Jake Hackl

Good tips for freelancers: Typical Programmer – Tips for successful freelancing.

One of my clients business is audio sales via cd-burning and downloading through retail kiosks as well as remote fulfillment via web orders (phew – say that four times fast). It is an interesting business that I’ve been working with for 4.5 years. Besides the content role I’ve had that included CDN management, transcoding, SAN management, audio ingestion, database strategies and what not I’ve recently inherited an ASP.NET site. The site is receiving more business support and our team is working to add features, do a redesign and I’m also doing little tweaks that will help spruce up its performance.

The first item on my list was to implement compression on the site. The web server hasn’t been upgraded to IIS7 yet and I’ve long forgotten how to use compression with IIS6. The best resource I found was Scott Forsyth’s post on it (IIS Compression in IIS6.0 – Scott Forsyth’s Blog – thanks Scott). One item I didn’t do on the first implementation was add js and css files into the static file list so I’ll be doing that as well.

Up next is introducing URL rerouting to deal with dynamic content. I just have a hunch that using domain.com/artist/beyonce will be better than domain.com/artist.aspx?artistguid=dkfjdsfkjf. That obviously relates to SEO and after the URL rerouting is in place we’ll go through the results of a IIS SEO Toolkit examination as well as combing through the YSlow results.

A redesign is coming as well and I wish I there was a reason to convert it to a MVC app but it just doesn’t seem prudent.

Today Google published their new approach on China through their blog. In an effort to show my solidarity with Google I have decided that JD Laboratories shall also take a new approach with its business in China. I’m still working on the JD Laboratories tax preparation for 2009 but thus far 0% of its revenues have come from China. And although I have planned for a 100% improvement in 2010 between JD Laboratories and China (based on projected growth estimates from 2009) I must bring a new approach. Google and I have been partners for years through various technologies including: email, SEO, & web analytics; this partnership shall continue.

Sarcasticly,

Jake Hackl

Owner, JD Laboratories

My spring laptop came with 4GB of high-flying RAM and I’ve been waiting for prices to drop drop drop so I could max it out at 8GB and they finally fell into the range of acceptability which for me on this day is $475. There is also the weird urge of year-end spending for tax purposes; the mindset of spending to save is dangerous! But hey, I’m running 8 GB now on my Macbook Pro and the difference is huge. Happy Holidays to me!

As I continue my migration from Windows to Mac the learning just keeps on coming. I’ve ceased trying to manually install the development stack and am leaning on MacPorts now. I am still having some issues and realizing how my years of accrued Windows knowledge is of little help. Luckily I liked DOS and now PowerShell so I have quickly adjusted to life spent in the terminal window and now I’ve learned the secret that shall help me immensely…I’ve learned how to show all files. Writing that just feels lame as it shows I have a long way to go on my Mac journey. But even with that truth, my only regret about my Mac switch is that I didn’t hold true to my initial goal of writing about the adjustments when coming from the Windows Paradigm and .Net stack along the way; at least then I’d have notes about what happened in case I have to do this again! ouch.

In terminal write:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

Then force quit Finder and you are good to go. Thanks to: MacWorld