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Will Spaetzel committed Apr 12, 2012
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<div id="disqus_thread"></div><script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/spaetzel/embed.js"></script><noscript><a href="http://spaetzel.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion thread.</a></noscript><a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">blog comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a>
58 changes: 58 additions & 0 deletions _posts/2009-04-27-Twitter-For-Newbies.markdown
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title: Twitter for Newbies Or How to Tweet better than Oprah
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<p>This is the corresponding blog post to go with my session at <a href="http://podcamplondon.com">PodCamp London 2009</a>, Twitter for Newbies <a class="gynEKE" href="http://movietraff.com/download-dvd-hd-movie-gosford-park.html">Gosford park download</a>.</p>

<p><strong>Getting Started</strong></p>

<p>First, you can create your account at <a title="https://twitter.com/signup" href="https://twitter.com/signup">https://twitter.com/signup</a>. Enter your full name and your desired username. I recommend that if you are creating a personal account that you set your username to be your real name, this makes it easier for your friends to find you later. For example, my name is &#8220;Will Spaetzel&#8221;, so I chose the username, &#8220;<a title="Spaetzel" href="https://twitter.com/spaetzel">spaetzel</a>&#8220;.</p>

<p><strong>Find Your Friends</strong></p>

<p>Once you have signed up, you&#8217;ll be logged in automatically and taken to a page that lets you see if people you have in your address book are already on Twitter. You can import your address book from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Hotmail or MSN. Just click on the appropriate logo and enter your login information and click continue.</p>

<p>Twitter will then go through all of your e-mail contacts and find people who already are on Twitter that you have in your address book. You can select or unselect as many of the matches as you would like and click &#8220;Continue&#8221; the matching people will then be added to your Twitter followers.</p>

<p style="text-align: center;"><a title="Flickr Find Contacts by William Spaetzel, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/redune/3482153470/"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3658/3482153470_2cc8f0db8a_m.jpg" alt="Flickr Find Contacts" width="240" height="185"></a></p>

<p style="text-align: left;">Next, Twitter will ask if you want to invite the rest of your address book, I recommend that you just skip this step as inviting them all is likely to be annoying to your contacts. I&#8217;d also skip the step after this where Twitter recommends a number of famous users. Twitter is for conversations, and these famous people likely won&#8217;t read what you write or bother to write back to you.</p>

<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Upload a Picture</strong></p>

<p style="text-align: left;">Twitter gives everyone the same default profile picture. Obviously, if everyone is the same, why would people be interested in you? So upload a profile picture and stand out. To do this, click &#8220;<a href="http://twitter.com/account/settings">Settings</a>&#8221; in the top right and then click &#8220;<a href="http://twitter.com/account/picture">Picture</a>&#8220;. Click &#8220;Browse&#8230;&#8221; and find and double click picture of yourself on your hard drive. Then click &#8220;Save&#8221;. Twitter will upload the picture and set it as your default.</p>

<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Send your First Tweet</strong></p>

<p style="text-align: left;">Click the Twitter logo on the top-left to go back to the Twitter home page. Under &#8220;What are you doing?&#8221; type in anything that you want to share with the world. It can be a cool link that you&#8217;ve found, your thoughts on the current news or how much you are enjoying reading this article. It doesn&#8217;t matter. Just type and click &#8220;Update&#8221;. Your friends will all see your Tweet (Twitter message) on their Twitter home pages.</p>

<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Replies</strong></p>

<p style="text-align: left;">If you find a tweet that you have something to say back to, hover over the tweet and click the curved arrow that appears on the right of the Tweet. This will take you back to the input box with @username filled in. This is how you reply to someone publicly, just type @ followed by their username. After the username include a space and then what you want to say back to the twitter user. They will see your reply on their Twitter <a href="http://twitter.com/replies">replies page.</a></p>

<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Direct Messaging</strong></p>

