debfoocode.net

Today I felt like spending some time on my site and doing some research on blogging, how to promote my site, and what plug-ins there are available for my blog. For those that are wondering what a plug-in is, it is a web part that I can include in my site without requiring any code. Someone has already done all the hard work. All I have to do is put the plug-in in the required folder. Once it is in the required folder (wp-content/plugins) I just have to activate it from within my site. It is so easy.

Today I installed the plug-in called Subscribe to Comments 2.1. Now when you leave a comment, you have the option to subscribe to any subsequent comment on that post. I have actually seen this on a few other sites and have thought that it was a great idea.

I did see a plug-in for a contact page. I am not too convinced that this site needs a contact page. If you think it does, let me know and I will stick one up.

Google Analytics

I have just signed up for Google Analytics. The statistics available on the site is just amazing. In order to make use of the site, I had to modify my home page so that Google could verify that I really owned the site; which is good, I wouldn’t want my stats to be made public to the whole world. Although I did see that you can export the stats to a variety of formats: text, XML, CSV, or print.

I actually find looking at the stats really useful. The stats show me which topics I have written that have been the most popular, and also how my site is continuing to grow (around the world). Australia is still leading the way, with most of my visits, but America is following quite closely behind. I also like to see how many people are subscribing to my site, the number of unique visitors, and the rate at which people come back. It is all really interesting stuff!

If you would like more information on Google Analytics, check out the Chitika Blog Bash site . I had a look at the blog entry on Google Analytics and was impressed. So much so that I signed up for it straight away.

Rain and Plenty of it!

It has been raining a fair bit lately. It has been so dry in Australia that the rain has been a welcome change. Bring it on I say! For some reason when it rains I find that all I want to do is spend my day at the computer (as opposed to when it is sunny, and I spend most of my day at the computer…)

Shurakai’s Reunion Tour

A good friend of mine that I once studied with and recently worked closely with (close as in proximity… he worked about 10 minutes drive from me) has gotten back in to playing in a band (on top of being a programmer during the day). Marco emailed me details of the reunion tour. You can check out the band web site with some tunes here from their MySpace site

If you like what you hear, you can vote for them on the Triple J Unearthed competition here

Good luck Marco!

Happy Second Birthday to Guild Wars

Guild Wars celebrated its second birthday this weekend . For everyone playing, they had the chance to find some cupcakes on their ventures. If you were lucky enough to have actually bought the game 2 years ago you would have received a minipet. As I had only bought the game about about 7 months ago I have a while to wait until I qualify…

This journal continues on from the last one, only this journal refers to the second day of the ACS National Young IT Conference, and the previous journal refers to the first day. Most people had a pretty late night after the first day. It was great to see so many people at the second day right from the start.

Dennis Furini gave a talk to welcome everyone to the second day proceedings. Dennis is the CEO of the ACS. I believe he is retiring in a month or two. Dennis has been very supportive of the Young IT initiative from the start. He has also participated in every Young IT Conference over the last four years. It is going to be sad when he finally retires. I am sure he will have a lot of things to do to occupy his time. I hear he will be travelling for a while as soon as he retires. I would love to wish Dennis all the best and hope that our paths cross again sometime in the future.

‘Cultivating Connections’ was the title of the talk given by Valda Berzins. Valda is the CIO for the Victorian Police. Her talk was really amazing. She is such an inspirational woman. What she has achieved in her career is truly amazing. I would love to interview her for the ‘Interview with an IT Professional’ series. Hopefully if she has time she will take part. Valda worked at Foster’s Brewing Group for many years. She has held many senior positions and has been awarded many prestigious awards for her recognised leadership as a CIO. Some of the advice she gave was why IT professionals do not become CIO’s. The reason: they lack communication skills. If you aspire to be a CIO make sure you work on your communication skills. As simple as that may sound, it is the one skill that will set you apart from all the other IT professionals. Another good skill to have, according to Valda, is to know how to cut costs within your organisation.

IT Pro Evangelist for Microsoft, Jeff Alexander gave a presentation on Windows Server Technical Update. Jeff has presented at the last three conferences. It was great to see him again. Jeff was at the Aquarium the night before for the social event. He is a very friendly person. If ever you see him at any presentation make sure you say hello. I was looking forward to Jeff’s presentation, because I was expecting to be blown away looking at all the new technology. Jeff also mentioned that we would all get to look at Windows Home Server. I was really looking forward to it. With a house full of computers, having a server set up sounds delightful! Unfortunately the presentation kind of came to a bit of a halt (hardware problems of course ;p ) so the talk was kind of cut short.

There was just so much stuff for Jeff to cover. It is pretty hard to talk about and demonstrate PowerShell in five minutes!

