error messages when used with older iPods, and the only 'clean' way to do the job is to go to Apple's support site, locate and download an older iPod updater and then run that.

This is really, really, dumb.

An OS X application that can import MacDraw and similar vector graphic images

EazyDraw "is a vector-based drawing application for technical drawings, illustrations, icons, logos, and similar graphics, with support for Claris Draw, MacDraw, and MacDraw II formats including conservation of all vector information. This release adds a new tape measuring tool, smart guidelines, an interactive cursor, expanded support for multi-layer drawings, cloaking of full layers, an Align to Grid palette, new Enabled Actions for layers, and more. EazyDraw is $115 ($95 download) for Mac OS X 10.2 and through 10.4. (Macintouch)"

Firefox Bug: rendering page incorrectly

I'm using FF 1.5. It's a great OS X browser -- very fast and pretty reliable. Despite being RC 3, however, some sites aren't rendering correctly. My hunch is the fault is Firefox's.

For a bug report I'm sending in, here's a screen capture:

Disposable Email Address Services - a review

An good survey of Disposable Email Address Services. They may be used for good or evil.

The sad state of web site authoring on OS X -- and XP

I recently came across a set of enthusiastic announcments about RapidWeaver. I tried it in demo mode.

Simple, yes. Useful? Minimally. By comparison to FrontPage 98 it's a toy. (FrontPage after 1998 went into a downwards death spiral comparable to the post 1997 collapse of Microsoft Word.)

So then I tried NVU, an open source Java app. It's a partial clone of FrontPage 2000 (shame they didn't clone FP 98!!). It's far beyond RapidWeaver, but one of the first things I did was create an anchor on a page, then create a link on the same page to that anchor. The HTML was well formed, but the GUI didn't create a viewable link. Ooookaaay, so much for NVU.

Well, there's always the ghost of Mozilla composer, though it's very much a page rather than site oriented application. Then there's Dreamweaver, with its increasingly feeble OS X support. I suppose there a bunch of other page oriented solutions.

Here's Faughnan's test for a serious web authoring tool. I don't think any OS X app can pass this test today -- FrontPage 98 did it well:

• View a web site as a file hierarchy or a directed graph of links.
• Click on page icon see metadata, drag and drop into a page to create a link with text taken from target page title.
• Create an anchor on a page. Drag and drop to create a link to anchor. Drag anchor to another page to create a link.
• Change the physical location or file name of a page. Have all links in web site update to reflect this change.

If a document-oriented end-user tool can't do this, it's not a serious contender. In 1997 (almost 9 years ago) we had at least four applications that were contenders, of which FrontPage/Vermeer was only one (AOL had another, I forget the rest). Now we have a range of OS X solutions that look like this:

• Blogger with TextArea support for Firefox/IE (but not Safari)
• Slightly more sophisticated blogger solutions
• Various page oriented solutions (wordprocessor save as HTML)
  
• Toy site management tools like RapidWeaver
• The missing domain once inhabited by FrontPage
• The missing domain once inhabited by Dreamweaver
  
• Industrial content management solutions that aren't particularly author-friendly and cost thousands of dollars.
  

The XP situation is only slightly better (if you consider Dreamweaver to be a non-industrial solution). Alas, the bottom line is that there just isn't a large enough market like me! I do need to migrate off of FrontPage on my XP machine. Perhaps my best option is to see how active NVU development is, and do some QA for them.