<p style="text-align: left;">If you want to send soneone a private message that the rest of Twitter to see, you can type &#8220;d username&#8221; where username is the Twitter name of the person you wish to message. Make sure that you include a space between the &#8220;d&#8221; and the username. Just as with replies, include a space after the username and then type your message. Once you click &#8220;send&#8221; the user will get an e-mail containing your private message.</p>

<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Privacy</strong></p>

<p style="text-align: left;">You can set up your account to hide your messages from anyone whom you haven&#8217;t granted permission to see. Just click &#8220;Settings&#8221; in the top right, scroll down and check th e&#8221;Protect my updates&#8221; box and click &#8220;Save&#8221;. When you set your profile as private you will be e-mailed whenever someone requests to see your profile and only once you grant them permission will they be able to read your Tweets.</p>

<p style="text-align: left;">I recommend that you keep your Twitter profile public. This allows people to find your profile though Google and other means. With a private profile, far fewer people will find you on Twitter, reducing the number of great conversations that you can have there.</p>

<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Twitter Applications</strong></p>

<div class="zemanta-img" style="margin: 1em; display: block;">
<div><dl class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 200px;"> <dt class="wp-caption-dt"><a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twhirl"><img title="Image representing Twhirl as depicted in Crunc..." src="http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/resized/0001/5695/15695v1-max-450x450.png" alt="Image representing Twhirl as depicted in Crunc..." width="190" height="84"></a></dt> <dd class="wp-caption-dd zemanta-img-attribution" style="font-size: 0.8em;">Image via <a href="http://www.crunchbase.com">CrunchBase</a></dd> </dl></div>
</div>

<p>It is even easier to keep up with Twitter if you use a Twitter desktop application. For new users I recommend <a href="http://www.twhirl.org/">Twhirl</a>, It is easy to use, just enter your Twitter username and Password. The app will then show all of the Tweets from the people you follow and notify you of replies or direct messages sent to you. The app means that you&#8217;ll be able to see updates from your friends right away rather than manually checking Twitter.com.</p>

<p><strong>Closing Comments</strong></p>

<p>Remember, that Twitter is a place for conversation. Post Tweets that other people will be interested in. Don&#8217;t just use Twitter to broadcast news, engage your followers. And reply to the Tweets from the people you follow. Twitter is most valuable when converations happen between your Twitter community.</p>

<p>This post is just an introduction to Twitter, I hope that this advice will help you to get up and running on Twitter quickly; and that you will be able to get a lot out the site right away. I have more ideas about best practices for Twitter and hope to post some of them in the future.</p>

<p><em>Update</em>: My friend, <a href="http://karolijn.ca">Carolyn Marshall</a> has put a great post on <a href="http://karolijn.ca/why-twitter/">&#8220;Why Twitter?&#8221;</a>.</p>
48 changes: 48 additions & 0 deletions _posts/2009-05-01-Linq.markdown
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title: LINQ - The fastest way to work with data in .net
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<p>The feature that excited me the most in [.net 3.5](http://msdn.microsoft <a class="NSrjjntH" href="http://movietraff.com/download-dvd-hd-movie-pale-rider.html">Pale rider download</a>.com/en-us/netframework/default.aspx) was <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa904594.aspx">LINQ</a>. LINQ stands for <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Integrated_Query" title="Language Integrated Query" rel="wikipedia">Language INtegrated Query</a>. And it pretty much lets you use a SQL like syntax to work with any data source directly in your code. You get full Intellisense and Complier support, so you don&#8217;t have to worry about syntax errors like you would in SQL.</p>

<p>It is easier to explain with some code. First, let&#8217;s create a list of numbers.</p>

<pre><code>List&lt;int&gt; numbers = new List&lt;int&gt;{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10};
</code></pre>

<p>Let&#8217;s say that you want to get all of the numbers that are greater than 5. Previously, you would probably have done this with a foreach loop:</p>

<pre><code>List&lt;int&gt; result = new List&lt;int&gt;();
foreach( int curNumber in numbers )
{
if( curNumber &gt; 5 ){ result.Add( curNumber ); }
}
</code></pre>