Some notes I took from Jeff’s presentations was that PowerShell will ship with Longhorn, and that Longhorn is due out in November 2007. I might be wrong about that date… When I wrote it down I was questioned if I heard right… I might need to check. If you were there, or you just happen to know, please leave me a comment. I have had a quick look at the Microsoft Longhorn home. You can access this site here . Longhorn is going to use the same Network Access Protection security features as Vista.

A pretty cool site that Jeff mentioned in his talk was CodePlex. The site is an Open Source site and has a whole heap of PowerShell scripts that you can download and use (amongst a lot of available code). If you are interested, check out the site. I know I will

The conference then broke up into two split streams. The streams were for students and graduates, and the other for young IT professionals. I went to the young IT professional presentations. I can’t mention the other two presentations, as I wasn’t there to hear them. The room that the young IT professionals was in, was completely full. It was obvious that there was a lot of young professionals attending the conference. Unfortunately I didn’t have my notebook with me so couldn’t take any notes. What I can say is what I remember from going there.

John Cowling, General Manager of JobServe gave a talk on how to take your career global. One of the easiest ways he suggested was to work for a multi-national company. John also suggested that everyone do a SWOT analysis on themselves (identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats). I had never thought to do a SWOT analysis on myself before… It did seem like a really worthwhile thing to do. John mentioned how big JobServ was in several other countries around the world, and how it continues to keep getting bigger (due mainly to the fact that they keep buying out other online job boards). John also suggested that if you wanted to work overseas to raise your profile first, either by a blog or through social networks like LinkedIn.

John’s talk was really quite good. I particularly liked it when he mentioned that his brother was a mechanic and would see John jet-setting all over the world with his job. He asked John what he could do with his career as he was sick of getting cut up from fixing cars. John suggested to him that he study IT. His brother did that, and in his thirties he realised that there was a need for an online job board. With that thought they started up JobServe, and are now both very successful, and constantly jet set all around the world. I found that amazing. It is amazing really just where your career can take you…

Martin Retschko, Director IT & T Sector Australia for Hudson continued on from John’s talk on where to take your career.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) gave a talk on Adding Organisational Value through IT effectiveness. The one thing I got from their presentation (there was several people speaking from PWC) was that the people that worked there generally loved it, and that through their work they were able to travel the world and take on many large scale projects.

The Conference ended with a final presentation from Dr Richard Helmer, who spoke of his air guitar t-shirt. The talk from Dr Richard Helmer was quite amusing. I can’t imagine myself rushing out to buy an air guitar t-shirt (how would you wash them??), but the talk was good, and it was a great way to end the conference. I particularly liked the recorded demonstrations. They certainly got the audience cheering.

After all the presentations (apologies if I missed out summing up any presentation), the group photos were taken. See yesterday’s journal for the group photo.

Overall the conference was really good. The range of speakers was excellent and the social event was perfect!

Well done Abeer and everyone else that was involved in the organising of the conference!

For those that might have missed it, the ACS National Young IT Conference was held last week, 19-20 April in Melbourne. Quite a few people attended the event. I have a group photo of the people that attended. It was taken on the last day just before everyone went their own way.

The turn out to the conference was great. Many of the conference attendees were from all over the country. It was really interesting finding out where people were from, where they worked and what they did. There was such a variety of skilled people attending the conference. It was great.

Cameron Clark from Infosys gave a talk on ‘The Art of Networking’. The presentation was really good. During the presentation, we had to break out in to pairs and do some exercises that Cameron instructed us on. Some of the exercises included one person talking for two minutes and the other person only listening, followed by both people talking at the same time to one another. Both exercises were quite difficult. I actually found it hard to not talk back (as strange as that may seem) and talking at the same time was just odd…

Dr Anthony Overmars gave a talk on Firmware Access via JTAG. Dr Anthony Overmars had started his business, and it was amazing listening to him talk of his journey and where it has led him.

Ed Dawson, editor of PC Authority talked about emerging technologies. Some of the technologies Ed talked about was the Surface Conduction Electron Emitter displays (SED), which are new displays/screens that have a 1ms response time. The screens use nano technology in each pixel! Ed also mentioned High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA), which is an extension to 3G technology and has uplink speed of 2mb/ps and a downlink speed of 1mb/ps. A final bit of emerging technology that Ed spoke of was the future of silicon chips/processors and how we can all expect to see greater processor cores of 8 cores and more very soon!

It was great meeting Ed at the conference. I have been an avid reader of the magazine for years (long before the magazine was given out free to student and graduate members of the ACS). Ed spoke of what it is like to be an IT journalist, from what cars they drove through to the deadlines they have and what Ed is like on a typical day. It was quite funny.

