HR Geeks

[Cross posted to hrgeeks@]

What is everyone’s preferred method of meeting notifications?  Posts in the Forum? Posts to the list?  Should we send out notifications to [hrgeeks] for each of the other groups in HR?  Blog posts so they show up in your RSS feed?

Please let me know if we’re not getting the word out in a way that works best for you – it’s all easily automatable, I just need to know what is wanted

Also, is the front page blog/story posting stuff useful or read by anybody?  Should we send out an [hrgeeks] email to let people know it’s been updated?

I just saw this, referenced in the New Yorker:

Strand Bookstore “Books by the Foot”

Interesting way to build a library – they can customize the set of books you get based on topic and aesthetics (all old leather, all hardback, etc).

Seems to be pretty cheap as well, depending on how widely you read!

Steven Speilberg used this service to furnish Indian Jone’s library, in the new Indy movie, as well as his own home.

Here’s a cool tool for everybody using OS X that needs to work with files on other UNIXy machines. It’s called ‘MacFUSE‘, and is based on the work done for the Linux FUSE user-space file system driver. Basically, it provides a framework for userspace file system drivers in OS X, using a plugin style architecture. There are quite a few plugins available already, but the most useful by far is ‘sshfs’. The sshfs plugin uses the MacFUSE system to provide OS X system mounts to remote file systems using ssh/scp. Once you install it, and give it connection details, the remote filesystem shows up just like any other SMB / network share mount in Finder. Drag / drop works, assuming you have permissions on the remote side to create/modify files. Opening files, mime detection, etc all appear to work flawlessly. It also hasn’t crashed or locked my mac up yet (I’ve been using it for a few hours with TextMate, to do remote editing without getting frustrated by Terminal.app).

MacFUSE Site – http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

SSHfs installer | read_me (requires MacFUSE first)

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the service, but I’ll give it a brief overview for those who aren’t.

Last.fm is a website (http://www.last.fm), formerly known as Audio Scrobbler, that keeps track of the music you listen to. It works as both a seperate player, and a plugin for Windows MediaPlayer, iTunes and other apps (and runs on Win/OSX/Linux). Every time you listen to a song with your media player (including your iPod!), it logs it to the website, and over time, produces a ‘radio station’ for you, both of the music you have listened to, and songs/artists it thinks you will appreciate based on your listening history. This music is then stream-able over the internet to you, or your friends. Back before MySpace and FaceBook REALLY exploded, it also had a proto-social networking system – people who listened to the same music were grouped into ‘neighborhoods’, that you could browse around and check out. This was based on the usually-correct assumption (in my experience) that people who listened to lots of the same music, tended to enjoy the same stuff all around. In addition, it provides a neat historical overview of what you’re listening to, when you’re listening to it, and what your top tracks / artists are. This service has been going for a little over 2 years now.

Ok, so that’s Last.FM. Today, I ran across a project called ‘LastGraph‘ by Andrew Godwin. It takes your listening history and does this:

Click to Open full size (2992×414)

It’s a Django-based web-app based on what appears to be a school project by Lee Byron. Godwin took Byron’s idea, and webified it, allowing you to create custom ‘wavegraphs’ of your listening history.  The service is, unfortunately, down now due to overwhelming popularity, but Godwin says it should be back up soon.

Here’s a hilarious spoof video, contrasting Django and Ruby on Rails.

You just got bitten by the snake!

Welcome to the new HR Geeks website, live as of 12:30AM this fine Wednesday morning.

We’re going to try and run this new version of the site sort of like Slashdot, with a couple authors posting stories here on the page, but all the action running in the forums. Jump on over there and sign up for an account, so you don’t miss any of the fun. You can syndicate per-topic on this site, or grab everything that comes across the wire. Full site feed will be autodetected by most feed readers, and content-specific feeds are linked on the right-hand side of this page.

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