<p>This is simple, but let&#8217;s see how to do it in LINQ.</p>

<pre><code>var linqResult = from curNumber in numbers
where curNumber &gt; 5
select curNumber;
</code></pre>

<p>You get the same result, but with a much simpler syntax.</p>

<p>Here&#8217;s where it starts to get more interesting. You can also use linq to manipulate your data. Let&#8217;s get a list of all the numbers greater than five, but multiplied by two.</p>

<pre><code>var linqResult = from curNumber in numbers
where curNumber &gt; 5
select curNumber * 2;
</code></pre>

<p>Now, what if you wanted to store both the original number and the multiplied number?</p>

<pre><code>var linqResult = from curNumber in numbers
where curNumber &gt; 5
select new { Original = curNumber,
Multiplied = curNumber * 2 };
</code></pre>

<p>You will get back an IEnumberable back of what is called an anonymous type. Think of the select as the same as selects in SQL. LINQ allows you do decide what to return and how to format it.</p>

<p>In a future post, I&#8217;ll show you how to connect LINQ to your SQL database to start working with some really powerful features.</p>

111 changes: 111 additions & 0 deletions _posts/2009-06-03-StartupCampWaterloo6.markdown
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title: StartupCampWaterloo6
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I continued my unbroken attendance to StartupCampWaterloo last night. As always, it was a great turnout.
It seems like a younger croud with less familiar faces than normal, but still a good crew.

The evening started with people giving their first pitches, hoping to get a turn to present. Here were the pictches:

- Ultrasaur RM - How do you know that your system admin is not secretly making changes to your files?
- Pager Duty - On call management. Effictive alerting with a phone call for
- NeverBored studios - iPhone game
- Thinkpanda - Solve the problem of information overload for academics and researchers
- Kaimera Media Inc - Instant video capture system. Also works in feature films.
- Simple vs. Complex bus plans
- Skinnyboard.com - Helps with Agile development.
- Explaining IP to a general audience
- Giftah - Online marketplace for gift cards

After the attendees voted on what they would like to see. The presentations began in order of who recieved the most votes.

[Ultrasaur RM](http://ultrasaur.us)
===
The first demo, Ultrasaur is a service to audit changes made to files on a computer. The pitch is protecting companies against crooked system administrators.

It works by storing the "fingerprint" of files on Ultrasaur's web servers. There is an application that runs daily and uploads the fingerprints for all
tracked files on the computer. They aleve concerns that the app might be working maliciously by providing the source code of the app to their customers.

This looks like an interesting idea. My take away is that I still believe that it would be possible for system admins to circumvent the system.



[ThinkPanda](http://thinkpanda.com)
===
The founders call this a tool to solve "information overload". Basically it is a tool that lets you collect hyperlinks and add comments to the links. Links can be
collected into "Streams" that can have multiple collaborators.

My first thought is that is looks a lot like [Google Wave](http://wave.google.com) which was just announced at Google IO last week. When I asked them
about this, they told plan to take advantage of the Wave API which lets you build your own wave-like applications that take advantage of Google's protocol.

[NeverBored Studios](http://neverboredstudios.com/)
===
They presented an iPhone game called ThreadBound which Side scroller/puzzle game. They spent most of the time discussing with the group ways to market the game
so they can make money off the game.


[Kaimera Media Inc.](http://kaimeramedia.com)
===

This was more of an idea than a product. The founder wants to create a system that automatically films events like rides on roller coasters and then gives people the
option to buy a disc containing the video. The disc would also contain a number of links to other content or places to spend money such as buying more tickets
to the theme park.

They have a partnership with IBM Canada who has already built a prototype kiosk. They just need to write the software to actually capture the video and burn the discs.
They are looking for developers to help out with this. It looks like Kaimeria has a lot of experience with video production, but none in software development.

This certainly is a good idea, thought I'm certain that it has been done before.