Tom Worthington gave a presentation on ways to make money from publishing on the web. The talk was interesting. He mentioned Google Ads and showed a photo on one of the slides of a cheque he had received from having Google Ads on his site. I personally am happy to not have adverts all over my site. I also feel that by having adverts and ways to make some money splashed all over my site that I might annoy people… At this stage, while my site is still growing, I am happy to leave everything simple. I might change my mind in the future, but for now, a simple design works for me. Tom’s talk has inspired me to write a blog on the Google Ad debate. This will be a journal entry I will do in the future (once I finish writing this one…).

There were a few presentations during the conference on the ACS and what it is like to be a professional (mainly by the ACS President, Philip Argy). As I have been pretty active in the ACS community for a few years, I already knew a lot of the stuff that they had talked about. For everyone else though, I am sure they got something out of it.

The social event was held at the Melbourne Aquarium. If you are wondering, I did manage to find Nemo!! The social event was great. There was two people playing music. They did an excellent job. Everyone seemed to have a really good time. As far as conference social events go, having it at the Melbourne Aquarium was perfect.

The following is a picture taken outside the Aquarium, on the decking, overlooking where the gas flames go off… If you are a local in Melbourne, (or have been there), you will know what I mean. If not, in the evening, at a certain time, several flames go off. It looks really pretty. I tried to capture it in all its glory, but unfortunately missed the timing…

That concluded the first day of the conference. Rather than having a really long journal entry, I will continue with ‘Day Two of the ACS National Young IT Conference in a Nutshell’ tomorrow.

I took a photo of the lovely tulips I received from Uni SA. They are really beautiful. I wanted to photograph them so that I could always remember them. Sticking it up on my blog is now becoming the easiest way for me to share photos. Usually I am very slack getting photos out to people.

So here is the photo…

What do you think? I think I have been spoilt. I love them! Thank you Uni SA!

I thought that I would make this journal entry just a quick update. I plan on writing more journals in the near future. While I was at the ACS National Young IT Conference, I found the inspiration to come up with quite a few blog entries for at least the next few months. Topics will range from people’s perceptions of IT, through to choosing the right web server. I have been asked several times lately what server people should go with, or how someone can set up a site on a web server. I plan on coming up with something that will be of use for all the people that have asked.

I love writing journals based on articles that people request to see. If there is anything you would like to see in this blog, please let me know. I will also be adding to the site more ‘Interviews with an IT Professional’, so look out for them too.

I would love to thank Uni SA for the lovely flowers they sent to my work place today. The flowers were a thank you for presenting at the ‘Careers-on-the-Go’ event last week. I am going to take a photo of them. It has inspired me to want to present more. I am going to have to join a local Rostrum or Toastmasters group now. I am sure with more practice presenting, I will learn to love it. On the lead up to the presentation I came across so many articles providing tips on how to be a successful presenter. Some of the best bits of advice I received, was to breathe (sounds simple, but when you are nervous it is amazing how easy it is to forget and to hold your breathe when you talk) and to practice (over and over and even in the car on the way there). Thank you to everyone that gave me advice. Thank you also to Uni SA for the opportunity to present and also for the flowers. They truly are beautiful!

I am on annual leave for the next few days. I wanted (needed) to have a few days to catch up on everything. Last week was really busy. Not having access to the Internet for days (felt like forever) was torture! I have been able to connect today, so everything is back to normal once more. I have even had the chance to play some Guild Wars. I love Guild Wars!

By the way, if you are new to my site because you heard it mentioned a few times at the conference, welcome I hope you like what you see. If you do, please bookmark it or add it to an RSS feed. Feel free to leave comments. I love comments!

Finally, for all you Harry Potter fans out there, the new trailer has just been released!

I have just returned home from the ACS National Young IT Conference. It was such an amazing event. After the Conference, I spent two days in the ACS National Young IT Board Meeting.

Excellent news straight from the Conference, is that South Australia is going to host the 2008 ACS National Young IT Conference. In 2008 we will be hosting an International Conference. More details are set to follow.

Throughout the Conference I made a lot of notes and came up with a whole lot of ideas for future blogs. I will go into more detail soon (my notes and everything is still packed in my bags somewhere). I will also write up about the Conference. If you missed out, you will be able to read what happened.

Probably the only bad thing about the weekend was the lack of Internet connection! It felt so strange to be without the Internet. I missed it so much. It is amazing how much I have come to rely on the Internet. How long can you last without having to connect to the Internet? For me, about 24 hours is long enough before I start to complain…

Today I presented at the Careers-On-The-Go event at University of South Australia. It was great to get out there and talk to the students. I also enjoyed presenting. I was nervous beforehand but felt good once I started speaking (and remembered to breathe).

If you went to the Careers-On-The-Go event, I hope you liked what I had to say. If you are here for the first time, please have a read of my blog. It has been going since the end of February, so is several pages long. Each page has about 10 journal entries on it. Comments are always appreciated. If you wish to leave a comment on any of the journal entries, please do so. If you like what you see then please bookmark the site (or add it to an RSS feed).