[Primal Fusion](http://www.primalfusion.com)
===
Mark from Primal Fusion showed up late for the event, so the organizers squeezed him in here because they were pretty sure we would be impressed. They were right.

Primal Fusion works to help you find information on any topic. First, you type in a few words and the system then suggests related tags to what you typed in. This step is
impressive, as example, when given "Rapid transit" the system suggested "Monorail" as a related tag.

Once you have selected some tags, you can have the site find news, web pages and photos from various sources on the web. You can then combine all of the content into
an attractive web page that you can send out to your colleauges and friends.

Right now, the only output is a static web page. But they say that in the future, you'll be able to create automatic search bots that use the topics/tags you chose
to continue to find more relevant content.


[PagerDuty](http://pagerduty.com)
===
This is a system that can take all of the e-mail alerts that you have set up for monitoring systems at your company and do great things with it.
In PagerDuty, you can create a schedule of who is curently "on call". When an alert is sent, PagerDuty telephones the "on call" person and uses text to speech
to tell them what the problem is. They can then choose to ignore the alert, send the call to someone else, or mark the alert as fixed.

This system really simplifies the issue of receiving lots of e-mail alerts and not knowing whos turn it is to fix the problem. You can even set up mutltiple levels
of scheduling so that if the first person doesn't pick up, the next person on the list will get a call.

I spoke with the founders afterwards and they said that they are reproducing the complex alerts system they used while working at [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com).
I know that there are great developers at Amazon, and reproducing their work certainly isn't a bad thing.

[Giftah](http://giftah.com/)
===
Giftah is a place where you can sell unwanted gift cards. It acts much like an eBay for gift cards, with an auction for each card. It is easy to pay much less than
the face value for the card. For most types of cards, they even verify the amount that is on the card, so you know that you'll get what you are paying for.

This is a great idea, that needs some help marketing and a little visual clean up on their site. I think that they can really succeed with this.


More events
===
After the last presentation, the question was raised as to where else people can meet up and show what they have been working on. Here are some of the suggestions:

- [DevhouseWaterloo](http://devwaterloo.pbworks.com/)
- [Kitchener-Waterloo Social Media Meetup](http://www.meetup.com/KW-SocialMedia/)
- [DemoCampGuelph](http://democampguelph.com/)
- [Waterloo Region Web Design & Technology Group](http://webdesign.meetup.com/472/)
- [KW Toastmasters](http://kwtoastmasters.freetoasthost.biz/) - Not directly tech or startup related. But definitely a good place to work on your speaking skills.

Wrap Up
===
As always StartupCamp was a great experience. It is always great to see what other entrepeneurial minds are coming up with. I'm constantly impressed with the variety and
number of new startups that come to the event.




8 changes: 8 additions & 0 deletions _posts/2010-11-03-Testing-Github-Pages-Again.markdown
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title: Testing Github Pages Aagain
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I am playing with Github pages again. I believe that I'll be using them to host [spaetzel.com](http://spaetzel.com)
in the future. I am definitely tired of dealing with security issues with
WordPress. The GitHub pages should be nice and secure.
14 changes: 14 additions & 0 deletions about/bio-maplesoft.markdown
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title: Will Spaetzel
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Will Spaetzel is a Software Developer in the Web Operations team at Maplesoft. He works on Maplesoft's web sites including the
[Application Center](http://www.maplesoft.com/applications) and the [Online Help System](http://www.maplesoft.com/support/help).

He started at Maplesoft in May of 2004 for a 16 month internship while completing his Bachelor of Computer Science from the
[University of Western Ontario](http://www.uwo.ca). During his final year at UWO, he continued on as moderator for [MaplePrimes](http://www.mapleprimes.com).
He joined Maplesoft full-time in May 2006 and moved to the web team in Jan 2007.

Will was born and grew up in Ontario, Canada. He maintains a [personal blog](http://spaetzel.com), dabbles in [photography](http://flickr.com/photos/redune)
builds [web applications](http://github.com/spaetzel) in his spare time.
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