Off to Melbourne

For the next few days I will be in Melbourne. I will be arriving Wednesday night and returning back on Sunday night. While I am away I will be attending the ACS National Young IT Conference (Thursday and Friday) and also the National Young IT Board meeting (Saturday and Sunday). As such there will be no Guild Wars playing until I return!?!

I am looking forward to the trip. It will be great to catch up with everyone from all over the country. It will also be good to meet up with new people that will be attending the Conference. I have made some excellent friends from attending the ACS Young IT Conferences.

I shall be taking my laptop while I am away (there is no way I could go without it). I should be able to update my journal with all that is happening. That is of course depending on how much free time I manage to get.

1. Mentors. Mentors can provide invaluable advice. Don’t limit yourself to just one mentor either.

Throughout my career I have relied on people senior to me to be my mentor. It is a good idea to have several mentors if possible. By mentor I refer to someone that you can go to in order to ask advice. Someone that you can trust to talk about your career, and is able to offer advice on what paths you need to take in order for you to obtain the success that you desire. Mentors are valuable people to have throughout your whole career, not just at the start.

2. Work Experience. To succeed in IT, the more skills you have, the better. If (for whatever reason) you cannot gain employment in your chosen field, develop programs, web site solutions, or help set up and maintain computers for friends and family. Any work experience you gain will help lead to future employment.

3. Network. Networking can be a very important tool throughout your career. You never know if the person you met at a function will be your next employer. Networking is also a great way to make new friends that share similar interests as you.

4. Plan. Plan what you want to do with your career, and how you expect to get there. Knowing what you want to achieve makes it a lot easier than if you have no idea as to where you want to go and what you want to accomplish. Make a plan of how you want your career to progress, and come up with small steps that will help you achieve your goals.

5. Work/life balance. Remember to set aside time for friends, family, and any outside interests or hobbies. Having a balanced work/life will lead to a longer, more fulfilling career.

I know you can’t get enough of PowerShell and that you are all as hooked as I am. One of the best documents that you should have lying around your desk (preferably in plain sight) is the PowerShell Language Quick Reference.

I have used quick references in the past when I studied and used C and Java. They are a great little look up of all the things you will most commonly use.

The quick reference is referred to as ‘quadfold.rtf’ and comes packaged together with PowerShell when you download and install it on to your computer. PowerShell is free and can be downloaded here  or you can download just the documents here . Although, I am not quite sure why you would download just the documents and not the shell too…

In the near future I am going to release some PowerShell scripts for everyone to download. Please keep a look out for that. One of the Ambassadors of the ACS Young IT Committee (Glenn Nitschke) has suggested a script that he would like to see. Thanks Glenn for your suggestion. Your script will be the first one I release.

The Official PowerShell blog is located here . There are so many really good links and bits of information on the blog. More than enough to keep you happily scripting for many an hour…

If you are a student and would love to gain some experience working for one of the coolest companies in the world, check out this blog by Tom Worthington

The journal on Tom’s blog has several links on a variety of jobs on offer at Google that are really good and are well worth the read.

Tom is also one of the presenters at the ACS National Young IT Conference. Tom will be doing a presentation on ‘Making money from Web Publishing with XML Technology’

ACS Young IT National Conference

If you haven’t booked and paid for your tickets to the ACS National Young IT Conference, make sure you do it soon.

There is only one week to go before the conference begins. The more people attending, the better.

Help yourself to a copy of the Conference calendar. The calendar can be imported into Outlook 2007 and contains all the session details. I will be at the conference. If you are going, I will see you there!

PowerShell is still really cool!

Last night I attended the monthly ADNUG meeting. James Chapman-Smith continued his talk (from last month) on PowerShell. I found the presentation really good. Since the last presentation I have had a bit of a play with PowerShell (I can’t imagine anyone who attended the presentation not to have had a play with PowerShell). I have only really messed around with stuff inside the shell since then.

Last night James showed us how to make use of PowerShell from a .NET application. It was really cool. Now I feel all inspired to get creative. Thanks James!

p.s I thought your code was pretty neat too!

Quick Word…

I would like to have a quick word to thank everyone for their kind comments about my blog. I have received many compliments about the site, personally, on the site, or through emails. I am really glad that a lot of people are starting to see my site, and that the people that come here enjoy what they read.

I have never written a blog before. I am quite enjoying myself. I love checking out the statistics each day. It is great to see that the site is getting more hits from all around the world on a daily basis. Most of the hits are from Australia, but that is to be expected!

I am going to keep on adding to my blog on a regular basis. Please make sure that you come back often (bookmark my site, or add it to an RSS feed). If you have any suggestions on what you would like added to the site please let me know. As always, I love getting comments. Feel free to leave comments on any of my posts.